City Council - Regular Meeting

Going to go ahead and call this meeting of the Whitefish City Council to order for Monday August 3rd 2026. Thanks for joining us in person. We're also joined by a few folks remotely via Zoom. With that said we'll start with our Pledge of Allegiance. Sir would you mind leading us tonight. Toby. Thank you very much, Toby. We'll move on to our communications from the public. We have no scheduled public hearings for this evening, but if you're here to speak on any item, now would be your opportunity. Otherwise, anything you'd like to bring to the attention of council, now would be your time and your name and address for the record, please.

Hello, everyone. For the record, Z418 East 2nd Street. I begin tonight by sending love to anyone who is blessed to have known the beautiful human who died by suicide this past weekend. Hugs to all of you. I'm often asked why I stand alone on the corner or the sidewalk with my signs, and do I actually believe that I will change anything? I always answer with a quote from activist A.J. Musty. Oh, I don't do it to change the country. I do it so the country won't change me. Which brings me to yesterday's front page feature in the Daily Interlake. Council members present, Mayor, please listen to Becker's words. Quote, I still have fear if I'm ever going to Whitefish That's when the fear is greatest. I'll be looking around to see what's going to happen. I close with a quote from Maya Angelou. When you know better, you do better. Thank you.

Thank you, Z. Further public comment this evening? Any volunteer board reports? Toby.

Toby Scott, Barclay Lane, Whitefish, the chairman of the Lakeshore Protection Committee. No real new news, but I'm continuing in my effort to take over jurisdiction of Whitefish Lake so that we have control over everything. And my latest effort is to meet with Brad Abel, one of the commissioners, and Eric Mack, who is the head of planning board down there at the county. And I know that Eric would be happy to turn it over because on two occasions at planning board meetings down there, I mentioned saying, hey, give it to Whitefish. We'll take care of the lakeshore, the entire lakeshore, not just the southern half of it. And he's, yes, you can have it. Unfortunately, he's not a counselor, so can't make that decision. But I'm hoping to speak with Brad Abel, and I'm taking along Mike Kopel. our Whitefish Lake Institute chairman, and also Dave Fern, our local senator, to just basically talk to him about, geez, maybe we can work something out, an interlocal agreement, and I know this has gone around and around before, but try and work it out, because we'd like to present it with the fact that Dave, Mike, and I have been, and we're still working on an amendment to the state laws regarding jurisdictions of cities on lakes. And that would, were it to pass, it would give us jurisdiction around the entire lake. So we're working on that. So it'll be... early January, February before that law would get presented before a committee and then hopefully the Senate and the floor and like that and possibly pass. But if it does pass, then the county doesn't have any choice. So that's where we're going, trying.

Thanks for continuing to push, Toby. I appreciate that. And just if I may back up for a second, I just want the record to reflect that Councillor Sweeney is excused, and Councillor Caltabiano is joining us remotely. Welcome, Giuseppe. Any communications from the council on volunteer boards? Not seeing any. You do have the consent agenda contained in the packet. I'd entertain a motion, please. Rebecca?

I move to approve the consent agenda.

Is there a second? Seconded by Councillor Quinnell further discussion. All those in favor please raise your hand. Those opposed like sign and that motion does carry unanimously. Michelle we have no public hearings scheduled for this evening so we'll move on to item 7 communications from our city attorney which will be resolution 26 dash 20 allowing the destruction of municipal records in accordance with state law. And this was postponed from our July 20th, 2026 meeting. Angela.

Good evening, mayor and council members. My staff report is on page 227 of your packet. Just a quick recap. Under state law, we're required to retain public records in accordance with schedule eight. It's the, we, oh, boy, sorry, I'm clearly tired. Section 754124 provides that upon written approval of city council and where applicable with permission of the local government records destruction subcommittee, city officer may destroy records that have met the retention periods set forth in Schedule 8. We have always complied to Schedule 8 as a city, or at least we've tried to. I think we've been much better about it, I'd say, in the last 20 years. But we just wanted to follow state law and kind of provide blanket authority for staff to get rid of records when they've met the retention in Schedule 8. Again it's something that we've been doing anyway. So I'm happy to answer any questions you might have. I know I had spoken with one of you about the possibility of providing for a longer retention period for electronic records which is kind of where our city has been moving over the past few years. I will point out that Schedule 8 are minimum retention periods. So if you wanted a longer one you could have a longer one. But I did speak with IT today and I think Chris is still back there. My under my understanding is that at present time we don't have capacity to keep electronic records for 10 years. There are some ways that he suggested complying with retention periods with result to technology that if you guys had questions I'm sure Chris would be happy to come out and explain those to you. But I will not get into the IT aspect of it because I would be in deep water for myself. But happy to answer any other questions you might have.

Thank you, Angie. Any questions for Angie on her staff report? We'll start with Ben.

Angie I apologize we've got kind of an echo in here so I didn't hear everything that you said as clearly as I would like. Did you say the electronic document retention you think that we have limitations on our ability to do that.

That is my understanding of our system yes. Ten years is a lot of documents that's a lot of space. Sure. It's a lot of storage and storage isn't free. And Chris's comment to me is that this time it's just not feasible for the system we have. We'd have to get more space. We'd have to make some adjustments.

Would something more modest like five years be workable?

I think Lainey just went to get Chris. Honestly, I wish I had a better grasp of the intricacies of what we do have and don't have, but I just don't.

Scott, we may have some questions for you if that's okay.

Excuse me, Chris.

Do you mind? It's quite all right. Do you mind approaching the podium just so you're on the record? Thanks, Chris.

Okay, good evening.

Good evening. There were questions on backup electronic storage from Councillor Davis and the city's limitations on that.

