City Council - Regular Meeting

all right I've got six o'clock so six o'clock I call this meeting the Saginaw City Council order please rise for the place

with liberty and justice for all. Honor the Texas flag. I pledge allegiance to thee, Texas, one state, under God, one and indivisible.

Thank you. Please be seated. Next item is the invocation. I do not see. He's running in the door right now. Is he? Yep. I was wondering if he'd make it. And, and. He's Kevin. Reverend Mark Towns, ladies and gentlemen.

Just in time, sir.

Thank you, Mayor and Council. Let's pray. Heavenly Father, we come before you on this great night. We thank you for the opportunity for this community to gather. We thank you for our leadership. We thank you for our first responders. We thank you, Father, for your goodness. And I pray that you would continue to lead this body to affect the lives of our neighbors in positive ways, give them wisdom. God, give them deep vision into the future of the needs and the opportunities and ask that you would receive our thanks, Father, for the blessings that we have. And we pray in Jesus' name. Amen. Thank you, Reverend.

Appreciate it. Next is the audit participation. You may speak on any item that's on the agenda. You fill out one of these forms over there by the police chief. Any item on the agenda you are allowed to speak on. Two is a consent agenda. A is the action regarding minutes of August 4th. B is the action regarding minutes of August 11th. C is the action regarding minutes of August 25th. D is the action regarding approval of a purchase order with Texas Parks and Wildlife for rainbow trout. E is the action regarding interlocal property agreement with North Central Texas Council Governments for regional traffic signals timing program. F, action regarding right-of-way dedication for city-owned properties on McElroy. G, action regarding multi-year agreement with First Coast Lights. H, action regarding interlock agreement for transportation authority. I, action regarding approval of purchase of fitness equipment for rec center. J, action regarding ordinance 2026-29, approval of negotiated settlement between Atmos City Steering Committee and Atmos Energy Corp.

Questions, comments on the consent agenda?

If not, I'll entertain a motion.

Mayor, I'll make a motion. We approve the consent agenda as read. Call. Valerie's second.

Please cast your votes. Motion passes. Let the record reflect. We do have a quorum. Full house. Thanks, folks. Thanks for making it out on this rather warm evening. 3A is Presentations and Recognitions. Gabe, what do we have?

One recognition from the Public Works Department, and then we also have a promotion from the Police Department. We'll let PD go first.

Chief is dressed up, so he gets to go first.

That's the reason. Mr. Mayor and Council, again, I want to thank you all for letting me be here today to recognize one of my employees. This is truly an honor as a chief to get to recognize your employees, and we've had a few of these here recently, so it's been a really good time to be in the police department. Tonight's going to be a ceremonial badge-pinning as we recognize a corporal promotion. That person is going to be Criminal Investigations Corporal Raven Sotelo. During the normal daily activities for an Investigations Corporal, they conduct investigations into cases that are assigned to them, but then in the absence of the sergeant, they take over the unit. Direct cases, assigned cases, they might be the lead investigator called out as well. So if I could have Raven step up to the front with me here. As she comes to the front, I want to give a little bit about her experience. She's been with the police department for nearly four years. I say nearly because next month will be her anniversary, so she'll have four years with us then. She holds an intermediate TICO peace officer license. She served as an FTO for new recruits for us, training officers, and currently is a member of our highly decorated honor guard. So she's done quite a bit in the four years that she's been here, and we really appreciate everything she does. Mr. Stephen, if I could have you step forward. So Steven is Raven's husband. He's gonna be doing the badge pinning tonight. I think it's very important to have the family present and actually conduct those badge pinnings when we have them. It signifies the family's support for their fellow officer and it's really detrimental to the officer wellness and future success. So Raven, if I can have you raise your right hand and repeat after me. Say aye, state your name. Do solemnly swear or affirm that I will faithfully execute the duties of peace officer of the state of Texas and will to the best of my ability preserve, protect, and defend the Constitution and laws of the United States and of Texas.

So help me God.

Steve, can you pin the badge? It is a great honor to now introduce to you formerly Detective Corporal Raden Sotelo.

Congratulations, Raden.

Congratulations. Ronnie, you up?

Mayor, council, it's good to see you guys. Thank you all for having us. Thank you for giving us a platform tonight. Come to you guys, because I wanted to present an award to one of our employees. He's been with us a short time. And that award is the 212 award. Some of you guys are familiar with it. But for those who are not, it goes like this. At 211 degrees, water is hot. At 212, it boils. And with boiling water comes steam, and with steam you can power a train. Something major happens within that one degree, a reaction that changes its environment. In this example, it moves an entire train that then delivers goods to several, many customers. This award is reserved for those employees that stand within that one degree, where that need of our citizens are met in an exceptional manner. Our city and organization as a whole benefit greatly from those who are always operating in the 212 mentality, consistently seeking for ways to improve their fellow staff members and the services that we provide to the great citizens of Saginaw, who we are blessed to serve.

With that being said, Bryce Golan, if you would come up to the front, please, sir.

Bryce has started with us 5-14-26. His passion has been on full display ever since. His eagerness to improve our system and to share his knowledge with his teammates has been very motivational and very much appreciate your efforts, sir.

Congratulations, Bryce. Well done. All right, moving forward, I'm going to do a bit of an audible here based on scheduling. We're going to move to do 4A next, then we'll follow that up with 3C and then 3B. So 4A, discussion and action regarding waste, connections, garbage, and recycling pickup. Lee, I think it's you, and then the team, Abel's team.

Yeah, thank you, Mayor. I think everybody knows Abel Moreno, our representative with waste connections, so I'll just ask him to take the podium.

Make sure I got this down. All right. Good evening, Mayor, City Council, City staff. My name is Abel Moreno, Marketing Municipal Manager for Waste Connections in North Texas. Along with me is Zach McPherson, District Manager, and Tim Middlestat, the Assistant District Manager for our facility in Holtham City. All right, Saginaw specifics. As you can see here, we do several routes in the city of Saginaw. And today we're here to talk trash. We're here to talk about trash recycling carts. If you recall back in January, we had initially gotten with the city TO GO OVER POTENTIALLY EXTENDING THE CONTRACT, YOUR CURRENT CONTRACTS UP THE END OF OCTOBER, NOVEMBER 1ST. AND WITH THAT, WE WOULD LIKE TO PROPOSE OFFERING CARDS TO THE CITY. TODAY WE'RE GOING TO GO OVER THOSE DETAILS AND SPECIFICS AS WE PROMISED TO THE CITY. some of the cities that we've transitioned either in the beginning of the contract or we're working on transitioning to carts are listed here a few notables halton city which is not far from here we carted them a couple years ago back in 2022 for trash The City of Midlothian, we just began the process of delivering carts for recycling and trash to the City of Midlothian August 1st of this year. It's going really, really well. City of Waxahachie, not only did we transition Waxahachie to carts, but we also transitioned them from twice a week to once a week. PER THEIR REQUEST. CITY OF CROWLEY, CITY OF JOSHUA, WE CARTED THEM LAST YEAR. EDGECLIFFE VILLAGE, WE WON THIS CONTRACT RECENTLY AND TOOK THEM FROM TAKE ALL, BAG TRASH, TO CARTS IN JANUARY OF THIS YEAR. We are a big community supporter. I'd like to say that being a part of this city, we're more than just a provider. We're more than just customer service. We're deeply, deeply committed to this city. We donate to Train and Grain every year. We're part of the Trunk or Treat, which I believe is going to change up a little bit this year. But nonetheless, we're going to be here to support that. Also, there is a theater that is coming, I believe, to the senior center and library that we're going to donate for that. So to go into the specifics, I'll bring up Zach McPherson.

Good evening, mayor and council. My name is Zach McPherson, as Abel mentioned. I'm the district manager for waste connections at Alton city. I'm gonna cover more of the operational details and kind of what this transition would look like if it's something we move forward with. So currently residential is being serviced as rear load. This means we have driver helpers on the back of the truck, right? It's customer provided carts or bags. So some of the issues we see with that is the nonstandard containers. We had a lot of different styles typically ends up leading to us not being able to utilize our equipment in a uniform manner. Higher safety risk. So we've seen in the past about two years, multiple life changing incidents with helpers on the back of the trucks or drivers that are on a solo route to where they would get out, move to the back of the truck and work in that manner. So lower efficiency, it's a lot longer. Our guys have to get on and off the truck every house. Depending on the quantity of trash, it can take minutes per house. It's really best for bulk and breast service, which is something we're gonna talk about more in a little bit. Obviously the big wide opening on the back of the truck is better suited to larger items. Right now we roughly see about 50% cart usage already. And like I said, those are customer carts. A lot of them look and function like the industrial carts we would be using. And then some of them are mortar barrel types. So why add carts? One of the biggest issues we're starting to face, and it started about a year and a half ago, is staffing challenges, right? You gotta think, we got guys on the back of the truck that are 100 and whatever odd degrees, all the way down to negative wind chills. So it's getting harder and harder. There are other jobs that these guys can be doing for the same, if not better pay, and they frankly aren't risking their lives. safety and productivity again right that's that's something we keep at the forefront of our minds we've had issues in the past and we're we're making a commitment moving forward to try to get away from that scalable capacity it's a lot easier for us to to adhere to changes within the city as far as house counts stuff like that standardized carts again it allows us to get a better asset utilization enhance appearance, it cleans up the city a lot. That's one of the biggest things we hear once we get through kind of the growing pains is that the people, they love what it looks like and reduce litter, right? Reduce the bags, animals getting into bags, whatever it may be. Lids are, you know, they're industrial carts, the lids stay shut. If they don't, there's issues with them, we replace the carts. So the proposed residential collection, we're gonna go over some different service level options, but they all are automated trash service starting at a 95 gallon cart, automated recycle service starting at a 95 gallon cart. That comes with new waste connections provided carts, obviously, and then we would update our fleet to match the updated service. And then brush would transition to a hand collected brush in bulk. So these are your different service options. If you look all the way on the right hand column, that's your current service at $1,557 a home. It's twice a week rear load take all, once a week 18 gallon bin recycling, twice a year grapple, which is that big boom truck we service the larger brush with. And then in that commercial row, that is the cost for an eight yard once a week. We're kind of using that as a benchmark. And then below that is your average per haul cost on a roll off basis. Something to note here, if you look all the way in the left column at commercial and roll-off, those would be the proposed new prices for that same service level, and then those would spread throughout options one through four. So starting with option one, it would be $20.24 a home. This is twice a week trash service, twice a month recycle service, once a week bulk and brush. option two at 2312 a home it's twice a week trash service once a week recycle and once a week bulk and brush option three is 1806 a home that's twice a week trash service once a week recycle and twice a month bulk and brush and then option four is 1557 home so matching your current pricing once a week trash service once a week recycle and once a week bulk and brush So this is a comparison of surrounding cities where their price per home and what their service level is. Something to note with this, this is the same price per home that we presented late last year. So some of them have seen CPI already and some of them have not, but they obviously will. So they're a little skewed. So you can see for the service levels we're providing, we're under market for each different service level. So transition, this is always one of the biggest things people are hesitant about. And it's not an easy transition, but it's something we've done many, many times. And we adjust every time, and it's gotten better for us. So we'd obviously have a coordinated rollout plan with the city. We'd sit down, do workshops, do whatever we needed, come up with a timeline that works for everybody. four to eight week delivery timeline. So this is the period leading up to whatever our agreed upon transition date could be. And that's the period we would use to deliver the carts, get out in front of the date, be able to deliver anything that is missed in that initial run. So to start with, the baseline would be 95 gallon containers. We spoke about optional branding last time. That's obviously still on the table, meaning you guys would get, rather than the Waste Connections logo on the side of the cart, we would pay our cart vendor to create a Saginaw stamp and all the carts would be stamped with your logo rather than ours.

No. So would that cost extra? Nope.

OK. So additional cart available after 30 days. We started doing this about a year and a half ago. We saw that there was a large influx of people would think they needed more or less in that period. And so we would over deliver carts and then we would kind of have to backtrack once people realized, hey, I want this instead, or I don't need two carts or three carts. And so we started kind of building a buffer period into those deliveries and it's worked really well. A lot of times it cuts down on probably 50% of the back and forth of delivering and picking up. Right out of the gate, everybody would get one trash and one recycle bin. Recycling guidelines are hot stamped on the recycling cans as well. This will be right on top of the lid. Bold white paint, real simple, real easy to read. And then dedicated on-site personnel during the transition period. So what we do is we would place either a supervisor or manager within the city. Kind of spoken able about it already. And basically we would have them office out of here. We would have a U-Haul for that whole transition period loaded with carts ready to go. And we have somebody on-site, whether we could work it out, you know, it'd be as close as possible to City Hall to where we could be in contact with the city and typically get stuff handled within, you know, an hour rather than potentially the next day. And I'm going to let Abel come back up and speak about the CART communication plan.

As far as CART communication, there's a lot of tools you can use, especially today, social media. There is a Saginaw podcast now. I think Talking Trash would make an excellent episode. Also, getting out into the community, training grain. We'd be more than happy to have a booth, pay for a booth, get a sponsorship, just like we do every year, and have face-to-face conversations with residents. just to make sure we're taking care of all their fears. There's a lot of misconceptions with carts and going to carts and a lot of questions and a lot of things that can be handled with a simple conversation, especially if it's face-to-face. Billing inserts, there's a number of things we can do just to make sure we blanket the communication. Recycling grants. So there is a company, the Recycling Partnership. They're out of Washington, DC. And what they do is they work with municipalities to help them communicate and talk about recycling and the benefits of recycling. And they kind of come in, they see a baseline with what's going on with your current service. Right now you've got those small 18 gallon bins. As we all know, WITH AMAZON AND WITH WHAT'S GOING ON TODAY, THOSE 18-GALLON BINS JUST DON'T WORK. THEY DO PROVIDE GRANT MONEY. WHAT THOSE DOLLARS GO TO IS FOR THE CARTS. IF YOU QUALIFY FOR A CERTAIN DOLLAR AMOUNT, AT THE END OF THE CONTRACT, THE CITY OWNS THOSE CARTS. SO IF YOU DECIDE TO STAMP, PUT THE SAGINAW STAMP, MAKE ANY COLOR THAT THE CITY WISHES, AT THE END OF THE CONTRACT, THEY'RE YOUR CARTS. AND THOSE DOLLARS ARE A FLOW THROUGH TO US, COME TO US. WE PURCHASE THE CARTS AT OUR DISCOUNTED RATE, BUT AT THE END OF THE CONTRACT, THEY'RE YOURS. THAT'S HOW THAT WORKS. And I'll bring it back to Zach for the value-added benefits.