Okay, so currently we have documents stored in multiple locations, both locally and in the cloud. If we want to put the problem that we're running into right now is where some of the storage locations are locally are going to be sunset because of their age and we've got to move that documentation up into the cloud. We have approximately five terabytes of storage that we can use in the cloud before we have to pay for more storage. versus if we have to replace one of the servers we're looking at because we priced a server earlier this year for replacement. We're looking in the neighborhood of about $294,000 for a server with 10 terabytes of storage. So we decided that's a little too much money for the city to be paying and we can stretch $294,000 over numerous years and have a lot more cloud storage. So we're going to be looking at moving those documents up into the cloud. As part of that we do have the ability with the cloud storage to use Microsoft's Purview which allows us to classify the documents and then set retention schedules. So essentially once a document's been classified and it can be either automatically classified based on the type of text in the document or the employee can classify it when they go to store it and save it. But they can, the document will then get a retention schedule applied to it however we set those retention schedules. And then once that retention schedule reaches its end of its retention, the user gets typically a 30-day notice that that document's going to be deleted in 30 days. That gives them a chance to either say, well, wait a minute, I still need to keep this document or do nothing. And in 30 days, it's automatically gone. So it allows us to handle the retention schedules without having to have a whole lot of user input and constantly having to look at documents and say, okay, have we saved this or not? Do we need to keep it or not keep it? And that would apply across the board, whether it's in somebody's personal folders, OneDrive folders, or if it's in a shared SharePoint storage location. And that's what I've been looking at as our most reasonable thing that we can do because of cost. We can thank AI for the cost that we're seeing because the cost is going up exponentially every month and most of the contractors now that we purchase from actually have warnings that they send to us saying that until the actual product ships we are subject to paying whatever the value of that device is if it goes up in price before shipping. So the cost because of AI data centers is really driving everything that we're doing right now. So that's kind of what we're looking at doing for our document storage. And we have a wide variety of storage needs because police, They have a different retention schedule than the rest of the city in a way because if it's anything that's related to like felony case, murder case, felony DUI, it's a retain it forever. And so we have to take those kinds of things into account. If it's something with fire and it's related to one of those, then fire's documents become retained forever. Same thing for legal, if it's anything related to a case like that, it gets retained forever. And then we have the standard one year, two year, three, five, ten types of recensions. And we can set all of that to be automated for the most part. There'll be some documents that'll have to be manually classified so that they'll catch the right retention schedule. for the most part we can have that all done automated.

Please. Sorry to drag you out of the back room there. No, no worries. If we were to say that we would retain electronic records of the city for a minimum of five years, would that cause significant impact to operations or costs?

It would in a way because if we had documents that only needed to be retained for a year or two, now we're having to retain them for five. And so we're keeping those documents. And at the same time, we're still building more documents. And so the thing is we're... getting more documents exponentially than we're getting rid of so you know say this year we may get we may have a total of a terabyte worth of documents that we save next year it's more it's more likely going to be a terabyte and a half of documents that we're going to store on top of that one terabyte that we have so it's going to be continuously growing and if we're keeping documents that we don't need to keep um, then we're using up storage space that we don't. Another thing that, um, we have to be cautious and careful about is, um, duplication of documents. Um, because that's another problem that we run into is that, you know, One document could be living in five or ten different places depending on how many employees and city council members, you know, got that document and it's being saved in all those different locations. With Microsoft Purview, it actually goes through and it says, oh, I see that there's ten copies of this document. I'm going to get rid of nine of them because it's unnecessary and it keeps the one. And that way we're not keeping all of that extra data and we're actually kind of cutting down what we're saving, what we're trying to save. If we do it just as kind of a blanket save then we're still going to have 10 documents. And you can imagine as we go along and more homes are built and more documentation is sent around and stuff. um or public works you know documents or whatever documents that may be um it's just going to keep on growing and it's it's something that if we don't stay on top of it we we can get out of control really fast

Are you presently purging electronic documents according to some schedule?

No, we are not. It's, right now it is left up to the individual employee and they, we do, I do try to send out like an email, been trying to like once a year to send out an email letting employees know that if they do have to delete documents or need, are trying to purge documents, that they need to check with Michelle, our city clerk, first to make sure that they're within the retention schedules because there are different, depending on the type of document, depends on how long it has to have been kept. In a lot of cases, they're purging documents that are well past needing to be purged. And that's another thing that we're running into is we have a lot of documents that we probably can purge. Unfortunately, I have no idea. You know, IT can help get it all set up, but, you know, I don't know, you know, what documents need to be kept depending on which department. That's something where we need to get... And another reason why looking at the purview is because... that way we can actually set those schedules up and say you know this type of document is only kept for two years or how many ever years it is and then let that system notify us that it's reached that retention period and it's time for it to go thank you additional questions for chris mr mayor may i yes please

Chris, thank you. Just for me to understand the different media where you're managing to juggle all of this. As a simple example, all the minutes of our meetings that are transcribed as well as kept on YouTube, in that amount of money that you cited, are we paying YouTube, which means Google, An amount of money for keeping all our minutes uploaded there. Is that part of the so-and-so cloud that you're referring to? I know there are different media, but just as an example.

No, for YouTube currently it's free still. That could change at any time and I would expect that it probably will change because a lot of things have been changing. A lot of the companies like Google, Apple have been either reducing the amount of storage that they allow that's for free storage or they're letting the customer know that they have 90 days to sign up for one of their new paid plans, and then the customers are having to sign up for paid plans to keep those things stored. So at some point in time, that free storage is going to go away, and we're going to have to pay for that, but that's separate from what we do. Like the... Zoom meetings that we have and the transcriptions from these Zoom meetings, those Zoom, because we have a few licenses, they allow the licensee a certain amount of storage and about every two months I go in and I grab those videos and transcripts and I move them into SharePoint. and then delete it off of Zoom so that we can continue to keep the recordings up, new recordings coming into Zoom. The last thing we want to have happen is fill up that free recording, and then we don't record a meeting, which is one thing we don't want to have happen.

Thank you. Thank you, Chris. Mr. Mayor, I have questions for Angie. So I'll let the others ask more questions to Chris, and I'll stand down until I can ask Angie, please.

Please go ahead.

Okay. Angie, just as a point of clarification, the state is not saying we shall destroy. The state is saying to us we may destroy. And hence, the resolution is saying we would like to have the latitude to to destroy records accordingly to different schedules without having to go through council every time but it's not to comply to a state requirement to destroy record it's actually because we're having the freedom to do that am i correct in understanding it this way

Yes, you're absolutely correct. The schedule, like I said, they're minimums. Like you have to retain them for a minimum. If we wanted to retain every piece of paper in the city for time out of hand, we could. So it's just allowing us the latitude of being able to comply with the schedule and not having to present all the documents we want to destroy to you folks every time we want to PERD SOMETHING THAT'S OLD AND NOT NEEDED ANYMORE. YOU'RE EXACTLY RIGHT.

THANK YOU, ANGIE. AND FOLLOWING UP, I TRIED TO FIGURE OUT SCHEDULE 8. AM I CORRECT THAT SCHEDULE 8 ALSO TALKS ABOUT KEEPING PERMANENT RECORDS? AS AN EXAMPLE, THE COUNCIL MEETINGS, COMPREHENSIVE PLANS, COMMISSION REPORTS AND SO ON. IS THAT CORRECT?