So, again, going to touch on safety, right? That's our number one core value as a company. Like I said, I could talk to this until I'm blue in the face. We've seen, obviously, a change in distracted driving has been unbelievable over the past couple years. multiple life changing events. So it's something we're going away from, right? As renewals and stuff come up, it's something we're approaching every city in. We're no longer bidding take all services. So that's really the driver behind this. Existing assets already in place. So one of the big things we see with the economy in the last couple of years is when new companies take over contracts, there's a huge capital cost to particularly the metal containers. If we were able to get this transition done, obviously those are going to stay with you guys so we don't have to pass that cost on to you. Mobile app technology. So we actually have two available to us. Now. We have a waste connections one and we have one that's called map gears Essentially, it's a customer app that you can track our trucks So basically the way it works is you'll see with automated service We go down the same street twice when it goes down one side of the street it turns yellow and then when they come back down that same street the opposite direction it turns green and then so you know that that street is incomplete and experience industrial team right we've been partnered with the city since you know through acquisition since 2007 so we obviously know the city well we know the industrial and commercial needs of the city and hopefully transitioning the residential side proving through growth again we've been with you guys since 2007 it's something it's a relationship we take very seriously planning for the future so residential service automation you know we're in a period right now where this is we're kind of ahead of the market us republic and waste management are pretty much going this direction a lot of the smaller companies at some point will do it too so we're able to do this at a lower cost because it's not the typical market service so we're able to get away from typical market prices ongoing resident education as Abel spoke to in the transition plan. We're going to be ahead of the game. You know, we'll have whatever the city would like to see as far as information and education. We'll be there to walk you guys through it. Company structure. We're obviously a public company. That sometimes can hurt companies, but I think it's great for us. We run on a decentralized model, so we get to operate. Between me and my business partners, we essentially operate our own business. We have very little daily operational insight from corporate, so it allows us to service the city as we and you guys see fit. Any questions?

Council questions for Zach or Abel? Mary, go ahead.

First of all, I want to say how happy I am to have you servicing our waste. You've been a great company, and I appreciate everything you do for the city. Thank you. The last time we discussed this, there was not going to be an option for a twice-a-week pickup, but I see now there is that option.

So the initial one we proposed was twice a week pickup. It was twice a month recycling. And so that was something we talked to city staff about. And so that was really the biggest change, right, was including the every week recycling.

That's no longer a problem if we go with the twice a week pickup. Those bulky receptacles are so huge. They're both that large. I wonder how people will be able to fit those in their garages to not be ... The code enforcement requires you to not have them in sight. I wonder if your trucks wouldn't work with a smaller receptacle, would they? They would. Oh, they would?

Yeah, we can go down to a 65-gallon, and it would kind of work in that same period of adding additional carts. And again, it's something we see pretty common that people end up realizing it's not as bad as they think. As far as weight-wise, space is obviously a different story, but we'll use that 30-day waiting period, let people contact us, say, hey, we want a 65-gallon cart, and then after that first month, we would roll that out, too.

And how does a 65 gallon car compared to what you normally see out on the streets in Saginaw?

It's about a foot shorter and probably, you know, length and width, probably half the size. So they're so they're small. Yeah, they're quite a bit smaller.

Yeah. Okay. Well, that that helps a lot, too. Thank you.

Yes, ma'am. Other questions. Council john.

So, thank you for all this info. Can you slide back to the one that had all the price comparisons? That would be helpful. Yeah, thank you. One question that I wanted to ask was the old bins that everybody has. I know that they're privately owned, and obviously, me as a citizen, it's my responsibility to get rid of that. I have several. It's not an easy thing to just dispose of them, because I don't have anywhere I can take them, and I'd have to pay probably to dispose of them. Is there a way that we can work in where those also get picked up, where we can opt into that at least?

Yeah, so we can create tags for it that just indicate, hey, this is the bin itself is being thrown away, provide them to the residents, and they can put that tag on their customer-owned cards, and then that lets us know within that first couple weeks that we're servicing, we'll get those picked up and essentially servicing as bulk.

Okay, and is that like a one-time, or is it... Where we could do it like once a quarter for the first year or something?

Yeah, we could do that. Sean, are you talking about the trash or the recycle bin?

The bins themselves. I have the... Well, no, I'm talking about the customer-owned trash bins. The big 100-gallon ones that I got at Home Depot, and I've got like six of them. And so disposing of them is not going to be an easy feat.

How do you throw away a trash can?

Right, right. Yeah. And it happens. I mean, I see them all the time where they're out and people have to spray paint on them. Take the bin because they don't.

I thought it was about the recycle bins.

Well, that too.

I mean, we needed to pick up.

Put them at curbside. Once if the transition goes through, you guys would just set them curbside empty and we'll handle that kind of more so when we're delivering the carts. But obviously we'll let that roll on for however long we need to.

And then my other question was about the grapple truck. I know there's been times in the past, too, where we've had emergency situations where we've had to request, you know, an extra grapple truck because there was a storm or something like that. I see that it's on all the new options that it's not listed. So is that something that for storm scenarios and emergency situations?

Yeah, it'd be kind of the same process, right? If you guys feel that the city needs to give us a call and we'll work out a schedule and get them sent out.

Okay. Because my concern is that we don't have a facility to take brush and I know that that the bulk brushes is still going to be where it has to be bundled has those requirements.

Yes, it'll be smaller. We have been talking to city staff about trying to identify some locations that we can place roll off bins and let the customers can throw some of the larger step away and then we would just work out kind of a uniform service schedule that that works.

Yeah, I mean I really don't see how without some kind of solution for that that I could even pick any of them because that's I mean I've had years where we have trees and I just can't I can't just take it anywhere you know the city of Fort Worth they have their own facility obviously it's a different scenario yeah Fort Worth residents can just go and dump brush pretty much whatever they want as long as it's up to 10 cubic yards or something and we just don't have that so the grapple thing was great stack it up by the curb and they come take it sometimes it gets missed they have to come back that kind of thing but if we don't have that

I don't see how I can pick one. If that's a sticking point, that's obviously something we can have a discussion on. Something we can have a discussion on if we were to move forward with the transition. It's not completely off the table. This is the baseline with what we're starting with. So if that's a sticking point, we can take care of that.

Also, we have those roll-off boxes once a quarter. IF WE HAVE THOSE ROLL OFF BOXES AND WE HAVE A STAGING AREA ONCE A QUARTER AND WE CAN ASSIST THE RESIDENTS WITH THAT, THAT'S A SIMPLE WAY OF DOING IT. BUT WE WOULD NEVER, THERE'S BEEN TIMES IN THE PAST WHERE WE'VE RECEIVED CALLS FROM CITY STAFF, THERE WAS A STORM. THINGS HAPPEN. WE'VE ALMOST BEEN A PARTNER FOR 20 YEARS. AND WE KNOW EACH OTHER VERY WELL. If you tell us there's a storm, you need some help, we're going to help you.

I appreciate that. It was more just the fact that we were getting it twice a year and then now there's no option for it. That was just my main concern.

It wasn't necessarily the emergency.

Of course, I would welcome anybody else to speak on that if that's a sticking point for them because it is for me.

With what we've seen from Waste Connections and bulky brush pickup has been fantastic. Y'all pick up a lot more stuff than I thought you would, honestly. And I've seen it many places around town, not just my own place. So I have no issue with bulk performance to date. I think bulk once a week is going to be even better. I think people will love it and have less huge things to save up and put out.

So I see that as a positive, not a negative. So a question on a couple of those. One, say Christmas time, people have a lot of extra trash that's not going to fit in their bin. What's the solution?

So it can be placed out as bulk. We do special accommodations with multiple cities where we service extra around the holidays.

OK. Another I have is people in Fort Worth, different company, but if the lid's sticking up a half an inch, they don't pick up their trash. Is that going to be a problem?

No. We don't get that egregious with it. Really, we use a 45 degree rule. And honestly, a lot of times we have guys that will get out pull one or two bags off the top if it is you know really overloaded and that's just for safety of the truck you get try to pick that thing up it starts making that turn into the truck a lot of times stuff will get thrown right so well our process typically is pull however many bags we need off the top service it reload the can service it again and then we've got tags that we can put on the cans that basically allow us to write whatever an issue was and so we'll work with the residents you know a couple times make sure that uh they understand the process and why we're doing what we're doing but now if it's If it's a half an inch like you're talking about, that's not going to be an issue.

I like the idea of all this because on a windy day and it's trash day, there's trash everywhere.

The only reason there's trash everywhere is because of those recycle bins. So our current, if we stay with the current one, that's the far right one, right? Yep. So about four years ago, we went through this, we sent it out to the citizens, and we got an overwhelming response back, don't touch my trash. Don't change it. Don't modify it, don't build it. So very seldom in a city do you get that big of a response back. Remember that gate bit was significant. So we got to tread very lightly here. I'm also a firm believer in don't fix what's not broken. We get very few complains about our garbage most of the time is, hey, they haven't stopped to pick our garbage up yet, that's it. I can't even remember anyone complaining about garbage. That's good for y'all. Bad is, why would I change it? Me sitting here, But why would I have a vote to go with anything other than what I currently have? The majority of the citizens are extremely happy with it. Other than the recycle bin. Some of it goes off 10 seconds after they get it in the front yard. So, I mean.

One of the things we talked about was keeping the trash the way it was and then going to the totes or bins for the, not the bins, but the totes or big trash cans for the recycle.

Yeah, that's something we've discussed in the past. Like I said, this is just something we're gonna be getting away from pretty quick here. So we wanted to try to get ahead of it and propose this to the city.

i was sitting here trying to go through the different options you had here and you know like i'm just going okay well my current one is i get picked up twice a week and you guys like the mayor said you don't ever take anything okay uh the rest of these just say once a week twice a week twice a week so definitely to me if i go with lewin i want I want exactly everything that the citizens is getting now as far as an option. They're getting their garbage picked up twice a week. They really love it. This, that, the other. And a little more. Okay. So I'm looking through here and I'm saying, okay, well, I'm definitely, if I do that, I'm gonna have to take options one through three. And then the, uh, the, uh, We now pick up once a week, so that means that's option No, it'll be the rear load truck. It'll be the rear load truck. So what's servicing the trash right now?

Well, that's what that's what Sean's question was if if we could work something in or how we propose to handle that so we can we would either do the the roll off Ben's place around the city.

Or if that's a big sticking point that's obviously some.

Yeah, that's like I said that some we can discuss.

And you see what I get here. I'm a citizen. I'm also a council member. I could really care less whether the yarn comes up, dumps at the end, or what. I want my traction, and I want the multiple options I can get out of it. the way I'm looking.

Nick, can I ask you, I want to say it was last week, there was a gentleman that was, I think, killed because he misstepped on the back of a truck and was run over by a car. So that's not a concern. I mean, that's what we're talking about is the safety of the employees that work for this organization.

Well, I mean, I understand that. But there's also a lot of other professions Yeah, but if we can eliminate it, maybe they need to look at their safety procedures without people riding them back to the truck. Maybe they need to have a one foot leash where they step up on it and match it on. Like, I'm a dead city. Yeah, no, yeah. Like on a ladder. Don't push your lack of safety off on the city. I also think this is where the future trash collection is going as well.

I think in 10 years, everybody will be doing this. because of the safety and the manpower issues that they mentioned. So I think now we have a choice, but in the future, we're not going to have a choice.

Well, I'll tell you right now, if I have to vote today, I know the way I'd vote. But I recommend it's just Payton, and we sit it out, and we have some... Absolutely the other concern I have with the automated car pickups is people parking the street and then be able to reach these things and

and pick up these trash cans.

Yeah. So our guys will get out and move the cans if need be. And then, like I said, we have those those stickers where we can identify problems with the resident and we'll go through a process over, you know, a month or so, reminding them, hey, if you can park X amount of feet away, we're able to service. It's typically an issue for the first couple of weeks, but it usually solves itself pretty quick.

But there's no rule in that department. A lot of people parking for miles. Mm hmm.

So, Mayor and Council, something we haven't discussed is if the contract with the current service were renewed as is, that doesn't mean the cost would remain the same. And I think with automated services, it's far more efficient. So future cost increases would probably be minimized. And I think what you're going to find in the region is that the bag service that we have becomes premium because it's labor intensive. There's safety issues. realistically program how much is going to be there. One of the tricky things we have now with the current service is you have, I call it a trash buffet, you see it every day. You have some people that are, you know, just common residential trash and then you have others that are probably taking trash for family and friends or it's, you know, substantial. So, just a consideration.

But that's fine. Thank you.

Yeah. What's the average size of if you go to like Home Depot and you buy one of those trash bins, what's like the normal size that you get?

Most of the ones they carry are the 65 gallon. They do carry the either, it depends who the maker is, they're either 95 or 96. So they do carry them. I think the majority we see are either 55 gallon or 65 gallon.

OK. So these would be bigger bins. Yeah. So OK. That's helpful.

Mayor, go ahead.

So my situation might be a little unique, but I really like working in the yard. I have a lot of flower beds, and I just tend to collect weeds and maybe shrub clippings and all that just as time goes by in those big black plastic bags. So if it was a bulk brush pickup day, if I had a black plastic bag that only had brush in it, would that get picked up?

Yep.

Okay.

Yeah, to that point, so I'd asked at the last presentation about that. The bulk brush, the current one we have, it says two times a year grapple truck, but it's also once a week too, right? Because one day was supposed to be regular trash and then the other day was supposed to be like a bulk. And so these other ones to me just seem like it's just business as usual. We just lose the grapple truck. So if we have a solution for that, that's...

JUST TO FOLLOW UP ON WHAT YOU'RE SAYING, SIR. IF YOU THINK ABOUT IT, AND THIS IS YOUR STATS, THE CITY OF SAGINAW, A RESIDENT TYPICALLY HAS 50 POUNDS OF TRASH THROUGHOUT THE WEEK. 50 POUNDS. IN ONE CART YOU CAN PUT UP OVER 200 POUNDS IN ONE CART. PLUS YOU'RE GETTING TWICE A WEEK SERVICE. PLUS YOU'RE ALLOWED TO PUT OUTSIDE THE CART. SO ESSENTIALLY ARE YOU GETTING to put whatever you want outside? No. Excuse me. You have a limit, but you're still allowed to put outside the cart. Trash. Like a trash bag? Yes. Yes. Outside of the cart. Yes.