That is correct. So schedule eight separates retention schedules by department almost. Fire, police, administration, planning and building, engineering. So yeah, that is exactly how it works. I guess the only thing I'd add is if a record is not on Schedule 8, it's up to the subcommittee to determine what or how long something should be retained. But Schedule 8 is 133 pages. That's pretty comprehensive. There's not much that's not on it.

perfect so uh just uh for my uh peace of mind and maybe for the record maybe a suggestion is that uh i'm all in favor of the resolution as it is but how about considering i'm asking you if it would make sense that could be an amendment to the motion later uh considering for the staff TO PROVIDE AN ANNUAL REPORT THAT LISTS THE CATEGORIES OF RECORDS TO BE DESTROYED OR DESTROYED UNDER VARIOUS AUTHORITIES, LIKE A TABLE, AND NOT THAT THE COUNCIL HAS TO APPROVE IT, BUT ANNUALLY THE COUNCIL CAN LOOK AT IT AND LEARN HOW THIS IS GOING.

YEAH, I THINK WE COULD DO THAT. YEAH, I THINK WE COULD. JOSEPHIE, TO YOUR POINT EARLIER, IF YOU GUYS WOULD FEEL MORE COMFORTABLE, having section one of the resolution read the city clerk or designee shall and change that to may destroy public records in accordance with the Montana local government records subcommittee schedule eight. I mean, I'd be amenable to that too.

That might clarify. That's your legalist call. You do your job, I'm not gonna do your job. So you decide which verb and mode applies best. I was just trying to clarify that the state is not telling us to destroy certain things that the state is telling us we may do with certain latitude.

Correct, yep, they're just minimum retention periods.

Thanks, Giuseppe. Rebecca.

I just wanted to ask Chris and Angie one thing. For the public that doesn't know Chris, he's our IT director. He's usually behind the scenes. Does a great job. So currently, though, we don't have the Microsoft Purview thing. We don't have a subscription to them.

We don't. We have it. It's actually licensed per individual, the way the licensing goes. And then there's some other licensing as far as like our SharePoint, the way that we have our SharePoint licensed. So the only employees right now that aren't covered are like our, what they call our frontline workers, which are like the firefighters, the public workshop street crews, which... You know, they get emails, but they're really not people that, you know, are creating documents, reading a lot of documents involved and stuff. So not really worried about those folks. But the folks that matter, you know, everybody in City Hall, all of the police department, all of the administrative fire department, part side of fire, you know, everybody's covered under the licensing. the what we need to be able to do is get that get it set up and it's it's a little bit of a tedious process getting it set up and which is where Each department is going to have to kind of help set up what they want for their department But once it's set up it pretty much and we get all the policies in place. It pretty much will run itself and

And is that costly per year? Because it sounds like you can keep expanding.

Right. We would. As we grow in documents, we will have to buy more storage. That's just going to be a given. But it's not going to be anywhere near as much of what we would be as if we were buying a server to have on site. So, you know, there is some cost effectiveness there in that essentially what we would spend on a server for onsite we probably will get close to 10 years out of just paying Microsoft for storage. The other thing that we have to look at also and it's just a matter of practice for security in case something happens is while people have their documents and if you're familiar with OneDrive you can keep a copy local on your computer and you've got a copy up in the cloud. and that's all great but it's not backed up anywhere technically it's not backed up anywhere so we will have to actually also back up this data at least in one other location than where microsoft's going to store it so that's going to be an additional cost for the backup and that's kind of regardless of whether we're doing it on-site or doing it through microsoft we it's Just as cybersecurity, we need to have it stored in more than one location so that if somebody did hack in and destroy or lock the data up where we couldn't get into it, we've got an alternate location and we can essentially not have to worry about paying ransom and just go get the backup copy and get back up and going.

Chris, thanks very much.

I would entertain a motion. Steve? I'd like to make a motion to approve resolution number 26-20, I believe. Resolution allowing the destruction of municipal records in accordance with state law with the addition of changing section one, the word shall, to may.

Is there a second to the motion? Seconded by Councilor Furey. Further discussion? Ben?

I'd like to offer a friendly amendment. I feel somewhat uncomfortable with... Can you make the amendment first, please, Ben? Oh, yeah, fair enough. I would amend to state that the electronic records of the city shall be retained for a minimum of five years. Okay.

We will vote on the friendly amendment to retain city records electronically for five years. Is there. Can I speak to it? Yes please.

I feel somewhat uncomfortable with I guess The time frames that are in here are minimums, and some of them are very short. And I would point out that there are a lot of items in here that could be subject to litigation or other issues that are very much within the time frames you would commonly see such litigation. I think in today's day and age, I feel like a more comprehensive or different schedule could be considered for retaining electronic documents that allowed them to be retain for a longer period of time. I certainly understand the complexities of this. I'm not trying to make this some big expensive project. And maybe the answer is that at some point staff might come back with a more comprehensive view of how we would retain electronic documents in the future, but that we don't just start deleting things until we do. So anyway, so my feeling was I would I would like to see us retain electronic documents for a longer period of time and This is a very simple way of doing that and perhaps we could have a more comprehensive policy at some future date. I

Further discussion on the amendment.

I can add one note to that, and that is we already do this with email, is we do litigation holds. So if I get a FOIA request from Angie that's looking up something that's related to litigation, I automatically put a litigation hold on that person's email account. We can do the same thing with any document that's related to the litigation. We can actually put a litigation hold on it, and it's essentially held forever until that litigation hold is taken off. So that's essentially how we save documents from being deleted, as long as we're, say, within the five-year limit or whatever, if we go past and it's been deleted. There's still a few ways that we might be able to find a document, but as long as we're inside the retention period, we can always throw a litigation hold on it and keep it forever.

I'm going to go ahead and call the question on the friendly amendment.

All those in favor, please raise your hand.

Please raise your hand again, Sargos. Those opposed, like sign. And that motion does fail on a three to two vote, which brings us back to the original motion for approval of resolution 26-20. All those in favor, please raise your hand. Those opposed, like signed. And that motion does carry on a four to one vote with Councilor Davis voting in opposition. Thank you, Chris. We'll move on to communications from our city manager. You have Dana's report enclosed with the packet. Any questions for Dana on her manager's report? Not seeing any. Dana, anything additional to report on?

I think I'm just gonna touch real quick. John Mayer and Fire Chief Cole Hadley and I did have a little bit of communication over the weekend just given the fire smoke and the situation that occurred in Spokane. Wanted to just reassure you guys that When fire restrictions are needed, you've authorized our fire chief to do so. He can put an order into effect, and then an ordinance will come to you the following council meeting. It's likely that we'll probably be going into stage one restrictions sometime here in the near future, just given our conditions. So just wanted to remind you that we have that authorization, or our fire chief does, so that we are being proactive in protecting our community also on wildfire our CWPP is out for public review I'm just gonna say it loudly for those online we've extended the comment period through until August 9th it was gonna be due today but we decided to extend it a week it's a very long document so making sure people had adequate time to go through it we felt was very important but with that that's all I have for this evening Thank You Dana

On that note, we will move to communications from the city council. We'll start with what will be resolution 20-21, a resolution establishing annual goals for the city. I think we've discussed this at several, 26-21. I would entertain a motion, please.

Steve. I'll move to adopt resolution 26-21 resolution establishing annual city goals. Is there a second to the motion?

Seconded by Councillor Norton. All those in favor please raise your hand. Those opposed like sign and that motion does carry unanimously. Michelle. Thank you Steve. We will move on to item 9b which is to provide direction regarding construction of the second fire station north of the baker avenue viaduct which is a continuation of our work session from two weeks ago i'll entertain discussion or dana

In the packet, thank you, Merritt, in the packet, Fire Chief Hadley and I both worked on a memo together, again, just to provide an update from the memo that we had provided during, and report that we provided during the work session. We did hear some concerns during that work session regarding the need for 12 additional firefighters and paramedics, which was a 66% increase in our total staffing level for our fire department. I'm very thankful to both Chief Hadley and Deputy Fire Chief Peterson. They did some more operational analysis and looked at how we could utilize staffing between our current station and what would be our future second fire station, Station 23, and looked at options of only staffing it during the day versus 24 hours, and what they found actually was very interesting given accommodations needed for vacation, sick leave, training, Kelly days and other types of leave. There's only a very small savings by moving to a daytime only shift. The savings would be minimal because of the leave required But also being able to use the staffing at the other station so One of the the notes that we had you know if we just did daytime shift from April 24th to July 23rd 58% of the calls were between 7 a.m. And 7 p.m. And 42% were between the hours of 7 p.m. And 7 a.m. so Our calls occur pretty much 24-7, a little more than half during the day, but almost half during the evening. So originally, the staffing idea was 15 firefighters. We knew that was very expensive. We looked at, well, could we do it with 12? Again, we analyzed that further, or I should say they did. I didn't do that work, thanks to them. And they came up with nine firefighters that if we hired nine firefighters, we could maintain a daily minimum staffing level of seven personnel between the two stations, four assigned to our current station and three assigned to station what would be 23. And this would still allow an engine or an ambulance to remain in service at each station. And then it just depends on call volume and the ability of staff to staff other apparatus. But the primary difference on how these staffing resources could be utilized between a daytime only and a 24-7 really comes down to the coverage with using the other fire station and what we currently have staffed there. So big picture takeaway, to just run a daytime shift at the current station, you're looking at eight additional firefighters. To run it 24 hours, seven days a week, you're looking at nine firefighters. That costs, we've been estimating $140,000, but the number of hours that you actually benefit from that is 4,380 hours, all those overnight hours during the year. So that is something that we wanted to show you and demonstrate in this updated staff report. We did include the former staff report. And what I did to kind of help the discussion was to, oh and I should first before I move on. So the estimate of what we need of 1.95 million to the 2.25 million for 12 firefighters and other costs for the facility, it's with the updated nine personnel, it would be one and a half million to 1.65 million if it's completed in the next few years. We do have enough carryover mills, or at least we did at the time. Again, I have to look at the budget, but we should have enough carryover mills to accommodate that increase. But again, we feel strongly this is a voted levy type of question when it's a significant increase like this. But to help your discussion tonight, we did include some questions for you to consider. One, should staff take this project to the next step of developing an agreement with Iron Horse HOA and the golf club? What staffing levels are appropriate? Is the city council willing to work on a ballot initiative for this project? Are there specific items or asks of the project that are desired or not of interest? And I think the HOA shared some of those ideas with you at the work session. Scott Sandrud is here. If you have any questions, I'm sure he'd be happy to answer them if you do come up with questions during your discussion.

Thank you, Dana. Scott, thanks for coming this evening.

We'll start with council. Any questions for Dana on her staff report?

Andy. Obviously funding is the issue on our side for the personnel And the suggestion of going out to a voted levy I think is a good one all like you say we could potentially start building some funds with carryover mills to help us out in that direction, but if we do go with a Levy when would we do that i mean that's a tricky part obviously because if we're going to get land donated it's also predicated on our ability to fund it and it's truly chicken and egg kind of situation but would we go out to a voted levy soon with it to begin in two years or three years when the station was actually completed or that part i don't quite understand

That's a really good question. So I think as long as you give us the yes, we're willing to do that, I think we need to get through the part of negotiating an agreement with Iron Horse and then we can schedule that all out. I don't know if they're getting pledges, do they want to see us have the voter approval first? We haven't gotten to those discussions, to be honest. I think the earliest we could do it and would want to do it is probably in the fall next year, otherwise we are paying for a special election. which we could do, but sometimes it's nice to do them all in one and save taxpayers $10,000 to $14,000 of costs to mail out ballots. But I would say the earliest would be next fall that we would be able to do a voted levy, just given staff projects that we're working on and everything. Again, though, we would want to pass the levy you can pass the levy and have it start, I think, at a different date, or if you do start it early, it will help accommodate, because remember, we can only do a voted levy based on a dollar amount now, and not based on mills, and you can do, I think, I believe, I have to research this a little bit more, I believe you can still do an inflationary increase to it and have that tied to it, but I'm not certain, just because the laws recently changed at the last session, and we haven't done a voted levy, But I will look into that more. But really what we're looking for direction is like should we move forward with that process here knowing that we'll have to have the firefighters staffed. We do want them hired before the station opens because there's quite a bit of training that needs to happen. It's great to have our firefighters that are here be able to spend the time get them through their different workbooks that they need to do so that when we do decide where to staff them they're really interchangeable that they're all experienced. And hiring and I don't know Cole might might have some information on this, but hiring nine firefighters, paramedics, what's the pool of applicants that we could actually get with the cost of living here too? So we definitely wanna have this plan, the voted levy done before the station's built so that we can have that onboarding process and hiring occur.