If we fill up that 95 gallon tank, if we have more trash, we can put it in a bag.

On your bulk day. Yes. So not every week is a resident gonna have brush, right? So on those weeks that they don't have brush, they can still put their trash bags out there. And like I said, going back to the stats, a resident has 50 pounds for a week and just one cart can hold over 200 pounds.

And what about the people that put mattresses and stuff out? Are they gonna have to wait?

No, we will pick it up with the bulk. Now, again, there's limits. You're not going to put over a certain cubic amount. You're not going to be able to put your tree limbs, your mattress, and trash bags, right? But you will be able to do it every week. So if you want to spread that work out... You can do so. You can put the mattress out one week. Next week, you can put out some limbs. The following week, if you've got some extra trash bags, put them out.

and part of the reason it makes me not hesitant about this is the performance i've seen from waste connections out they pick up darn near anything right now really do like i said i don't get complaints from people saying oh they didn't pick up my trash i'm probably your worst customer so because just where i am like sometimes let me see i'm in a weird spot but otherwise people do not complain about what they really don't and that goes back to nikki's point about why change what's you know not broken but I understand the safety issue and where we're going, so I think this is inevitable. But part of the issue is I think Waste Connection has done such a good job that people are like, I don't want to change it because it's great today. And you're a victim of your own success. That's not an insult at all. You've done a great job. Again, people will say, I put out this, and they picked it up. And I'm like, really? OK. So no. And that's why I'm confident going forward, if we pick one of these newer options, your tracks will be picked up. People will pick up a lot. They will pick up a lot of your just junk. And I don't have any issue that Waste Management will not pick up something somebody puts out. They put it on the right day, et cetera, et cetera, and work through those things. I'm very comfortable with these changes, because I know the performance we've gotten so far. And waste management has been a very good partner with us. So that's what gives me confidence going forward, really, with these plans. And change is difficult for folks. And there will be some pushback there, but I think when we educate people, we can make this work. Other questions? Just a comment.

When I moved here 26 plus years ago, I was shocked that we had twice a week pickup. We had it once a week where I lived, and that was more than ample.

Yeah, no, that was what I was going to say is that if people are typically buying the 65 gallon and getting 2 times a week picked up.

Every single week. 95.

It's just sitting there. And again, on Brad's point, I look at option four, keeping the price the same. I think it would be very amenable to no price increase. I don't want to increase anybody's prices. And I think with the once a week where people get used to it, it'll be fine. Once a week recycling is what we do now. And then more brus and you're getting picked up now. So most people will not have huge amounts of gravel, truck kind of rust. Some will, yes. But most of the time, it will be small stuff that will get picked up. I have full confidence the way it's going to be, we'll pick up what we put out unless it's just a tree, an entire huge tree. So I'm pretty, and again, I was very skeptical of this because I, again, my situation is weird. It's where I live. I'm not close to a road, so I'm different. The feedback I've gotten from other cities, and this has worked pretty well for other cities, so I'm pretty confident in us going forward with one of these options.

I think before we pick I don't think we should be picking one today because it's here for a moment you should never do anything I think that we the council needs to look at these come back with which options right and I think that we need to have a town hall and do exactly I think it was you that recommended getting with Pedro and having one of those videos talk about these You know, that way the citizens are informed. Their opinion's been heard. And we can then make the decision.

Any other questions, council? Anything you guys want to add? Will we wrap this up for tonight? No, sir. All right. Then what's the council's pleasure? I will entertain a motion. Nick, you want to make a motion? Yeah.

Mayor, I move that we table this. For how long? Until we're able. Can we just say the date?

Huh? Yeah.

Can we just say the date or can we just say the table? Well, table it until we're able to have at least one town hall with the citizens and ample time to give your citizens feedback on that.

Is that what you second that?

OK. Everybody clear on the motion? Yeah, we should have come home and it's like I said I drew if you can set up a you know one of those video things you do. Podcast yeah.

I think that's a motion stable. Thank you guys. Thank you there. Appreciate your time. Thank you for your information. Good stuff. All right.

So we're going to go to 3C now.

This workshop regarding police recruitment, recruitment plan, and process to fill vacancies. I think this was Sean. So are you going to start to kick us off, Sean?

I mean, I don't really have anything to add other than, you know, it was tabled last time, proposed to me that because Nick was missing that we needed to have Nick here. So Nick's here and I look forward to seeing what you have, sir.

Well, can you, I'm sorry to just say, you know, you brought this up, Sean, would you just want to discuss what your, why you brought this up and what your concern is specifically?

My concern is I just, We've had a lot of vacancies. I think we can all agree with that. And I wanted to see a formalized plane presented to us. That's basically the gist of it.

How many vacancies do we actually have?

We have six. Six. Six vacancies.

More than I thought. Go ahead.

Yes. Six vacancies. Yes, it's a lot of vacancies. It's nowhere close to our all-time high back in 2023 when we had 10 vacancies. As you said, this item was brought up on agenda on August the 4th. The topic was tabled on the 4th and reset for today. At that time, it was suggested that you, Councilman Morrison, contact me in reference to some of your concerns and questions. But to date, I still haven't heard from you. It's been a month with no contacts. Your only comment that was made at the August 4th meeting was about vagrants when this subject opened up. So I don't know if we're talking about recruit and retention or if we're talking about crime. They're not one and the same. What I have here is going to be specific to recruitment and retention, but I do have some stats as well for crime, if that's the direction that the council wants to go.

Let's stick with recruitment and retention. OK. Keep us focused.

So to the members of the council, so I've repeatedly offered every member of this council an opportunity to visit with me or my admin team, yet only a few of you have done so. I've offered each of you an opportunity to do write-outs. Still only a few of you have taken the opportunity to do so. With that said, I want to discuss part of the research behind this when we're talking about recruiting and retention, because this isn't a Saginaw issue. This is a nationwide issue. So when we look at the research specifically targeting law enforcement, you'll find two prominent pieces of research. The first is the Police Executive Research Forum. We call it PERF. They've done studies in 2019, 2022, and 2024. The other is the International Association of Chiefs of Police. They did studies in 2020 and 2024. So that's where I'm getting a good bit of my information as to what is the standard that agencies are looking at across the nation. I'll talk a little bit about what they recommend and what we've done and what we've not done. So these two studies, they've listed 17 areas where departments can have can focus their recruiting and retention efforts, 13 of those we've actually done here in our city. So those areas are increased starting salary, relaxed tattoo policy, relaxed grooming standards, simplify application process, enhance recruiting efforts, offer new equipment and uniforms, invest in wellness programs, begin sponsoring academy training, community engagement, flexible shift schedules, physical fitness incentives eliminate residency requirements hiring and recruiting bonuses relax the drug use policy improve agency culture leverage interns and non-sworn personnel and expand age eligibility so i said that's 17 items that have been defined i'm going to touch on each one of those as i go through my comments here to tell you kind of what we've done or what we've not done So the first on that list was increased starting salary. This council, this body approved new pay scale, which brought us up into the upper mid-level for our region in pay. What we saw during that time was a pretty significant increase in applications. However, that same year, the surrounding departments also gave raises, so the comparison cities that we were compared to was against their salary the previous year, so everybody's salary increased. As of today, so two years after the salary study was done and implemented, our starting salary is already 10% below the average of those same cities that we were compared to, and it gets worse as you move up. So when you hit midpoint, you get further behind, and then if you even get close to top out, then you're even further behind on that. Specifically, as an example, if we take the rank of police officer, which is our lowest rank in the schedule for sworn personnel, we start at 72,000. The market has shifted to 81. We're talking about just in two years. Mid-level for Saginaw is 81. Market's 90. When you get to the topped out officer in Saginaw, we're at 91. The average or the market is 103. So that's where we stand when we talk about salary. If you want to look at the upper ends of my salary, at midpoint, my position is 12% behind. And at top out, it's 21% behind. That equates to roughly $50,000. So when we're talking percentages versus actual dollar numbers, compare that to when you're trying to attract somebody else in the future, what it's going to cost to get them here. There is a direct correlation between pay and number of applicants we get, as experienced in our last pay increase. We are the lowest paid department for recruit officers. This is actually changing as we speak. We currently pay around $48,000 for starting pay for officers and other cities around us are starting off at $65,000. So pretty significant when you're talking about trying to attract folks and say that's already changing, so that's not going to be an issue as far as a barrier.

We start at $45,000 and you say it's $65,000?

Yes, sir. I believe those are the numbers. I don't have that exact number written right here in front of me. The next item on the list was relaxed tattoo policy. So we relaxed our tattoo policy shortly after Chief Macon retired. Chief Macon was the chief prior to Lee Howe, which was the prior chief to yours truly. During Chief Howell's tenure, we actually changed the tattoo policy. Under Macon, you had to wear sleeves all the time if you had tattoos. Under Chief Howell, he allowed tattoos without the wearing of sleeves with police chief approval. That is still what we use today as far as our policy. That written policy says no visible tattoos on the head, face, neck, scalp, eyelids, mouth, ears, hands, or fingers. And then we have the following limitations for tattoos for those on the arms. So visible tattoos exhibiting or advocating hatred, discrimination, or intolerance towards sex, race, ethnicity, religion, sexual orientation, national origin, age, physical or mental disability, medical condition, or marital status, as well as those depicting or symbolizing supremist or extremist philosophies, organizations where activities are prohibited. Visible tattoos deemed offensive to modesty, decency, professionalism, including those containing vulgar images, words or phrases, nudity, or sexually explicit images or other obscene material are prohibited. And visual tattoos that depict or promote the use of alcohol or narcotics that are suggestive of activity that undermines the purpose of law enforcement, including gang-related signs and symbols, are prohibited. So when we talk about tattoos, we allow tattoos, but there is a caveat to that. So don't come to us with a swastika on your forearm and think you get to wear that tattoo. You're going to have to cover it up. Prohibited tattoos does not mean that we will not employ them. It just means that they have to wear a sleeve. So when we say these are prohibited, it's not a barrier to your employment, but it is a barrier to what you can display while you're in uniform. Next item on the list was simplify application process. Our application is about as minimum as we can get under TCO rules. So TCO requires that certain things happen in certain time frames. We have to follow that. Our initial application is an online application that all city applicants complete, along with a supplement that is mainly check boxes. Once this is done, they complete other requirements moving towards full hiring. So those other requirements include a written test and a row test. That's our initial physical. We can normally do those all in the same day. Then you have to fill out a personal history statement. This is a TCOL required document. It's about 30 pages long. There's no way to simplify it because it is TCOL required. Once we get that personal history statement back and there's no obvious red flags, you're scheduled for an oral board, then your background investigation starts. The background investigation is what takes the longest amount of time, because we are trying to contact references, we're trying to go through all the cities you've lived in, talk to your neighbors, criminal records, all that stuff, so it takes a little bit of time in the background process. Once it's complete, we can offer a conditional job offer. Once the conditional job offer is made, then we can do the physical and the psychological. You can't do those until the conditional job offer is made. I'm sorry? Yeah, the physical, that was the last thing I mentioned. You've got the psychological and the physical, which are after the conditional job offer. Yes, sir. Required by TICO.

So on the background checks, we've been doing those internally, correct? That's correct. And then I know at the budget retreat we discussed it a little bit, but it didn't get approved to hire a third party. How long does it typically take for us to do it internally versus if we were to go external with it?

So our backgrounds can take anywhere from 60 to 90 days to complete, which is probably a little on the lengthy side for departments here in our area where you've got one person assigned to doing that task.

So you can get about three backgrounds going at a time.

And if you've got six openings, you've really got to get someone off that first list of three before you can start number four. So it takes a little bit of time.

But if we went to a third party, could we

Use that substantial the third party will ease those time restrictions because they do the initial part of the background We have to finalize it still under Tico rule But they would do the the time intensive part of that background So they'd have the person's assigned to it. We give them six they can do six at one time So we'd get all you get a big report back with potentially six applicants on it. So can it shorten it? Yes by how much I would like to say we could get down to under 60 days, maybe around 45 days, but until we actually see that, I can't tell you for sure, but it's a whole lot better than 90 days where we're at right now.

One of the questions to me, the most important one, is do you feel that the mistake of 90 days to get the background check is a driving factor in us not getting people in the front door?

No, really it's getting people to apply. We're in a really good spot today as we're talking, so in the last month or two. So I've got four sworn applicants that are actually in the mix being processed as we speak. I've got four non-sworn that if their backgrounds were done today, I could start searching for an academy for them. So we're in a good place to get positions filled just because of the way the applicant pool has fallen. You're trying to get those sworn applicants is what we're really after because you don't have the... the four or five months down for the academy. You still have to send them through FTO, but as a sworn candidate, they can go through a shortened FTO program if they got a couple years' experience somewhere else. It makes them available to us a lot quicker. Just because I hire an officer doesn't mean the spot's really filled. It's going to be close to nine months before they're available to me on the street as far as a standalone officer. Does that answer your question? OK. The next thing down the list was enhanced recruiting efforts. So we have become much more active with academies. We attempt to ID unsponsored candidates and persuade them to apply with us if their preliminary review looks promising. We work with four academies right now. So it's Tarrant County College, Weatherford College, COG, which is Council of Governments, and Hill County College. I just got a phone call from Hill County College on Monday. Take that back. Last Thursday. He's got an academy right now with a number of unsponsored candidates, so we're trying to get in touch with them to see if they're interested in coming this way. It does require relocation most likely for them, so that will play into their decision as to whether they're interested in applying with us or not.

Do we pay for relocation?

We currently do not pay for relocation. So if I hire them and they're in the academy, I will take over their payments for their academy to pay for it, but we do not pay for relocation assistance.

Would that, do you think that would help

potentially could. There's lots of departments that do it, but I haven't heard anything from those departments on how often that is utilized for them. The big departments around us, when you're talking about Dallas-Fort Worth, Arlington, you get into Grand Prairie, they actually have recruiting teams that are going to New York, they're going to Minneapolis, they're going to all the places that typically your blue states that are having a lot of problems in defunding the police type movements and really trying to hire people away from those states and bring them here. So they have a lot of use in the relocation assistance type programs, but they're sending full teams of people out to other states to do recruiting, something that I don't have the staff to do.

Would a recruitment video of some type help, do you think?

So we're actually working on that. That was one of the ideals that you presented. Last week I sent stuff to Robin Espinosa, she's my background investigator, And then we get with our communications team. So Lena and Kevin, they do a phenomenal job. If you if you follow our Facebook page, you see all the videos that they're producing there. So we have some ideals in place that we're moving towards. That video is not done yet, but we are in the process of creating a recruiting video when you're talking about I'm going to get ahead of myself. So let me let me stay on my list here. Then I'll get to it. I don't want to start repeating myself. Another issue was offer new equipment uniforms. We've always done that. So if you come to work for us, you may get a used uniform out of the closet temporarily while the uniform shop is getting your uniforms. But you will get a full set of uniforms, full set of leather gear. We issue the firearm. The only thing we don't issue is the boots. You're responsible for that. But we we issue everything else. You come to work for us. You will not be out any any funds for uniform. We're going to pay for that. Do we do an allowance for footwear? We do not. Footwear is not that expensive, and it's so varying. We have payroll deduct for firearms, but not for footwear in the police department. It hasn't been an issue, at least that I'm aware of. No one's brought it to my attention that it's an issue trying to find a pair of boots and get them on their feet. I don't know that footwear is going to be a barrier to recruiting or hiring somebody or keeping them here. It's been nothing that's been mentioned. The next one, this is specifically, you're talking about the younger generations, what they're looking for is investment in wellness programs. My generation didn't care much about that. It was the tough love ideal. You don't like that, get over it. You don't go talk to anybody because then you're weak. So we don't encourage that in our profession anymore because of the mental health issues that our profession has overall. So the police department was instrumental in getting a program called Responder Health approved for wellness. This program is offered to every first responder, sends out training and seminar updates, both in-person and virtual. In addition, it offers 24-7 peer support services where officers can call anonymously for any reason at any time. It also offers monthly training, online resources, and family support. That's in addition to what the city already offers through the EAP services through another vendor and what our insurance also offers for mental health. We have made that a pretty big focus here in Saginaw because it is important to these new generations coming into law enforcement. The next thing on the list was sponsor academy training. Again, I'm going to turn back to Chief Howe and his leadership. Prior to him, we didn't send anybody to the academy. You had to be certified. Under Chief Howe, we began sending qualified candidates to the academy, and it's something we continue today. Right now, we're sending probably two to three a year to the academy. It is pretty expensive. We would rather hire the person that's already certified as opposed to the person needing the academy, but we're not opposed to hiring that right candidate and sending them to the academy. Next one was community engagement. This again is a big issue for the younger generations. They want a sense of purpose. Community engagement is what kind of fills that. Our department is very active in our social media. If you've been watching any of the videos, we've got a pretty big following. Again, I'd reach out to Alina and Kevin. They've done a phenomenal job. That's Pedro's department, by the way. His leadership over that, they've done just a really, really good job of getting us in a spot where we're being recognized. and getting recognized to the point that I have other chiefs talking to me about the reputation of our department. Those videos kind of give you a little window inside into our culture as well, which is important to some of the younger generations. They want to see that culture that's a right fit, that they see as family.

I see you guys in a positive light as well. That's what I like.

They're all lighthearted. We address laws and misconceptions and then just the funny videos that are out there.

To show that y'all are people too, like everybody else.

No, certainly. You then get into flexible shift schedules. We are very flexible in our schedules. Patrol, there's not a whole lot you can do. We do work a Panama shift, so technically what you work is two days one week and five the next. Everybody gets a weekend off every other week. If you look at schedules back when I was in policing and probably when Chief Howell was in policing, those are fixed. My days off might be Tuesday, Wednesday. Nowadays, even as a brand new officer, you don't have to wait to earn a weekend off spot. You get the weekend off every other week because that's the way the schedules flow. If you're not on patrol, you have the opportunity to work a 10-hour shift. So that's what most of our inside units are working, is 10 hour shifts. Again, we're trying to maximize that time off, which is, again, important to the younger generations. The older generations appreciate it too, don't get me wrong, but it really is something that the younger generations are looking for when you talk about work-life balance. Next one is physical fitness incentives. This is something we started last year. So we do offer a physical fitness incentive. It's not mandatory, it's optional. If you complete the physical fitness, we use the concept two rower following the Texas DPS protocol for that. If you qualify in the 50th percentile, you get a check for $500. If you qualify in the 70th percentile, you qualify for $750. We do that once a year. This year, I made rowing mandatory for everybody. It's not a pass-fail, but I wanted everybody to see kind of where they're at and at least make an effort. We had quite a few people, I think, that even surprised themselves at where they ended up at. again physical fitness is something that's important to us it's important to mental health it's important to make sure that we're able to do our job when when the time comes the next item on that list was eliminate residency requirements since i've been here that's never been a requirement so we've complied with that all along hiring and recruiting bonus so this is something that we do not do we have had officers and if you come to us with three or more years experience i will try to start you off at step two instead of step one That's as close as it comes. It's almost like a lateral transfer thing instead of a hiring bonus. But we don't have anything formal on this. And when you're talking about hiring bonuses, my issues with that, if we take this year, so the 8% was very important to staff to get as a recruiting tool because it's one of the few agencies in the state that actually have adopted that. So it will make a difference. It could be the reason that we're seeing our sworn candidates actually apply right now. I haven't had a chance to talk to them to see what drove them to it, but that's the newest thing we've done, and we're suddenly getting certified candidate supply. So that's the only change that we've made, really, that may be driving that. My point that I was going to make here, though, if I offer a hiring bonus and say three years experience, I'll bring you in at step three. year like this year we don't give a pay raise because we did the eight percent my three-year guy is still making two-year pay and so if i recruit and tell someone else you got three years experience i'll move you in at step three he's now making more money than my three-year guy who's been dedicated to my city so i mixed motions on the hiring hiring and recruiting bonuses just because it has the potential to affect morale in a way that i don't have that issue right now i'd rather not create that It may be a good thing to attract more applicants, but I think there's some negatives that come with it that might be concerning. The next one on their list was relax the drug policy. You don't have to worry. We're not going to talk about that one because I'm not going to do it. So if you've got drug charges or convictions or arrests, you're not coming here. And TICO here in this state takes care of a lot of that. But even in missions, if you haven't been arrested but you come in and say, well, you know, two months ago I did a key bump of heroin or whatever, you're not eligible for employment here. That does happen. So we have people going through the process that admit to illicit narcotic use within the last year and think they should be a police officer. You will not get hired that way here, and I'm not willing to change that. Improve agency culture. This is something that we've been working on. I think from Chief Howell to current, trying to change the culture here has been something that's been ongoing. And it really comes down to we were a department of a bunch of old folks that have been here for a while. And then they start retiring and start going on. You end up being a department where our average age right now is going to be your average experiences right at five years. It's a really, really young department now. So with that, you know, you have opportunities to change the culture, to create something that you want. We're very laid back. I'm not going to say lazy because I think that's the wrong word, but we're very laid back. I want to keep us laid back, but I want to keep us active. And so there's a fine line in there in trying to keep a really calm culture but an active culture that's then not accused of overstepping their bounds and in use of force issues and things of that nature so and I think we've done a pretty good job with that with that culture as they already brought up the the videos that we do so the videos kind of give you a snapshot into our culture and I think most people are seeing that to be pretty favorable The next one on their list was leverage interns and non-sworn. If I had them, I would. I've got seven total personnel that are non-sworn. Four of those are jailers, two work in records, and one is my admin coordinator that supervises records. My jailers do help with vehicle maintenance, and they help with building maintenance. So they're already wearing multiple hats in addition to work in the jail. They can't do the other two while I have an inmate, though. So as long as there's an inmate, their responsibility is in the jail. And then the Sergeant Espinoza, who's my background investigator, then has to take on vehicle maintenance and take on building maintenance, which can be a full-time job, especially when the heat's like this and the ACs keep going out. When you're talking about that, I don't have personnel to assign tasks to, to take officers away from doing those medial tasks. That's going to take me into our sworn staffs. For Sworn, for years, we've been after the two per thousand. When I came here in 2009, we were two per thousand. We stayed that way through 2011. I don't remember exactly what the financial crunch was that happened at the time, but we had positions that we froze. We ended up giving those back to the city in an effort to search for COPFAST grants, which would fund officers, but you can't supplant, so I couldn't have openings. I had to give those openings up to go after grants. And we didn't get those back right away. It took five or six years to get those positions back. So when I came here, we were 40 officers authorized. Today we're 42. So we've seen a total growth of two officers, but a population increase of nearly 9,000. And so when you do the two per thousand during that same timeframe, I should have had 18 officers, not two. And so when you start looking at it calls for service per officer and how we're addressing that, you know, our calls for service have gone up 45%, uh, since 2014 to current. Yeah, we're doing more with less, and that's where we're at. So when you talk about trying to leverage other folks, I don't have them to leverage, but I'm also asking more of my folks. Next on the list was expand the age eligibility. We don't disqualify due to age. I think the oldest that we've hired has been 51 years old, starting the career for the first time with no prior experience. Age really isn't a factor as long as you're healthy. You gotta be healthy. Don't be looking at us just for an insurance opportunity because you plan poorly early in life. You gotta be capable of doing the job. And that's gonna take me down to my big one. I saved this one for last, because this is the relaxed grooming standards. So this is an area that I could probably change today, but I refuse, and I'll tell you a little bit about why. So I have a personal belief that beards are not professional looking in uniform. Several of you all wear beards, don't think I'm talking bad about beards as a whole. I normally wear a Van Dyke when I'm not in uniform, but if I put the uniform on, I shave. When you start looking at societal views towards policing over the last three decades, I believe there's some commonalities that give rise to citizen distrust. You can go back to the 90s and the early 2000s where the emphasis was the war on drugs. Everybody remembers hearing that. That's what law enforcement was focused on. The profession heavily promoted the paramilitary style. Officers wearing BDUs, heavy vests, carrying rifles. And every recruiting video you found was people slamming doors, flashbangs going off. Everybody in SWAT gear. It was all about high action, high risk. My opinion during that time, because it was the war on drugs, we tried to emulate the view of warriors. We became somewhat unapproachable to our citizens. With that, our training took on titles of the warrior. We stopped being guardians and started becoming warriors in everything we were doing, creating a further misconception amongst our ranks that it was us versus them. If you think that doesn't have a negative impact when you're dealing with citizens, yeah, I would argue day and night with you. It just has those impacts. Then you fast forward to TV shows like Shield, SWAT, NYPD Blue, movies like Training Day and Unthinkable. They depict officers intentionally violating the law for the right reason. You can never violate the law in this profession for the right reason. If you violate law, you're in the wrong. Don't care what you're trying to accomplish, you can do it legally, and you can satisfy the requirements of law without having to ever do anything illegal. We then go to the 2000s where you had Duck Dynasty, a plethora of SWAT military shows, all with male characters depicting the long beards. People started identifying their identities that way. And so with those identities, they didn't want to shave to come into the workplace for law enforcement. Was it a barrier? Maybe to some degree, because they didn't want to give up their identities. But what I found during my research is all of the cities that have implemented the allowance of beards have all said it didn't make a big difference. So was it a barrier to recruitment? Really, it remains to be seen. It did not change recruiting that much at all. What it did do, though, once you open Pandora's box, everybody that was already employed wanted to grow beards, and once they had them, you can't put that back in the box. I refused to let it out of the box. There are some reasons for that. To me, it gives a more approachable look, exemplifies professionalism, and makes for uniform grooming standards. the simple rule is it avoids subjective judgment on length and neatness so again how do you how do you define it is quarter inch long enough is half an inch long enough should it be one inch that's subjective there's nothing on that that says what's right so why even introduce it into my ranks and that's what my view is so i refuse to do so there's another caveat that's coming out now it's load bearing vest and so when you look at I think Fort Worth, you'll see a lot of officers with this. They got all the stuff on their vest, very little on their gun belt. So our profession for years has had an issue with lower back problems because of the gun belt, the way we sit in cars and whatever. So it creates a lot of issues. So the answer was go to the load-bearing vest. The load-bearing vest, now you look tactical. All the stuff's on top of you. You'll find officers that have three rifle mags on their vest on routine patrol. Why are you wearing rifle mags if you don't even have a rifle? Those are some of my issues with it. But what the current studies are showing is that load-bearing vests are creating neck issues. Do you want a neck issue? Do you want a lower back issue? Because I can fix the outer vest without doing the load-bearing vest. They make suspenders that go underneath the shirt that hold everything on your shoulder, so we can fix it if we have folks that are complaining of lower back issues. But the load-bearing vest is not something that I'm willing to entertain either because, again, I think it takes away from the approachability of the officer and our citizens. So that's going to take me down into... What do new candidates want? So they want flexibility and real commitment to well-being, defined purpose, backed by wellness programs and professional development opportunities. That's what the research says. So our profession is marked by burnout and stress, therefore mental health support and work-life balance matter. Work-life balance means honoring time off and providing it generously. So in the past, OT was voluntary. Because of staffing issues that we've seen nationwide, not just us, you start requiring overtime. Overtime takes away from your off time, takes away from your family, creates more burnout. Burnout creates what? It creates people that are unhappy. What do they do? They leave. And so what we're seeing in our profession right now is more people leaving within the first five years of starting the profession. And we're seeing people retire at 20 years. So the 40 year guys that are sitting over there, the 35, 36 years guys that are standing here in front of you, those aren't happening anymore. The younger generations, when they hit 20, they're out and they're going to do something else. They want purpose and values and mission. I believe that when you're talking about purpose, especially from the content of a recruiting video, we're looking at showing that serving your community is a reward. You're representing something larger than yourself, serving your neighbors, family, and friends, doing something that matters. We need brave women and men to make a difference to be the difference. And that's kind of how our recruitment video is progressing. It's kind of along those lines. We want people to enter our profession and be part of it, but they really want purpose, so trying to create that purpose for them that might drive that. The new folks coming in on day one, they want to see what their career path is. When can I promote? When do I promote? How high can I promote? And how quick can I get there? The next one is pay. How quick can I get to midpoint? How quick can I get to top out? So those are the things that they're looking at. As far as your career path, that's a hard one to establish because it is really going to depend on your productivity as an officer as to are you able to promote? Do you study? Because it's a written test. Can you do that? There's an oral interview that takes place with it, and then your stats come into place. So have you performed? Have you done your job? Did you study for the test? And when you score dead last on the test, don't ask to be promoted because it's not going to happen. So that's probably the most troublesome one, trying to establish a true career path for someone. If you just want to stay at the patrol level, I can tell you where you're going to be in pay. I can tell you that by year three, you're probably eligible for day shift, if that's what drives you, which it is. It drives a lot of them. And then they want defined leadership development. So they don't want to come start on day one and think they're going to have to be a patrolman forever. They want to be a corporal, they want to be a sergeant, they want to be a lieutenant, they want to be the chief. So when you talk about leadership development, we send all new supervisors to the required 40-hour TCO course because it is required. In addition to that, our corporals and sergeants, we send them to a month-long police supervision class that's specific to police supervision. Sergeants in hire attend Lehman, which is a nine-week law enforcement management college that they attend. So it's three modules, three weeks each. First one's in Texas A&M. Next one's up at TWU in Denton. Third one's at Sam Houston State. So they go for three weeks at a time. These modules are normally several months apart. And that's all they do is leadership. leadership training, leadership discussions. They write a white paper on leadership. So it's very beneficial in helping develop them. It's not required, but it's something that we do. Sergeants and higher also attend what's called the FBI leadership certification course. It's three courses that you take and you write a white paper on it on leadership. Lieutenants and higher attend a two month executive leadership course similar to the month long. It's done by Aaliyah International Law Enforcement Group there. We also allow the lieutenants and hires to attend the Lehman Command Staff Leadership College. So it's a week long. You can repeat it every year. But it's largely the same topics every year, but it just keeps refreshing you. And then the AC or chief is allowed to attend the FBI National Academy. So I had the opportunity to attend the National Academy in 2010. It's 10 weeks long. You're in Virginia for that. Probably some of the best leadership training that I've had in my career. give a three-year commitment when you do that you come back and then you you just have a wealth of contacts networking from your your time there's 250 people per session they do four sessions a year one percent of law enforcement leadership across the nation gets to gets the opportunity to attend that so we do encourage our our administrators here i've encouraged my assistant chief to sign up for that When you have children, he's getting to a point where he'll start being able to get some free time maybe to do that. But with children and a wife, it's real hard for the wife to take care of children for 13 weeks by themselves without having any assistance. When you talk about benefits, the study indicates you give more holidays for that work-life balance, more vacation. We talked a little bit about this during the budget process. At 30,000 citizens, There's kind of a requirement in there that law enforcement or public safety as a whole starts with three weeks of vacation. Right now we start with two. Nick, I think you said, why are we waiting? Why can't we go ahead and do that now? That's going to be a financial thing with the city, giving more people more time off. But it's one of the things that we can look at moving forward. My folks for retention, they say buybacks of accumulated time off, so sick leave. Vacation time and comp time if they're not going to use it They want to be able to buy it back and not let it just set in the bank until they either use it or they retire They've suggested take home cars if they're on patrol and live in the city, you know currently I don't have enough units for that But if that's what we decide is that the way to move forward then we can do that and make arrangements for that Instead of sending cars out. We'll keep them for a little bit longer better medical When my folks are talking about that, they're talking about lower costs. There are a few agencies that are now starting to offer lifetime medical benefits to retirees. Define a retiree. So most of them say 20 years with the agencies, not 20 years in TMRS where I'm eligible to retire, but 20 years with the agency or 25 years with the agency. Again, encourages them to stay there because they can retire at 55 in law enforcement and have free medical coverage until they hit 65. Tuition reimbursement or student loan reimbursement. So currently our city does the tuition reimbursement. If you want to attend college and get your degree, the city will compensate you for that based off grade. But we have a lot of folks that we hire that have student loans. They didn't go to college here, but we don't offer a student loan reimbursement program. So if you could identify your loan, make that accessible to the city so they can verify that, then could it not qualify under the same program as tuition reimbursement? Childcare assistance or stipend. This is a big thing that a lot of agencies are looking at. Not necessarily doing, but looking at. Our officers are young. They're starting their families. And so daycare has become a major thing. Valerie, you know, daycare is expensive. And so when you're on a, on a income and trying to make a house payment that nowadays is 3000 plus per month or whatever, and then pay all the utilities, there's not much spare cash. So what we're seeing is officers have a tendency to keep a spouse home with the children. So now they lose half their income. So having a child care assistance or some kind of stipend would be something in the future that I think we need to look at. Or you have a daycare associated with the city somehow. We did approach the Halfley Center, it's been 15 years ago probably, to see if there was something we could work out, and we weren't able to work that at the time. Is it something we could move forward with? Maybe. And then the relocation assistance that you brought up. Is it something that would be utilized? I don't have an answer for that. I don't know how much it's utilized in other cities, but I really think relocation assistance would be incumbent upon us going other places to recruit outside our area. Again, that's going to require staff on my part because I can't do it with the one person I got. um we already kind of talked about pay but one of the things that we're seeing with some of our partner agencies around us we have an eight-step plan they've started reducing their steps to three four or five years so you shorten the amount of time that it takes to get to top out again when you talk about that that career progression or forecasting as to where i'm going to be two years five years six years from now that's what folks are looking at I think proper gaps between rates. Right now we have a bunch of overlap. So one of my recent promotees promoted has been topped out in the lower rank for years. And so when they promoted, they were making more than the previous two promotees that hadn't been with us as long. So they were lower in the ranks when they promoted, went to base. She's gone actually to several steps higher than them. So it creates some animosity, but I think most people understand. And we used to try to explain it to them. That was one of the other things that my folks brought up as far as things that they'd like to see. Already talked about the lateral pay and the issues I had with it. Shift differential pay was another one that the folks brought up so the night guys don't get anything special from being on nights. That is, it's not uncommon, but it's not what every department's doing either. But having some kind of differential pay for shifts would probably be a good thing. The formal employee referral program, so that was mentioned previously. Paul, you mentioned that in your email to me as well. Our folks are already recommending their friends and family that are interested in law enforcement they think are a good fit, and we're not paying them. I don't think it's a bad thing to pay them to do the same thing. I don't think it's going to change our recruiting any. I think it's going to reward them for what we're already getting, but it's not going to increase recruiting any. last one that i have here kind of have it highlighted is uh the pay increases we know from experience that when we increase pay applications increase so we have to stay in the market and when we start falling below the market that's what hurts us yeah yeah i've i've heard bits and pieces of conversations here and there but it seems that there may be a belief from some that that our department's the highest paid department in our area and it's just not the case you know we're we're not anywhere close to the highest paid department And I think we still agree with that assessment we we want to be in that 75th percentile range that top half, you know, I don't think we have to be at the very top but I don't think we can afford to be at the very top, but if we can stay in that second tier, we seem to do pretty good. But as of right now, we're down below the 50th percentile mark. That has an effect on us.