Steve. Can you just, there's a couple questions I have here. Number one, is it nine new firefighters we're hiring or nine we're going to have on call or working at the time?

No, so it would be nine new firefighters that we would have to hire and we would have four assigned to the new station. Right now we have six assigned to our current station. We would change that and assign five to our current station and then we would assign four to the new station. So we'd have nine on it any time in the city. but we would actually need nine new firefighters also. Seven minimum staffing. So minimum staffing's interesting. What it is is in the contracts with our union, we say we want a minimum of four people here at a time. We cannot go below four. You can't all take vacation today. We have to service the community. If it goes to below four, they have to fill that position with one of their members. If none of them want to fill it, then it's the lowest seniority on the last shift, am I right?

So then they have to backfill it. Do we have an overcrowding problem at the current fire station that we need to have only five people there, or are we not utilizing our current fire station adequately if we go backwards to only five there at a time?

We have room for up to nine in that station right now. But the reason for adding the second station is more about resource placement and servicing both sides of the city and not just having all resources come from the same location. Because now you're adding extra travel time that is unnecessary if we could have a station built in that area, especially with partnering with the group like Iron Horse, the golf club and the HOA who are willing to donate the land and donate the funds or help us raise the funds. Sure, I understand.

To build that station. I get that part of it. It just strikes me as weird that we're currently underutilizing our station that we have that can hold up to nine firefighters, and now we want to build another station and reduce our current... our current on-duty firefighters at the current station just so we can spread them out at the cost to, at the tune of one and a half million dollars roughly to the taxpayers. And that kind of, so I have some heartburn over that. The other thing that I would like to have a little more information on, and I'm sorry that I wasn't here at the last meeting, but why wouldn't this, I mean this seems like a perfect opportunity for an SID. that this doesn't need to be spread across the whole entire city of Whitefish?

Yep. So the SIDs are usually utilized for capital projects. So we could purchase land, build a station with an SID. It is not something that you would use for operations. So the firefighters themselves would typically not come from an SID. It's a 20-year, usually an SID is 20 years that you usually have a bond to build the capital. With the proposal that we have right now, the capital, the land, would be no cost to the city, so it would be the operational side that we have to address, and that would be through a levy of some type. You could do a special assessment, You could identify that area. The problem is the firefighters themselves, regardless of where they are stationed, are increasing capacity for everybody in the city. So let's say that there is a wreck on Highway 40 and 93 at this intersection down there. we have typically, we currently have a four firefighter minimum. Say we have four firefighters on, they're there. By adding another staff of three minimum, all of a sudden we have firefighters that are, even though they're north of the viaduct, say there's an accident at Safeway, they can still respond. So you're still increasing capacity from the operation standpoint with the number of people. The station itself makes sense for an SID, but the operations don't, just because they're located on the, north side of town instead of south side of town, we still have the increased capacity of servicing every call.

I get that. By having nine firefighters on at any one time, we could do that with our current capacity if we chose to go out and say, hey, we definitely need more firefighters active on duty. It's hard for me to accept that we need to build this just because one community group is coming in and saying, hey, we're going to give you the land and we're going to do it right now, we're going to do it right here. And then the cost, the long-term cost of that million and a half dollars a year, year over year, gets put on everybody. And that isn't, I mean, when we could, if we needed that capacity, we could get to nine at our current station. And that's the part that doesn't, it's just not quite computing. And I understand spreading the resources and having them more spread out, but at what cost to the community do we need to do that? That's my question.

I mean, I think it's a valid question and concern. I think from what our perspective is is we've been assessing impact fees for a second fire station. You have 10 years to build it. This was an opportunity that came forward to us as staff. We were approached by Scott and his team because we're gonna have to find land anyways and we really have to build it or we're refunding all of the impact fees. And that's fine if that's the decision that council doesn't want to proceed with a second fire station. Your growth policy calls for it. All of your planning documents in the first staff report, all the planning documents call for another fire station. staff was taking those policy documents that were adopted by council as we need to find a second fire station property north of the viaduct is very limited and for ideal location this did become the ideal location being on east lake shore can the impact fees pay for the operations or can they only pay for the building and it sounds like the building and the

capital is being offered by iron horse.

They will, we will be, it's going to be a contribution where we do contribute the impact fees that we have, uh, because you know, they're going to be in the end. Um, Scott can probably share it more of this. It's not just iron horse that is hopefully going to be fundraising for this. Um, you have Northwoods, which is in the county that will be able to have a better service from us, but you know, we couldn't levy them. They aren't in sea limits. but this way they have a buy-in to the station because now they're within five road miles. You've got places up all around that area that are in the county that can actually contribute to it now that won't contribute otherwise. We cannot contribute to the capital that they're at least getting.

So they're getting a service. They pay a little bit up front for the capital and then they get the service at the cost of the city taxpayers.

Right, because everywhere in the fire service area currently does that. And these places are in the fire service area that I'm talking about. So they're already getting a cheaper cost service. So they are paying for service right now. Is it equitable? We've been talking about that for a long time. They are paying for service right now. Yes, they wouldn't be paying for the increased capacity. but they would at least have some buy-in to the station that would go there. Again, you know, it's...

There's nothing that can force them to offer up for this. This is all based on donations from them. The idea that they'll donate to it.

Correct. No, it is. And it's definitely predicated on the donations of the land and the building value, other than the impact fees amount that we would contribute. If we were to do this on our own, we'd be facing $7 million. I mean, a minimum, probably. And we'll probably collect a million of maybe... two million of that over 10 years, depends on the building market. We're gonna have to come up with the money somehow, so then your taxpayers are paying for a station or we're refunding it to developers, which you could do, but again, you're gonna have to change a lot of policy plans that you have in place. The only reason that we've been working on this and felt pretty strong about that we were headed in the right direction was because of those documents, and I would just say that that's really important that You know, staff is taking direction from these documents that are adopted, and so if it's just now is not the time, that's okay to say, but I think we have to be realistic that there is gonna be a time in the future that this does become a question of council. Staffing has definitely been, we did increase from five per shift to six per shift over a two, three year period, about three years ago, maybe? Almost four. Four years ago, my gosh, it's been so long, huh. Four years ago, we did increase to six per shift, That helped us with overtime costs because we are actually our overtime has gone down because of adding staffing Increasing staffing will help us call as we mentioned at the work session I think we now have what is it 24 days a year essentially if you calculate it out Yeah, we were I didn't look at it this morning, but we were just under 11 days so far this year where we had zero emergency response available and

AND THAT BASICALLY THE HALFWAY POINT THROUGH THE YEAR, WE'RE COMING UP ON LIKELY 20 DAYS THIS YEAR WHERE WE'LL HAVE ZERO RESPONSE AVAILABLE.