What I'm learning here is we have to kind of definitely emergency medical and police and fire has to be looked at differently when we're looking at our salaries and stuff. We have to look at it closer. Right. Exactly.

Academy. Yeah.

You know, it's going to be tough for me to take that $20,000 pay cut.

And just to be clear, that's to attend the academy. So once you get out of the academy, you would fall under our regular pay, which we start at 72. But if you're that non-sworn looking to get into the academy, someone to sponsor you, why are you going to let me sponsor you at 45, 48, wherever it's at, when someone else is going to sponsor you at 65? Exactly.

Definitely they want that pickup instead of the sedan.

Right now, the next one on the list for my folks was opportunities. Again, this requires more staff. This is what we lost our our most recent folks to. We lost three folks all under five years. It is to opportunities. They want to be part of task force positions. That's what you see on TV is detectives and narcotics. Everybody wants to work narcotics. I don't have a narcotics position because I don't have the staffing for it. So when you talk about opportunities, you're going to have to increase the number of officers so that we have those opportunities to send somebody off to the task force. There's a number of task force that we can be involved in, FBI, DEA. The Postal Service has a task force. Counties have task forces for narcotics. I mean, there's a number of task forces that you can be involved in. There can be financial upsides to that, because if they do a big bust or seizure, if your city's part of the task force, you get a piece of that. I would never abdicate that we do a task force just for that, because one, it's not guaranteed, and two, that's not the way to run a business. It would be a benefit, but it wouldn't be the reason in which to do it. Other things my folks have asked for is hats, so we allow caps now. Some of them want to wear cowboy hats. I've got a policy on my desk, been sitting there for a year. I haven't decided to sign it yet. I know what caps look like when they've been in the patrol bag. I can only imagine someone getting out of the car and throwing their cowboy hat on, and it looks like the old bull rider hat that some of us have worn in the past. Not going to be a beneficial thing. We are looking at targeting military policing unit candidates, their exit programs, so people coming out of the military. We've not actually started that yet, but it is something that we're trying to get involved in and figure out who we need to talk to to get involved. Officers would like to see gym memberships. Again, it's something that other agencies offer as part of their benefits package is they provide you with a gym membership to local gyms so you can go work out whenever you want to. We do allow our officers to work out on duty in our little gym as part of our fitness program, but we've got folks that are looking for something a whole lot bigger than that. Relaxed standards on credit checks. This was a national thing. Again, I'm not willing to do that. If you can't take care of your finances, I probably don't want you out here dealing with other people when they're having hardships. Accept those with minor arrest records. TCO controls this. If it's a Class B misdemeanor or higher, TCO regulates how long it has to be before you can get hired. If it's Class C stuff, we can normally deal with that. Another recommendation was drop all physical standards. And I think you see that across the nation. You see it on TV. Deadly force is used because a couple of officers were way out of shape, get involved in something, they can't handle it, and they resort to deadly force when they probably didn't have to. I'm not saying that happens every time, but I think that physical standards are important. It doesn't have to be Mr. Universe fitness standards, but it needs to be something that's adequate to the job so that you can do what you're needing to do.

It's also the image that's projected to the citizens. You see somebody that's fat and overweight.

Yeah, I mean, there's comments all the time. And even on Facebook, if someone posts a picture of officers doing stuff and there's an overweight one there, there's all kinds of donut jokes that go with that. You get back into the PERF study. The public perception of law enforcement has worsened since the highly publicized incidents of 2020. That continues. The COVID pandemic created the real problem for the under five years folks. The pandemic created multiple telecommuting opportunities that provide more flexibility, freedom, and in some cases money than traditional in-person jobs. Still true today. A lot of folks have gone back into the office, but you still have a lot of folks that are working from home. I would argue, I know an executive that recently retired. He's working from home largely because he wanted to be with his family. He does travel once a month, but he makes more money than what he made previously in his job. And so those are still out there. And we do lose people to that still. Still have a lot of negativity in the profession, which leads to resignations and retirements at younger ages than what we previously saw. It really hurts us though when it's in that mid-level management. So corporals start leaving the profession or leaving to go somewhere else. you get into a problem where you may start promoting prematurely because they don't have people that are truly ready to promote, maybe. And I'm not going to go outside because of the effect that has on morale, but you do start promoting people that maybe need another year or two of maturity in the profession before they promote. And so those mid-level folks, when they start leaving, they have a really big hit on us. Paul, to your email earlier, there was a little bit of question about the FTO and CID rotation stuff. FTO is three phases of three weeks, and then there's a ghost phase that lasts for two weeks. For nine weeks, you're with a... another officer that's got some experience. Phase one, you're doing about 25% of the work. Phase two, you're doing 50 to 60% of the work. You hit phase three, you're doing 75 to 90% of the work. And then in ghost phase, you're on your own. Really, you're not. There's someone in the car with you, but he's in plain clothes. He's not in uniform anymore, and you gotta make all the decisions, but he's gonna keep you from getting your rump in trouble for making the wrong decision. After that two weeks, we then cut you loose. You're then held fully to our policies, and we expect you to be able to work there. CID rotations, so we do have a three to five year rotation in CID. We have one position in CID that the sergeant can keep as permanent. But even the sergeant is a three to five year rotation. The reason we do that is people want opportunities and abilities to perform in other areas. If I said, okay, all four of my detectives are three detectives and property officer, you're fixed positions. You never have to move. It takes out all availability for anyone else to rotate through the unit. Therefore, what do they do? They start looking for opportunities somewhere else. So rotation is, is pretty much a necessity for us to be able to continue doing what we're doing and give people the opportunities to learn how to be an investigator, how to write warrants, how to file cases, things of that nature. I want to talk a little bit about what causes disqualification. So last year we had 137 total applicants. That sounds great. We hired five. When you start looking at the reason for not getting hired, we had conviction or admission to crime, use of illicit drugs, termination for misconduct of a prior job, The biggest one is they fail the test interviewer physical. So we have people show up that are completely unprepared for anything to do with testing or taking a physical. That's 52 applicants failed last year in that category alone. Unstable work history. This will get you terminated if you have six jobs in the last year and a half. Probably not going to take a chance on you. You're moving too much and I'm going to invest way too much money in you if you take off and leave me. So that will have a detrimental effect on you. The second biggest area is incomplete application. So they have the application that they don't complete it, don't turn it in. That's them pretty much just walking away from doing anything. When you're talking about the application, it's largely the personal history statement. Say it's 30 pages, it wants to know everything. It's T-code required, I can't change it. I mean, I can put it on my letterhead. I can add more questions to it, but I can't really take anything away from it. So it is what it is. This year, so far, We've had 128 applications. 24 are still active. We've hired one. 29 failed to complete the application. 33 have failed the test, interview, or physical. 10 had the unstable work history, 15 for illicit drugs, and 14 for convictions or admissions to crimes. And so when you talk about recruits, I mean, we get a bunch of applicants, but it doesn't mean they're quality applicants. And that's really what we're looking for. I'm not going to hire just anybody off the street. You need to be quality. You need to be something that's going to fit in with us. And so where we are now, I've got four I think it's actually five, but four commissioned in background process, and I got four non-sworn that are ready for backgrounds that could be sent to the academy. So I've got eight potential that are looking solid. These aren't fresh, just sitting out there. We haven't looked at them yet. These we've started looking into. They look pretty solid. So if we could get six of these hired, we'd be doing pretty good. Normally, that's not how it works out. We're going to get about 50% of them hired. So if I can get four of them hired, we're still in a better place than where we were two months ago. If anyone's... Yes, sir. Yeah. So one of the sworn he's in the very final stages. I'm hoping that we'll have him on board here pretty quick. He's already completed everything up to the psychological and physical. So he's the he's on the very tail end stages. He's passed everything else. Talk a little bit about why we have our vacancies. So I need to go over here. So since 2024, I've had one retire, four resigned, four terminated, one failed FTO, and one failed the academy. And so the folks that resign are the ones that we're really after to keep. If you get terminated, it's because you violated policies and you're to the point where I don't want to keep you around. But the resigned are the ones that we try to go after. So I've had three resign that actually went to other departments. one for two for less money. One because that's the county where he lives. He was going to get a take-home vehicle. His wife had had some medical issues. He wanted to be closer to home. And he says they have a pursuit policy that allows you to pursue anything. So that was a driving factor. Another one wanted a narcotics task force position. He did leave for more money. But in order to get the task force position, he had to agree to go through the FTO program with them first. He has done that. I don't know if he's actually made it to his narcotics position yet. That's what he's driving for Another went to the same County agency with the intent to be on the task force refused to do the FTO program So did not get lateral pay took base pace. He took a pay cut Already got in trouble and is in judicial now. So he's not even working narcotics like he wanted to go so Those are the people that we'd normally try to keep but they're leaving for opportunities. And so when you're talking about opportunities, I don't have those without having staff.

Do you feel that the people leaving, I mean, you're going to lose if you've got people leaving and decide to, you know, go off and do other things. Do you feel that we're losing at a higher rate than any other city around here?

No, I mean, we're down three in that area. When I look at cities around us, I think part of the email that Gabe sent out, so Grand Prairie, Frisco, and Plano are the highest paid agencies here in our region. And they also top out in three years between 105,000 and 110,000. So far more money than what we even come close to topping out at. And they've got 15, 15, and 20 openings. That doesn't account the people that are currently in their academy that could wash out and whatever. That's openings that they don't have a body dedicated for. Yeah, I called Haltom because I'm good friends with those folks over there. They're currently running five openings. He's got five that he's hired, but they're waiting on the academy. They haven't even started the academy yet. And he's got one in the academy, so technically he's 11 down for officers on the street. But he's got some people hired. They're just waiting on the academy to start up so he can get them in there. If you look at our comparison cities for pay, Fort Worth is 80 down, Denton's 25, ULIS 11, Arlington 11, Louisville 7, Mansfield 4, Watauga 3, Grapevine 2, Keller 1. This isn't something that's just us. This is nationwide. That concludes everything I have as far as what we're doing for recruiting, what we're trying to do to keep people. I'd be more than happy to entertain any questions that you might have.

Mr. Peabody, I just want to thank you. That was an excellent summary. That's an intense, very deep summary, and we appreciate it. You put a lot of effort in that. Thank you for filling us in on some stuff.

Sorry I kept you here so long.

No, it's OK. Sorry. A couple of questions for Chief Ragsdale.

You answered pretty much everything I sent in to you. One of the things that you talked about in the beginning, I encourage counsel, if you have not wrote out with the police department, write out with the police department, find out what they do day in and day out. But it also gives you an opportunity to talk to them and find out some of these things, you know, they'd like to see and not. And if you haven't shame on you because you really need to do it. I agree.

I wrote that with you guys. It's it really is.

And you'll get a good laugh, because every time I've gone out, there's been a couple of good stories. All right, other questions for Chief?

I'm just gay. I think we're really between now and the next second. We really need to look at our emergency medical and come up with a different approach. I mean, I know we've chosen, you know, to take the 8% and knock that out. You know, again, hindsight's 20-20. looking at how this has gone, it seems like we should have did the 8% at least for emergency medical coverage, how to get that. But now next year, we're going to be that much farther behind. So we're going to have to look at that, you know, for that company, look at that. And I would recommend we look, really take a strong look at the

Yeah. Yeah, I think the chief mentioned one thing we may look at in the future is Reducing the steps in certain positions so that you can tap out quicker. And we have some unusual situations, both in police and fire, where folks relatively late in their careers choose to promote. So naturally, somebody's tapped out and they're promoted. There may be somebody in that position longer that is making less. But no pay plan can fix that. But we're happy to look at it.

Any questions for Chief?

If I can just add, too. I've mentioned that I'm against beards. It doesn't change no shave November. So we still participate in that. My guys are back here, so they know. November, you still get to grow a beard for the month. But year-wide, it's just not going to be the case. Appreciate that.

Anything else for Chief? No, thank you, sir. Excellent. Excellent.

Thank you.

All right, we're going on to 3B. And I appreciate everybody's patience. So regarding flock cameras, this was a citizen request. Lauren Taylor, Stockholm, I'll let you start it off. Please, sir. Come on up.

Thank y'all. Thank y'all for taking me, listening to me. I must admit, I'm a little nervous. I have this many eyes on me. But I'm going to go ahead, and we're going to move forward anyway. Flock cameras have officially made it to our city. i first noticed the one in my neighborhood pointing into my neighborhood about a few weeks ago these cameras are advertised as license plate readers what they do is they trade a little bit of privacy for security that's what their purpose is or at least that's what they're advertised as i don't know how much the council has paid for them that's honestly none of my business What is my business is what these cameras are recording. Literally, my business, my private business, my personal business, all Saginaw's business are recorded by these cameras. The data collected by these cameras can be used in a way that is a clear violation of the Fourth Amendment, which states that you need a warrant before you can go digging into someone's belongings, data included. I know there's an argument to be made that, you know, these cell phones, they have cameras on them and geolocation data. But when I bought this phone and signed up for the services, I had to sign up for the user agreement. So I agreed to the conditions of this phone and no one in Saginaw agreed to the conditions, service terms and conditions of these flock cameras. They are wildly unpopular throughout the entire country. I have a list of counties and cities where they have been already banned. Greg Abbott himself, the governor of Texas, has put a moratorium on flock cameras. they're they're so unpopular that they have been vandalized and there have been reports where individuals have hacked into the camera feeds and hacked into the data so individuals that don't even need to have that data are being hacked into them so i am there's been a lot of people here that have been asking for a little bit more money i'm asking you all to In this particular case, don't spend the money. I'm coming to you all with a proposal to not spend the money. So here's what I recommend you do. at least for now, put like a giant box over them that will at least satisfy my initial want of just not being in a mass surveillance, but it'll also disable them and then hold a vote. So then the citizens of Saginaw can then decide on whether or not they want this trade-off for their privacy for the security. Because maybe I'm alone in this. Maybe I'm the weird one out. And I think the citizens of Saginaw should have a vote on whether or not they want it. And if they don't want it, by all means, take them down. And don't pay for the contracts. Get that money filtered back into the police department. However, if they do want them, undo it. Then everything's fine. So that's my recommendation. I blocked off a whole five minutes. I'm worried I've come to the end of my presentation. I talk fast when I'm nervous. I probably sound a little nervous too, so I'm sorry about that. But do you all have any questions?

Any questions for Mr. Stockham? Is it pronounced Stockham? Stockham, yes. Okay, thank you. Do it right. Mary, go ahead.

I believe I'm correct in saying this. When you said that Governor Abbott put a moratorium on them, I believe what he put a moratorium on was cities being able to use state funds to pay for them.

Yeah, I didn't, whenever I read the news, these headlines and all the details in them, I don't know what that means because in some, in some of my studies it was counties that did the contracts with FLOG. Now, I've learned that that's not true here. It's the city that's done the contract with FLOG.

I think it was just cities or counties being able to use state funds to pay for it.

I think that's what- The word I was using was jurisdictions, so that's general enough. But it's an example of what I'm saying is that's how wildly unpopular it is. I mean, flock cameras and this whole move towards mass surveillance is what we criticize other countries for that go into communism, like China or whatever. And I don't want to be a member under a mass surveillance state. There's plenty of cameras everywhere for red light cameras or whatever. And I feel we need to draw a line somewhere because I don't want then cameras to be put across every public bathroom or other things. I'm getting ahead of myself. I apologize. But the point is I don't want to be part of a surveillance state or in this case surveillance Saginaw.

So.

Yeah, I'm not necessarily for Mr. Stockholm, but I had sent a question in and I just wanted to have a little bit of discussion from maybe the police chief and the city manager about what the flock cameras are.

I was going to have everybody speak first.

Yeah, that's perfect.

Are you good? Anything else, sir?

Yes, yes, yes. I appreciate you listening to me. I only blocked off five minutes anyway. Thank you all. Thank you all very much.

So I do have folks who want to speak. And if you do want to speak, you can fill out a form at this time, because I'd have to. Next is Lori Allen. If y'all would just state your name and address for the record, please.

Lori Allen, 577 Griffith. I have concerns about the flock cameras. They are logging time, place, license plates, car make, color, bumper stickers, and car body damage into a searchable database that is shared far beyond Saginaw, Texas. It can be used for racial and political profiling, non-law enforcement access, and data privacy vulnerabilities. The company is private, and they are mapping everywhere we go, not just license plates. A police chief in Oshkosh, Wisconsin, caught Flock lying to his city council and stopped the $8 billion surveillance contract less than a day after the council approved it because it does build a heat map of every car, where it goes, and where it's been. A flock employee confirmed the software does exactly that. Florida Sheriff H.D. Deloach of Putnam County has ordered all cameras taken down because they don't have legislation with clear guidelines. Governor Abbott has paused state's funding because of privacy concerns and misuse. Florida Governor Ron DeSantis, Missouri Senator Josh Hawley are investigating the privacy concerns and misuse. At least three Texas counties have canceled their contracts and have taken the cameras down. There are multiple instances of misuse. A Lufkin police officer was indicted on 100 felony counts for misuse of lock camera information. The Washington Post investigation found at least 50 officers charged with or accused of misusing plate readers that tracked, basically stalked, their wives, girlfriends, and exes. A Kentucky police officer ran 2,048 searches to track the mother of his child with no warrant, no probable cause, and no judge ever saw it. It's not anyone's business where I work, drop my kids off to school, where I go to church, or where I go to eat. This violates my constitutional Fourth Amendment rights. No warrant, no probable cause, not approved by a judge or magistrate. Flock CEO Garrett Langley has blurred his house on Google Maps because he thinks he deserves his right for privacy. It wouldn't surprise me at all if he exempted himself and his family from this surveillance. Please cancel the flock contracts, remove or cover all cameras, and don't replace it with another company. This was not put on the ballot to be voted on by us. We did not vote for this unconstitutional permanent surveillance, and I do not consent. Permanent warrantless tracking does not belong in a free society. Thank you.

Thank you, ma'am. Matthew Lechman. I can't read it. I'm sorry. Tell me how to pronounce it. Matthew, what's your last name?

Whatever you can. Lechman. OK, thank you. My name's Matt Lechman, 524 South Hampshire Street. Also, I want to say thank you, Councilman Mary Copeland. Been very upfront. Any questions I've had, been very forward. Anything other than that, so thank you. I'd also like to apologize to people by me. I got off work, rushed here, changed. I do not smell great. Sorry, y'all. But that's my point. This matters a lot to me and to a lot of people. I'd like to share a quick story and how that kind of plays into today. So this is a true story. It's nothing crazy. But in sixth grade history, we're going to the Foundation of America, all that stuff. And talking about, you know, Bill of Rights, Constitution, all that stuff. Got to the Bill of Rights and history teacher said, okay, we're going to go over the first 10. I want to go down and talk about each one and see how relevant it is today. You know, this is written a long time ago. So we're just going to go down, see what's relevant, what needs to be changed.

Okay, okay.

First Amendment, free speech. Do we need to change that? No, no, no, no, no. We're not going to change that. Why not? No, we're not touching that one.

Okay, fine, fine.

Got to second one, right to bare arms. What about this one? No, no, we're not changing it. Well, guys, think about it. Guns have changed a lot since back then. We got machine guns, bazookas. We got all kinds of crazy stuff. Don't you think that should change?

No.

Yeah, okay, maybe just, you know, maybe just this. And then, you know, I'm not going to drag this on. The list went on. And, you know, unknowingly to our sixth grade minds, she had taken away each right little by little. She was like, guys, this is why we have these amendments. This is why we have all these things. And I just took them away from you just like that. Do I think that these flock cameras are, you know, the end of the world? Do I think it's going to destroy the world? No. What I do think is that it is a very slippery slope to something much worse. Like two people spoke before me said, all this tracking of our location, when, where, you know, these people know and unwarranted. Cameras are one thing, and I'm no expert, but it's not long until a salesman comes in here and says, hey, look at all the success you guys have had with these cameras. And I say success lightly because I believe before these cameras were invented, our policemen and women were able to do their jobs without these cameras. So I have no doubt that without them, they would do just fine, be able to do these jobs. Anyway, I believe that salesmen come back in here and say, hey, look at the success of these cameras. Well, we have gunshot detectors we put up in these neighborhoods. Your gunshot will be able to locate it, which is a real thing. Be able to locate it, help solve crime that much quicker. Well, it's not much longer after that was put out. Well, they also listen for cries for help. So they're not just audio devices that listen to spikes in audio, they listen to everything. They put neighborhoods right next to houses, listen to everything these people have on their lives. They also have literal face tracking cameras that build profiles on people. So they got where you go, when you go, they got what you say, and they got what you look like, and the profile they built on every person with these cameras. We don't have those yet, I don't think. What I'm saying is it's a very slippery slope. If we allow cameras like these in our city, and we allow them to stay in our city, it's only a matter of time before someone else comes in convincing you guys to, this is the next best thing. This is going to help crime go down so much more. I believe the past two people hit on a lot of stuff as well. And again, I found out about this, thank you, Ms. Mary Goughlin. Didn't have time to prepare for it, but I don't have any statistics with me, but is there any questions, anything like that?

Any questions? All right. Thanks, sir. Appreciate it.

Thank you.

And the last one is Jackson, and I can't read your last name. I'm sorry.

It's Jackson Clark. Thank you. 621 Seabourn Drive. I also have a few questions. A lot of people already hit on some of the points that I wanted to touch on, so I won't kind of reiterate those. But this isn't an attack on our police. Our officers didn't build a nationwide database. This is about third party using our data that they're collecting. The problem really is who's getting the keys to this, right? And I'll give you one example down south in Pflugerville. They just did an audit of their system and actually cut the contract. They had 459 outside agencies that were searching city plates 1.6 million times in six months. So 1.6 million times. The local police department had 3,000 inquiries. So what are those 1.6 million searches, you might ask, right? Union Pacific Railroad searched 242 times. So what is the Union Pacific Railroad searching? I don't know. Canadian County Sheriff, Oklahoma, 480 searches. Of a Texas suburb, so Miami Township PD of Ohio, 143 searches. Florida Fish and Wildlife Commission, not sure why they would be searching a suburb in Austin, but they did as well. Medicare fraud investigators of Illinois are also conducting searches. So really, it's not often that it's the local police departments, it's these third-party agencies that are going through this data. So who's really using the data is often our biggest concern as citizens. Mountain View, and I believe you spoke on this a little bit earlier that you weren't quite aware of what was being shared and what wasn't being shared. So a lot of times these cities will allow nation or statewide sharing to exist where other agencies can come in and the city can say, hey, you can look at our data or you can't look at our data. Well, the city actually said, hey, you can't look at our data, you can't share our data. But that data was still being shared to these other agencies. So a lot of times, even when the city says, hey, we don't want our data shared, they're still turning on that feature. So as city council members, I think it's important for us to educate ourselves as to what data is actually being shared. Because it does matter and some of the people have already hit on some of the more egregious uses of those things and those things will happen I think with police there's a bigger audit mechanism But with these other agencies that are accessing this data and it being such new technology There aren't really many safeguards in place that put railroads to stop those people from accessing those data's right and So that is one thing that we really need to be aware of. Several counties have already, like Kendall, Hood, Guadalupe, Bandera, have all pulled the plug. More than 50 cities nationwide have cut their programs. So I would like to ask the council, maybe you can answer this later, but will you commit to a public audit of the data that has been accessed by outside agencies, date and reason, and if those third parties were ever approved by the city council, and will you turn off that statewide and national sharing? And lastly, I'd like to leave you with a quote from Benjamin Franklin who said, those who would give up a central liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety. Thank you.