AND THAT'S 24 HOURS A DAY.

THANK YOU.

APPRECIATE YOUR TIME. LET'S START WITH REBECCA. JOSEPHIE, I'M SORRY.

I CAN WAIT. AS LONG AS YOU CAN HEAR ME, I CAN WAIT.

GO AHEAD, PLEASE.

OKAY. THANK YOU. Here is, have we, I have a number of questions, Dana and Council. Have we put into the big picture what we're doing or we will be doing with the fire station on Big Mountain?

So we've considered that this is a good response to most of Big Mountain. However, I will say that the Big Mountain Fire District, they lease their building. It is not owned by them. It is the, I believe it's the resorts building. You're sitting here, you know, okay. Yep, and so they do lease that building. I know there's a strong sense that that be a staff station if we were to annex. And I think that there's still a lot of negotiations that would have to occur with that. Having a station at the top and toward the bottom, I mean, isn't necessarily, I think, a issue. I think you could utilize staffing between both those stations at that point when that occurs and if that occurs. But we have looked at it in that it does service almost all of the southern, there's very small amount up at the top that that wouldn't actually reach as well.

My concern is really the operating costs here dwarf the building. Giuseppe, we can't hear you.

If you just mind speaking up just a hair.

Hold on, let me see if I can do this. One second. Can you hear me better now?

A little bit.

Oh, that's so weird. I wonder, Chris or Jake, if you can increase my audio volume. I'm pretty yelling. My neighbors in the hotel room will learn everything about fire in Whitefish. So what I was saying is the operating costs dwarf the building. And we all know there is a larger business case here because homeowner insurances are going skyrocketing. And there is a meaningful case where certain HOAs find a breakeven between how much or if even they're feasible, their home owner insurance is going to cost versus investing in what I would call community fire station. So I have a number of questions, and I think they're more directed at timing and the anxiety of trying to make a decision without seeing the whole picture for the next 20 or 30 years. So for instance, Big Mountain. Something is going to happen to Big Mountain, and they are planning, they put the resort tax dedicated to the operating cost of their fire station. I do not know what percentage, but it's the lion's share of the percentage of their resort tax. So we will have, the community will have a fire station own or do not own the building. We will have a fire station up there on Big Mountain and it's stuffed somehow. We already have a fire station where we have it in Whitefish. And I hear we have a concern because sometimes it's understaffed. So we should look at that. And then we have a couple of communities. One is the Homestead. One is Iron Horse. And we'll have more who will come to us and say, we'll build the station. You have the training capabilities. You have the staffing capabilities. You have the money to pay for the operational costs. The issue here is that the moment we commit to 12, in my staff report there were 12 firefighters, now there are nine, okay, to nine more firefighters, that's $1.4 million a year that we're committing the community to. I would ask a negotiation question. I would say, how about the city pays back Iron Horse for the land and the building, and Iron Horse pledges to fund the operating costs for the next 20 years. Because we could do that, too. We have impact fees, money that we can use to to pay back Iron Horse for a gentle fair market price of the land, build the station, and the city would be donating the station, and the HOAs would be pledging for the next 20 years of operating costs. How about that? My concern is that this is a great opportunity, but I am anxious about having the opportunity pulling our plans. It's like the tail wagging the dog rather than the other way around. So I'm all for a station. I'm all for safety. I'm concerned about timing and concerned about where it fits in the bigger picture, evacuation routes. We need to still address evacuation routes from the western part of the lake, from Big Mountain. Where is the big picture? I know that four years ago we had a fire station master plan, but I don't think it's been updated with all these opportunities. Again, sometimes an opportunity becomes the biggest drain of financial funds. I remember when they gifted my daughter a horse, and I don't even want to go there. So I'm not yelling. I'm keeping my volume out high because you asked me to. For now, I stop.

Thanks, Giuseppe. I'll just comment to remind everyone that a voted levy, Iron Horse, at least in the past, and I don't know what it is now, made up 35% of our tax base. So not only are they going to donate the building, they are paying a significant portion of that voted levy. and they recognize that, that they're gonna still pay for staffing, not just the station. So do keep that in mind. We could probably do a calculation, we could try to figure out what the percentage they are of our tax base, but I assume there's still a pretty high share of our tax base as they were. Is it bigger than that? Yeah, it might have been closer to 40%. Yeah, with just the values and the tax rates that they have, especially up there with the second homes that they have now for tax rates, it's significant up there. So they are paying a significant portion of that too. They aren't out. They're not not paying for the operating.

They'd be paying just like at a higher rate probably than others I've got two one is I

Could you just help me understand a little bit why the difference between option one and option two is only one firefighter? Like how come it's not like half?

So for a 12-hour day shift, you're going to need two crews of firefighters because you need to go seven days a week. In order to have staffing to be able to actually respond in a fire engine and be able to respond in an ambulance, you need a minimum of three firefighters there each day. It takes two crews to cover all seven days at a 12-hour shift, so that ends up being eight firefighters. Four staffed for each shift with a minimum of three each day.

Each shift is eight hours, so... Twelve. Okay.

Is what we were proposing. If we were to do a day shift, it would be a 12-hour shift.

I see.

Okay.

Um and my second question to Dana is I know one of our other council goals here is a potentially voted levy for emergency services that would encompass in my understanding um essentially a permanent funding for capital replacements of trucks and things and given that this proposal would presumably come with even more trucks and things in the future would it be worth considering combining the voted levy for the capital replacements along with these firefighters to have one encompassing emergency services living

Yes, I think that's exactly what we would do, would combine it into one emergency services levy. I honestly think that it might be at a point where as we do that analysis, we also look at our police department that is property tax supported. We replace a vehicle every year and that's $75,000 and every year it goes up because an outfitted police car is not just your normal Port Explorer or Dodge Durango, because we're switching.

And so I think it would be good to look at it holistically from an emergency services standpoint and public safety loving sure and given that the future changes in the Legislature is that that's generally a good way to do things, right?