So that's the only three I have. Anybody else who wants to speak on this, you can. I'd ask you to fill out a form after you speak. But anybody who wants to speak on it right now, now's your chance. I'm going to let the police chief and other folks respond. And just to say, I want to make sure everybody gets a chance to speak. So anybody else wants to speak, now's your chance. You want to speak? Come on. Come up to the microphone so everybody can hear you. And part of the reason that we have the microphone is this is on YouTube. I want everybody to be able to hear what we're saying. Yes, ma'am.

My name is Kristy Noon. I've lived here over 30 years, 953 Hiawatha Lane. My concern is the abuses that's happening. I saw Dallas police chief talk yesterday. He said, I don't know the number of cameras that they have. It's a lot. But $3,300 per camera is what that cost. Their city council asked him, how much is it the next year to renew? Guess what? It's $3,300 per camera, again, to keep that live camera and to save that data. So you have all of these cameras you're paying $3,300 for every year. the police chief, he might like that $3,300. And I know there's more than that in here, in the city. And yes, I would rather that money go to the police chief to hire the right people, to get the right things that they need, rather than a camera to spy on the citizens of Saginaw.

Thank you, ma'am. Anybody else? All in, all done? All right, Keith, you want to?

Sure. I'll try to answer some of this. First, I want to talk about the effectiveness of flocks. We got these cameras in early 2024. We've had 68 total offenses that have been resolved with the use of flock. Most of these are going to be hit-and-run type accidents, injuries, people flee. You don't have a vehicle description, but no LP. FLOC has allowed us to bring resolution to those crimes and allowed those victims to get the restitution that they deserve through insurance or criminal prosecution. Of our offenses, there's been 11 crimes against persons, 21 thefts, six vehicle thefts, three narcotic arrests, three DWIs, 24 due to warrants. Most of these are felony warrants. Eight stolen vehicle recoveries and four stolen gun recoveries through flocks. That's been our two-year experience. Dallas PD says that they've solved 12 homicides already this year with the assistance of Flock. They solved 15 last year where they only had a vehicle description, no license plate, no suspects. Fort Worth has made 2,200 arrests. They have 300 cameras been in place since 2020. In 2024, they ID the shooting suspect who had shot at officers and fled the scene in the vehicle did not have losses played at the time. Attempted murder was solved in under one hour. They recently when I say recently here in the last few months had a road rage murder. They don't mention specifically Flock as how they solved it. They said it was their real-time crime center and surveillance technology, which is part of Flock. So they solved that in just a couple of hours. San Antonio was able to make four arrests of violent home invasion suspects hours after the invasion took place. Missing and Exploiting Children say that they've solved over 100 missing children cases with flock and the numbers just go on and on and on so that's that's really just here close to us The flock cameras, they take a still photo, so there's no video involved at all. It doesn't do anything with facial recognition. It takes a photograph, it's a snapshot in time as the vehicle passes by, records the license plate number, records color, make, type of vehicle. If it does have damage on the side that's viewed by the camera or it has specific stickers or racks or anything on it, we can search by that. That's where FLOC gets utilized the majority of the time for us, is we have a vehicle description and nothing more. We look for a vehicle that matches that color make, say it's got a luggage rack on the back. We'll search that vehicle. We'll get our returns. You'll get returns that aren't related, and we understand that. But FLOC is just an investigative tool. It's not the end-all, be-all. It allows us to identify a potential person of interest to talk to. We go talk to those people and prove up our cases from that point. In the case of warrants or stolen vehicles, does Flock make mistakes? Sure it does. They indicate that they misread plates about nine times out of a million reads. And that means there's a digit that's messed up in there. So it may read a three as an eight or vice versa. It's the officer's responsibility to validate that information. So Flock does not cause you to get arrested. Flock may cause you to get stopped by the police. But as soon as we validate that, you're free and on your way. There's no arrest that takes place. there was a comment made about flock being hacked and other people having information that it's not happened to a flock camera it's happened to other vendors but it's not happened to a flock camera uh flock uses a hse 265 security or something like that i may have the initials wrong on it it's a government grade security from the moment the image is captured until it's uploaded into the government cloud a government rated cloud so the encryption that takes place there is is CGIS compliant and CGIS is the requirement that we have to have on all of our tools and access that we have to state data systems and stuff to keep those from getting hacked. So it's top of the line security that they have on it. There was a video that was out some months ago where There was a guy showing that he had a flock camera and he'd hacked it and he was able to do all these things and there was no security to it. But in his video he admits this is not actually a flock camera. I've never attacked a flock camera. I've never accessed flock data. And so what you see online isn't necessarily what's going on. The governor, I think, I don't agree with his action on this. I think it was a knee-jerk reaction due to the political fallout. He did block grant funds that were used for flock. He didn't ban flock by any means. He said you can't use state funds to purchase flock. And he's put a moratorium on the cameras that DPS has because those are state funds that they use to run that. Flock is highly unpopular, especially right now, but the claim of the Fourth Amendment violations doesn't exist. There's been over 30 cases before the courts, including the Ninth, Eleventh, and Fifth Circuits. The Fifth Circuit is what controls Texas. It says there is no Fourth Amendment violation and no warrant requirement for Flock. What you expose in public cannot be protected under the Fourth Amendment. This goes all the way back to 1967 and the Katz case that specifically said anything that you display, even in your home or office, that you display that anyone else can see is no longer protected under the Fourth Amendment. Fast forward to where we are today, there's been 30 different cases that I'm aware of. Some as recent as May of this year, which was the Texas Fifth Circuit case. So I understand the argument that it's a Fourth Amendment violation, but it's not. It does not track the totality of your movement. If it did, that would certainly require a warrant. What it does is take a snapshot in time at a fixed location. It does not follow you. It does not track your overall movements. There's a camera here. If you look at Saginaw, our cameras are only on the exterior avenues around our city. And so I can prove that you came into town. I can't prove that you left. I can't prove that you went anywhere else in my town. I can only prove that you drove through it. That does not track the totality of your movements, which would require a warrant under the Fourth Amendment. They say the courts have just continually held that, that it is not a violation of that. Again, it does not track your complete travel. I'm going through my notes here of what others were saying to make sure I touch everything. As far as the sharing of data, so the data is ours. It belongs to us. The only way my data gets shared is because I authorized somebody else to see it. And when I say me, I mean my department, whoever I have that has administrative rights. I would argue that in the early systems of Florida, a lot of people had administrative rights that probably didn't deserve it. And so they would get a request from their buddy who's at the neighboring agency, and he'd say, yep, we're going to share with you. And no one else knew about it. So like in the case of Pflugerville, where they said, the city says we don't want to share. Well, that's great. What are your users saying? Because if your users allow that information to be shared, the city's not aware of it, but also... Flock's not at fault there. Flock, you're an administrative user. You can approve those shares. And that's how that works. So do we share our information? We do. We share it with our surrounding agencies because we're a highly populated metropolitan area. So any car that's here is probably, well, we know it's in Fort Worth because Fort Worth surrounds us on three sides. So we share with Fort Worth. Fort Worth shares with us. What we have in place is we have a policy that's been in place since we've had the cameras. We have an audit mechanism in place. We already have the AI audit tool that Flock offers. They're not offering it to everybody. We do have it. And so what that does is it identifies characteristics that are anomalies to searches that wouldn't seem right, and it freezes that user's access to any and all flock until it's reviewed by an administrator, being myself, my assistant chief, or one of my lieutenants. And so we have a number of safeguards in place here in Saginaw. But again, I would tell you, our cameras are on the outskirts of town. I know that your car came into town. I have no idea where you went after that. It does not track the totality of your movements, therefore does not fall under a Fourth Amendment protection. I know that's an unpopular opinion with folks. I've got just a whole lot of case law here. You see, if you look at the Texas Court of Appeals, there was a case in 2020. They said specifically the use of LPR data to identify a suspect's vehicle locations did not violate constitutional protections as the information pertained to public travel. That comes back to Katz and to the Knotts cases. Knotts was 82 or 86 case, I believe. 83 case. And that case specifically, this was not flock related, but it was about the emerging technology that society was seeing. And it says, the court emphasized that traveling on public thoroughfares reveals direction of movement and stops to anyone watching without constituting a Fourth Amendment search. not further said that a car has little capacity for escaping public scrutiny it travels public thoroughfares where both its occupants and its contents are in plain view that's back in 83. we're fast forwarding today with technology it's it's a concern now because it's more prevalent but the cases let's say 2019 2024 2025 2026 all these cases are saying the same thing what you display in public which is driving the vehicle vehicle is a privilege not a right You drive that vehicle on a public thoroughfare, you make that available to anybody to see, and therefore does not fall under a Fourth Amendment protection. That's what I have to say about that. I'd be more than happy to answer any questions, but I don't know how to be more clear than what the courts have said on the specific issue of flocks.

Well, thanks, Chief. I guess one of the questions that a lot of folks would have, how can we secure this data? How do we know that this is not being abused, used improperly? I don't think anybody's against us catching felons. I don't think anybody wants us to catch fewer felons. If there's a felon, the felony warrant, I don't want them driving in Saginaw. But how do we secure the data for innocent law-abiding citizens? How do we make sure that that's not abused, not given to the wrong agency? How do we know that that's not being done?

So the protocol is put in place by FWOC. I don't have that sitting right here in front of me, but the ASE 256 security protocol is a government protocol. It's from the minute the image is captured until it's uploaded into the government cloud, and then there's additional security features that take place when it's in the cloud. If you erase the key, it erases all access to the images and even the vendor can't get those images back. The manufacturer of the technology can't get the images back. It's not anywhere. It's deleted. It's gone. That's what they have in place. I am not an IT guy that can explain to you the specifics of the security. I can make that available. I thought I had it here in my notes. Let me go quick. See if I have anything on it. So it's part of the AWS. And it's their literature that they put out. So how do you know data is actually deleted? It goes into all the protocols. There's a couple of members on council that would understand that. I'll make this available to them if they wish to look at it. But it doesn't mean anything to me, because I don't understand IT stuff. But it goes into just a whole list of S3 deletion, how it works. Yeah, again, it's foreign to me when I read it.

It's great government. So how long do we, if somebody gets an image like today, somebody drives an image, how long is that image kept? How long is it maintained?

It's kept for 30 days. So it can be kept longer. If we do a search and it's part of a criminal case, we can tag that to be saved and it'll be saved for the criminal case, but it automatically deletes in 30 days.

All right, let's go down to this. Paul, you want to start with questions? Nope, I'm good. Nick?

Yeah. It is case law that they're looking at the public. From what I've seen and everything I've read and what I was concerned about to begin with way back when is the usage of it. Correct. And we've been bombarded the last few months as citizens of the United States, Texas, Saginaw, The bad actors and we always say you know it's not all not everybody, but there's a few bad we've seen it we've seen people arrested with it seen it on YouTube or people been arrested. They've had the hard lawyers to to fight. Certain things be accused somewhere they use this data. We've seen word like like we said. You know different different agencies looking at data with no reason and the police department or the city doesn't audit and they come back with you know why are these people looking at this you know you know and so that's the big concern and it is I absolutely agree it is a slippery slope I work in IT. I work in this stuff. I work in big, large data. And I actually work with AI a lot. And I see where it's going. And when you have large amounts of data, I can crunch it and I can start pulling things together that's pretty amazing. That's the concern. And my big concern is... What the sag and I'll have as safeguards to to ensure that this data is being treated right. Either internally within some inside and also. Things that I don't know. You, the assistant police chief, and someone else, they have admin rights, right? Is that what you said?

Yes. So the only people that can search Flock in our agency would be the administrative team, my sergeants, and my corporals. And the reason being is if I have a supervisor on scene where we have a vehicle description and we need to identify, try to identify a suspect, they have the ability to search that. My officers have read only. What that means is when a car comes into our city through Flock that has a hit associated with it. So this could be a warrant hit, could be stolen car, it could be child abduction. There's a number of crimes there that qualify. Another agency has entered that into Flock. the flock camera then tells us hey this car just came in and it's got this hit associated with it so officers can see that they can see the hit they can go start looking for the car but they cannot search anything on a car to try to identify where cars are going how they're traveling you have to be a supervisor in our agency in order to access that data okay good and then we do monthly audits and say we also have the ai assist tool so anything that's an anomaly that's going on The AI Assist tool, real quick.

So has it hit any anomalies? Has AI2 spit out any anomalies? And what do you all do with those anomalies when you get them?

So the AI Assist, I'm going to go through real quick what it looks at. So it looks for searches beyond the 30 day time frame. Unidentified user is running searches for the same plate outside the 30 day window. Multiple case numbers for the same plate. Single user plate search, where one user is the only person repeatedly searching for a particular plate. Exclusive external network search, so you have someone who's searching only outside networks, not our own. And then narrow time frames where the user is repeatedly searching for the same plate in very narrow repeated time windows. So that's what the AI assistant tool does. It starts catching any of these anomalies and the biggest one there is going to be I'm searching for a plate and I use a different case number every time. That plate number keeps coming up. It says, hey, you may not know about this one. You need to check on to it. As soon as it flags, it removes that officer's access from being able to search. And so when I say officer, I'm talking about supervisor for us. That thing gets flagged to my admin team. So Lieutenant, myself, and my assistant chief, we will review that and see what the circumstances are around it. Does it meet the requirements of flock? Is it related to a case? If so, we'll release that hold on that supervisor. Otherwise, it would be I'm not going to say prosecuted. It's going to be looked into as a potential policy violation, and if it became criminal, then it would be prosecuted. When you look at the issues with FLOC, when you talk about the abuse, it looks like roughly there's 10 agencies. I went to the Institute for Justice. They're tracking all this right now on their website. They've identified 10 agencies in Texas. Johnson County, Esso, Temple, Pugerville, Lufkin, Houston for two, Katy, Fort Bend County, Pasadena, Baytown, and Deer Park. Several officers have been terminated. There's a couple of officers that have been filed on for criminal aspects. I'm not sure what they were charged with. But in almost every one of these cases, it's an intimate partner or ex-intimate partner that's the victim. And so it's not like officers are going and searching for random people to see what they're doing. They have a tie back to the person. Not making it right, not trying to justify it by any means, but there's a tie back to this. It's not just random people that are all of a sudden falling victim to a rogue officer doing something. um so so you have some kind of connection back to the officer most of these are ex-spouses ex-girlfriends current girlfriends where are you going when you start talking about searches you know the same plate search in a narrow time frame so i want to know where where this person is going every tuesday between seven and eight see what cameras they're hitting. You're trying to figure out where your girlfriend might be heading. Is she heading this direction towards the mall where she said she was going or is she headed a different direction than where she should be going? I don't know where she's going because I don't track the end result there. When you talk about the misuse, that's how the majority of that stuff takes place. It's not just random officers picking a plate and saying, hey, we're going to start tracking this. The audit assistance tool, in addition to our monthly audits that we do, which we go in and we look for things that are out of place, plates that are being searched that don't have case numbers to them, things of that nature, The audit tool does the same thing. It just does it 800 times faster than what we can do it. So if we're missing anything, it's finding it. And so far, it's not found anything. Neither have we. We've not found any violations of our policies. uh and to answer the the question about multiple agencies out-of-state agencies searching your data with i go in and search a vehicle it's going to search everyone that i've shared my information with so it doesn't mean that illinois is searching saginaw texas i haven't shared with illinois but if illinois was searching And I had shared with them it would search my stuff. Doesn't mean they're looking for a car in my city. Just when they did the search, it's searching my information as well. So there's some explanations to that. But the only way that Illinois gets hold of Saginaw information is because I grant it. One of my administrators grants it. We're not granting that kind of information. If you're here in the state of Texas and you're relevant, I will probably share information with you. What we do share more often is what's called hot sheets. so the hot sheets are your warrants and things of that nature so when i put that stuff into flock i can share my hot sheet and so if my warrant shows up in humble texas they can make that arrest if it's a warrant that would warrant um I just lost my train of thought, sorry, would warrant extradition. If it wouldn't warrant extradition, then it's not something that we would share with them. So we have safeguards in place here in Saginaw. I can't speak to these other agencies. We weren't early in the game. Fort Worth got into this in 2020 when there was very little protocols out there, and so they're trying to play catch-up. By the time we come on the stage, there's already some pretty substantial protocols. There's best practices that are involved in it. Our policies meet best practices as far as the state goes. I think we do a pretty legitimate job of protecting our data and making sure that not just anybody can get to it, because I don't allow officers to search it. You have to be a supervisor of some type in order to search that information, and to me, that's the first step. Do I want 42 people accessing it, or do I want... 18 people accessing it and so that's that's how we've addressed that here in Saginaw.

Other questions?

Just one. So I know at least one HOA has also contracted with FLOC. And could you go into, does that mean that the HOA president has access to the FLOC cameras or?

be quite honest with you when it comes to the private entities i don't know what they can see they can only see their information but i don't know what they can see of their information most of those organizations they share that with their local police department that started early in the in the flock realm even before flock with some of the other vendors as a crime reduction effort. You advertise that at your front gates, you know, limited access coming into some of these subdivisions, you know, two or three access points. So you'd advertise that to keep criminals out because they knew that if you were coming in, your license plate was being read. They share that with us, but you do have to be a flock member in order to see anything. So if HOA has that, say, in Blue Mound, and Blue Mound doesn't have flock, Blue Mound can't see that data. Could that HOA share that information with us, being a close neighbor? Sure they could. But they would have to make that available to us. We can't just start seeing their information. We have to have an invitation.

So there's an HOA in Saginaw that does it? Okay, I didn't know. Sean?

You answered my question on that last one. Thank you.

Mary, go ahead.

I've been keeping myself informed about this subject and reading every article I can get my hands on. And a week or two ago, the CEO of Flock Systems, which is the name of the company, has put in three new guardrails, one of which is the 30-day is going down to seven days as of January 1st. So that company itself is putting in three really strict guardrails that will go into effect on January 7th to make that data less accessible and safer for all of us.

And just to clarify, so they are doing that as any new signer on a flock is limited to seven days unless they choose to do more. Those of us that are already on the system, we stay at 30 unless we elect to go fewer days. But even a new city could sign in and they could increase that to 30 days if they so choose. But the default will be seven days, just so everybody understands that. Yeah.

So what's the max? Is it 30 days of max you can keep it without?

Yeah, 30 days is max. If you haven't saved it as a criminal case within 30 days, you lose it all.

Oh, go ahead, sir.

And I would like to make one other point. And I preach this all the time about voting. And people don't understand. When they live in a city, local decisions affect their everyday lives. And this is a perfect example of an issue that is local. local decision was made for us to have these flock cameras so no matter what position you take on the issue you should understand anybody watching this if you don't vote this is an example of why you should and I'm not saying you should vote before or against flock cameras i'm saying please understand voting is so important at the local level we had 1500 voters last time we broke a record we have 15 000 registered voters that is not just a saginaw problem Almost all cities have very low voting. So I just want to use this opportunity to let people know how important it is that you make sure you're understanding what's going on in your city. You look at the agenda for every meeting. If that's something that you feel is important, like this particular issue, you educate yourself. You watch the meeting. You come to the meeting. You speak on the issue. And then you will be more educated, and you will make the right decision, and you will vote. And you will have the information you need to vote the way you should.

Todd, I have one more thing. We have a Citizens Police Academy here. I've gone through it. I encourage you all to go through it and learn what these people do day in and day out and about it and learn more about the flock cameras. I ran my plates. I had them on my plates. It came up with three hits in 30 days, two on Longhorn and one on Jacksboro Highway in Fort Worth, and that was it.

Um, so this, we've talked a lot tonight. I have a couple, I just want to circle back to one thing that Jackson said earlier, and I'm trying to remember exactly what you said, so correct me if I'm wrong. You said, would we be willing to do an audit, or what, what was your words exactly? Yeah, would you be willing to make a public, uh, Am I?

Okay.

And I would be willing to do that. How could we do that? What can we share with the public that would be to get some more, I guess, comfort. Comfort is the wrong word.

People can understand that we're trying to control this, and we are controlling it.

So what can we share with the public to show what our procedures are, what we're doing, and what we're not doing?

Yeah, we can make our policy public. I think we can probably identify the agencies. There's a transparency report associated with Flock that we can complete and make viewable to the public and then identify any agencies that we're sharing with. Probably be something good for us to go through just to see what all's there as well.

100%. Let's do that. Is there any reason why we can't say...

Here are the agencies that has looked at our information in the last 30-60 days. Like I say, Fort Worth has done it 10 times.

I'm sure we could, but if you search a vehicle, it searches all systems. It doesn't mean they're searching my information specifically. It just means that their search went through all the systems that they're attached to. So it doesn't mean they're necessarily searching my information.

So when they do a search, it searches the whole system for that ID?

I believe so, yes.

And then it comes back and says... This vehicle was last seen here.

Correct. The last camera location that it was seen at will be real quick. Brandon, is there anything I'm missing or misstated? I want to check with my folks over here that that are more involved with what I am. I will tell you, I have access to it, but I've never signed into it. I won't ever sign into it because that's not my level of investigation. I have other folks that do that, so they tell me that they've searched Flock, and that's good enough. But I've never been into it, so I can't tell you exactly what reports are there and what I can see. I wanted to check with them to make sure that I hadn't misstated anything.

And so the chief mentioned earlier about his command staff. And I think you're talking about yourself, assistant chief, and two lieutenants, right? That's correct. Yes. And they're all here tonight. They are. They're all here. They're people just like the rest of them. I do not have access. I cannot search this stuff. I don't know how. I don't want to know how. Council does not. We will not. There are some lines here. But how can we prove it to y'all? That's the question. I mean, because we can say this stuff great. How can I prove to you that we're trying to safeguard your data? Because I think everybody's going to agree, we want to catch the bad guys. That's our plea. We want to help our police catch bad guys. I really do. If you have a felony warrant, you have forfeited some of your privacy. I'm sorry. And I want to get you off the street. I want to get you into court. So that's what we're trying to do. This is really awful. Are we doing it 100% transparently, the right way? Maybe not. Maybe we can do it better. And I think that's a lot of what was said tonight. How do I know this is safe? How do I know you're not surveilling me? How do I know? We've got to do a better job proving that. How can we do that? I don't have good answers for all of it tonight. I have good answers for some of them. What I would like to do, I would like for y'all to give us some homework, and I would like to come back and discuss this again in maybe six weeks, two months, if that's time reasonable. And I'm looking at you because this was your idea at first. in two months and have this discussion again, and we can see what we provided, what we've gotten out there, and is it enough? Is it more? Should we do more? Is that some reason? Yes. Okay. And everybody else can say, hit me up offline if you have questions about this, because I don't have all the answers. Council doesn't have all the answers. We're trying to do our best here. To my knowledge, we have 24 cameras. I don't remember what we paid for. Somebody mentioned that earlier. Kim, do you know? I bet you know. It's $20,000. I know it's $20,000. What did we pay for those?

$67,500.

I knew Kim would have the answer. And is that annual or is that? Yeah. OK, that's what I thought. We're paying $67,500 a year for this town. So just to be transparent, those are your tax dollars. Our tax dollars we spent on that. So we have $20,000. We're not adding any. But I want to do this right. I want to do this fair and I want to be transparent. So let's let's take some actions offline and try to post some stuff. I'm going to put Pedro's team to get some more information out there. And let's come back in the first meeting in November and have this discussion again.

Is that we also get a representative? We can ask. Sure. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

I say I know that they're local, or at least they are local, so yeah. Okay, so let's first meet in November. I don't know what day that is. Let's first meet in November.

Let's reconvene this group. Let's talk about it again. We'll have some more information. It's November 3rd. November 3rd, okay.

And we've heard your concerns. I want to address them. I really do. But I also don't want to make Saginaw less safe, honestly. The big complaints I get from folks are crime and traffic. And unfortunately, that all goes through the PD, so I apologize. My police department friends, you have to. And again, don't blame the police for the flock cameras. This was us, and this was flock. So this is the tool the police are trying to use to catch bad guys. It really is. Come on up, please, so everybody can hear you. Yes, ma'am.

I've seen two videos this week.

One was police body cam, okay? They did a felony stop on this minivan. Because Flock said it was a homicide hit and run or something.

Can you turn the cameras or the microphone?

So they stopped this vehicle because Flock told them this vehicle was involved in a homicide hit and run. So I know, I've worked at a police department long enough to know what a felony stop looks like. If I get stopped on a felony stop and their guns are blazing, looking at me, screaming at me to get out of the car at 63, I'm probably going to have a heart attack. These people were terrified. Flock was wrong, or whatever agency. That's what I want to know. So when our police department gets a hit on Flock, I'm sorry, my voice is going out, gets a hit on Flock, what confirmation other than Flock do you do? Do you physically, like when there was a warrant on a car, you physically call that police department and say, hey, I got this car, this tag number, show somebody's got a warrant. Can you confirm this?

And so that is our policy. Flock is a tool. And so when we get there, Flock does not have access to any kind of driver data or Texas Department of Public Safety. So the first thing we do is we try to locate the car and we run the plate. The plate is run through a state system. So that's going to tell me who actually owns the vehicle, where it belongs, if there's any hits associated with that plate. So that's going to be the first verification. If that's not on there, then it's treated as a lower priority. It wouldn't be treated as a felony stop. my plate information is my solid information that's what comes through tlets if there's anything attached to that plate at the state level that's where it's going to be flock could be aired we know that that that can happen it could be a fat finger entry where it's supposed to be a t and it's an eye whatever the case again we're going to run the plate before we take any action at all so i found this particular video cam i'm sorry this particular video cam from this officer

They are doing their confirmations while they're pointing these guns at this family.

Correct. That's not our policy.

The flock information said this is a such-and-such color minivan. Damage here. And this is a redheaded woman driving it. Which was not the case. The van was different color. The woman didn't look anything like the suspect. And they were wrong. But the officers were talking to each other after they realized they pulled over the wrong car. And that officer says, why does this keep happening? This happens all the time. It doesn't get corrected in the flock system. And so these officers, they're used to doing this wrong.

Yeah, I can't answer for what you saw there with those officers. That's not been our experience. And so have we had an error before? Sure. But the first thing we do when we look at the vehicles, we run the plate. I don't react to a flock hit alone. So run the plate to verify what information I can. Then we make the traffic stop if the vehicle's in motion. So I already have that information on my computer, know what I'm looking at. And if things aren't adding up, then it's like, OK, we're going to approach this in a different manner. If any officer's on video camera saying this, why does this always happen? I would almost argue that's more of a cover up for something they realize that they messed up on and they're throwing verbiage into their video to make it look like it's someone else's fault because proper protocol is one, match your vehicle up. If the color's not right, the vehicle's not right, why are you taking any action on it at all? And so that would be my argument and that would be a training issue for officers in the state of our police departments across the state. They're really young. I mean, we've seen so many retirees. I mean, the officers are really young, so they're learning. Is this a learning issue, a teaching issue? I really don't know because I don't know what agency you're talking about, but I can tell you that's not how we do it. And that's the only thing I can attest to is how we're going to do it in Saginaw. And we've not encountered those kinds of issues.

Thank you.

Thank you, ma'am. Yes, ma'am. Right. Just to be clear, there's no facial recognition. It's running the plates. And when a police officer pulls you over, they run your plate. If you get pulled over for speeding, they run your plate.

You stop at a stoplight, they run your plate.

Potentially, yeah. Let's cut it off here. Let's reconvene in two months. We'll get back to you.

I just wanted to say thank you very much for taking this seriously. I do believe that y'all are the good guys and y'all are doing the right thing and y'all are doing the right thing addressing our concerns.

Let's try to prove that we're doing it right. We'll try to get back to that, I promise. All right, so we have an executive session at 8.46.

Second. Did you cast?

All right. Please cast your votes. And I think motion passes at 8.58. We're adjourned. Thank y'all.