Seems like the most effective way and the way that the state really wants us to do things is to be Transparent and go to the voters directly and ask them the question Rebecca

So this is probably a really dumb question but the area surrounding this site that's outside the city limits is the Whitefish service area correct.

With the exception of Big Mountain Fire District it is fire service area that's outside city limits.

OK. I just was just thinking about how underfunded that is. I am really gung ho on getting this done. I think the faster we get it done the better. So I I'm even OK with using mill levies for it if it's going to take us a long time to get a levy passed. I think it's an incredible gift from Iron Horse to the community to offer us this land and their fundraising capabilities and As Dana said it's in at least five plans because it's also in the Wisconsin Avenue corridor plan and I just don't really want to delay too much on it. I am very much in favor of it. DIRECTOR DEWOLF.

Thanks Rebecca. Scott would you like to add anything or did Andy do you have any questions.

Thanks Scott. Dana addressed these really well, but I just wrote down a couple of things. Steve, to your question, we don't want it to be called the Iron Horse Fire Station. It's to serve north of the viaduct, and we have challenges out there. When that fire happened right at the viaduct, had that been a terrain situation or shut down the viaduct, we're all stranded. And Big Mountain does its best fire to back things up when they can, but that's not very often. So I'm sorry, I'm going to get emotional. I had a very serious accident on Big Mountain two years ago, and I couldn't get an ambulance. And I was deemed non-life-threatening, non-critical. But when you have a shattered shoulder and a ruptured Achilles and you're laying there for three and a half, four hours and you can't get transport, it's not a lot of fun. So there's a medical aspect to this as much as fire. People are focused on fire because we see smoke. I'm not the only one. We've had other incidents where we've been at people's homes where there's been a medical incident. on Wisconsin Avenue and they were able to get service, but it took 20 to 30 minutes. So this was a heart condition and that's not very feasible either. Getting through town, even as good as Cole's drivers are, is very difficult when we're busy, winter and summer. And I watch these trucks and ambulances try to get through town and it's really tough. So the moving of the fire station to the new facility, adding that mile plus, it's a big deal. It's a big deal for response times. I didn't hear response times come up at all tonight. And I know we're talking about costs, but we're talking about community safety and response time is a big deal. I've learned through this process how frequently you wouldn't get any response locally because they weren't available. And as a taxpayer, city resident, and my taxes have more than doubled since I've been here, that's not very comforting. So I really would support doing a broader emergency service you know, review as it started. Assistant Chief Penderson has done, I think, a fine job starting some of those measurements. But I just, I throw that out there as additional information because we're focused on cost. I understand that. But our community out there, the folks north of the viaduct that are in the city, pay for a very large portion of what is enjoyed in the city as well from a tax standpoint. The other part I'll add is we have artificial lines out there. I have neighbors that are county residents and it's really an interesting invisible line that happens. But I already have pre-commitments from several of those folks along the lakefront to get a manned fire station there. We gotta get paperwork in place. They're saying I'm not gonna donate till we have a memorandum of understanding. you know, my community up there, they wanna make sure that if this land is donated, that it becomes a fire station and an active fire station, right? So there's a lot of things going on behind the scenes, but we're here to help the city of Whitefish put a fire station in. We don't want it to be called Iron Horse. We don't want it to be just associated with Iron Horse. You got Suncrest up there, you've got, you know, a developer or family that owns a lot of land that's now part of the city, just right along Big Mountain Road and what might change on Big Mountain Road. So there's a lot going on out there. So it's not just, I just wanted to be clear about that. So, yeah. Giuseppe, you talked about having people pay for operations. I stand in the middle a little bit between the city and I appreciate all the help from Dana and from Chief Cole Hadley. We pay a lot of taxes. We support a lot of this city. And we're not asking for a lot, we're asking for response time. If there's a better answer to get response time out there, we're all ears, we're happy to do that. If all we wanted was a fire station, we could do that ourselves. We do security ourselves, right? But we don't think that's the best thing for the community. So we do believe that this entire city benefits. Councilman Davis, you probably raised that question as well before. We do believe that the whole city benefits by having the right number of personnel, trained personnel, and the right number of equipment. We haven't talked about equipment either, but equipment is as essential as the manpower as well. So anyway, I hope that addresses your question a little bit. We would not be interested in paying both taxes and paying for operations. If we're gonna pay for operations, we'll build it ourselves.

Thanks, Scott. Steve, I think, has a question for you, Scott. I just have a question for you. Because based, you know, I totally understand what you're saying. I appreciate you coming up here and talking and addressing my concerns. Part of my concern, though, is that what seems to always happen to us in the city is because... Because as we talked about in our work session, we've done a good job managing our resources and providing the services that we provide at a very high level, higher than the county for sure. But this fire station is adjacent to the county, and it would serve many, many, many people in the county very well. Why isn't the county involved in this work? process and this consideration why does it fall just on the city because i keep coming back to this about a lot of things that that come up that we end up having to pay for even though it services many people in the county and and they don't and the county doesn't pitch in anything to it so why is the county not involved in this process in this consideration great question i i don't have a good answer for you on that we haven't gone huh you do yeah

because that's in the Whitefish fire service area, which we have an agreement with them and we provide fire service within the entire Whitefish fire service area by contract with them that they pay us for. So that's why, plain and simple.

So they're never on the hook to pay for or staff a fire station outside?

Not on the fire service area, no. That's the responsibility of the Whitefish Fire Department and the City of Whitefish via our agreement with them that's been in place since the 80s, Cole? Yeah. For over 40 years. 1986. I mean, that's the simple answer, anyway.

But it doesn't preclude them from helping.

So, I mean, and that's one thing. The fire service area recognizes that they, the board, recognizes that they are not paying their fair share for the services that we're providing there. They're trying to raise their rates, but the county commissioners hold that control. They're the ones that get to determine if a rate increase occurs. There can be discussions with the fire service area, even on this station, and we can have those, but the hurdles they have to jump through to just address the other needs of firefighters, because they've tried to ask for additional support to support additional firefighters in the city. It continues to go on deaf ears, and quite honestly, I think it's that why would we approve a rate increase for our county rate payers when you're just gonna pay Whitefish to have more firefighters? And it's a hard thing to understand because of that agreement and maybe it's just, it's a difficult thing that I think the fire service area has to deal with. We can pose the question if the fire service area is interested in supporting this project by increasing their fees also for these additional firefighters. They're already talking about six firefighters to add to our staffing level that would help this situation. The bigger issue I see, even if they said yes, we'd even ask the commissioners for an additional three to help support this specific station. We want six down south. The commissioners are the ones that hold the strings.

And this is exactly my point, is that it always falls to us, just like I mentioned earlier with what the state is doing in terms of our budgeting, and at some point we have to say, no, they have to get involved and help because it's not fair for us to flip the bill for all this when the fire station's gonna be built adjacent to The county and it's gonna serve as many people in the county as it does in the city limits and so I mean That's not your problem and I appreciate Scott everything you've done to bring this forward. I really do I hope you don't think that I am just poo pooing the whole thing because I think it's wonderful what you guys are doing I really appreciate it and I and I am I'm all about safety for our city and I just wonder how much the taxpayers of the city can actually bear continuingly going forward without at least having them have some say in it. So that's not up to you. That's a different discussion. But thank you.

Thank you.

Additional questions. We do have a list of questions that Dana asked the council to respond to this evening. I don't know what page they're on but there's four and I'd like to just dial into those now. Question number one, should staff take this project to the next step of developing an agreement with the Iron Horse HOA and golf club? Showing of hands, yes. Giuseppe, Steve, Dana, we have the go ahead for item number one. Item two, what staffing levels are appropriate? Like Coles made a pretty commanding argument that a minimum of nine is required to keep staffing levels appropriate and I don't think we can question his data nor the report that was prepared years ago for our ESC and fire master plans. Any comments on that or are we comfortable? Nine? Okay, Giuseppe.

Mayor, I let Cole decide. I'm not going to vote on deciding what the firefighters need.

Thank you, Giuseppe. We'll move forward with the proposal as stated, Dana, which would include nine new firefighters. Item number three, is the City Council willing to work on a ballot initiative in the future for this project? I think we're probably all in agreement that Yes.

That this is a levy-funded thing? Correct. Yeah, I am.

Yeah, I mean, I think just a comment to that is, you know, addressing the concern about costs going forward, I mean, it's not us that's going to make that decision. Put it out to the voters. It's the voters, and if the voters decide, in particular if we roll it in, as Dana said, with, you know, other capital equipment needs and going forward with one, and if people are not into it, and they don't want to pay for it, they'll tell us no you know that's like why i support it i guess is my overall as much as anything because the people are going to say because we do have three planning documents obviously that tell us we need a station north of the viaduct and if i look at some of the biggest wildfire risk in this city it starts at houston point and east lake shore and goes all the way up the hill and station from there is going to hit that faster than we're ever going to hit it from our existing station so But we'll know, people will tell us. It's like, yeah, it's a great idea, or they'll say, sorry. Yep. Rebecca.

Is it possible to run it through financially just as a kind of scenario in case the ballot measure fails and we have to fund it through like our own council mill decision making?

Yeah.

You know if the state doesn't change any of the property tax system in this next session, which is unlikely but Then we would be able to look at what other funding mechanisms we might have But I would say right now It's pretty it's a pretty simple calculation if you take the one let's say 1.5 million divided by 121 thousand roughly that'll tell you how many mills it's equivalent to I

I think in the broader question. I think if the levee doesn't pass then we cross that bridge when we come to it Well my first comment is

Back to my idea before of the sort of more encompassing levy. At least as far as my support goes, I think that's important because not only we're not talking about just funding firefighters, we're talking about funding future equipment costs of the fire station. And I think in terms of, I think this is a good idea. We should move ahead with it. But I would like to see it be the all-encompassing version. And I'd love to see a financial analysis of that at some point of what that looks like. Yeah.

We will absolutely get that done. It is a city council goal and on our to-do list.

Thank you. So can I ask one final question? Could we fund via a combination of mills? Say we picked up five of our carryover mills, which would take us out to the levy ballot at a lower number, for example. Could we do that?

You could.

Sorry Jake are there specific items or asks of the project that are desired or not of interest. Rebecca.

If possible I'd like to have a public restroom out there because we get a lot of people biking out there and running out there on our shared use trails and it would just be nice if they didn't go in the woods or someone's private property. And I know that's maybe not necessary but I think it would be a good safety feature since people are gone you know a long way out with no access to things.

Can we get an iron horse concession stand down from the ball course? Free range balls? Every three holes?

I love it. And finally, we'll go with Steve. Final question. To the greatest extent possible, I think this has to go, I want you to, I would love for you guys to go to the county and say, listen, this is what we're facing. and get your friends that live in the county that are across that imaginary border to go with you and say, you guys need to help us with this. I don't think it should just be on the back of whitefish taxpayers. I really don't. So thank you.

Any additional questions from the council? Dana do you have the direction needed to move forward with this. I think it's a good start. Yes. Okay. Thanks very much. Scott thank you for attending this evening. You bet. Any time.

We'll move on to comments from the council.

We'll start Giuseppe if you can hear me. Any comments this evening.

I can hear you loud and clear. I have a comment about the discussion for the firefighting ordinance or resolution. I forget what it is called. And I do not know where that ended up being, but I would like in the wording to impose restrictions. I don't remember the exact wording, but also to rescind restriction, meaning it looked, as I read it, as if he could impose, he or she, right now they say he, could impose restrictions, but nowhere does it say that he can release the restrictions. So just some wording about making it practical. But I'm all for it within the big picture. Thank you.

Giuseppe, it was ordinance or is ordinance 17-25, and I'll just quote the ordinance very briefly here, but the city of Whitefish authorizes the fire chief to enact fire restrictions for the city in order to rapidly react to changing fire conditions and provide a united front with our partners. then furthermore um the fire chief is authorized to enact fire restrictions for the city of whitefish by order at any time and at the next regularly scheduled meeting the city council just decide whether to enact such restrictions by ordinance which i fully plan to do at the next meeting so giuseppe just to yeah and that was my point all the

if you could hear us just up you're cutting out a little bit but i just wanted to clarify because i think i understood that you were trying to say that our ordinance only allows us to enact fire restrictions our interpretation of that is that we can enact fire restrictions at any level so we can take them back or we can take them forward as the fire the fire chief cannot we the fire chief can SO HE CAN RESCIND THE FIRE RESTRICTIONS. IT'S AN ENACTMENT OF A TYPE OF FIRE RESTRICTION, AND THEN IT STILL COMES FORWARD AS BASICALLY A REPEAL OF THE EMERGENCY ORDINANCE. SO THAT'S KIND OF THE PROCESS THAT WE SEE UNFOLDING. IF WE WANT TO CLARIFY THE LANGUAGE IN THE ORDINANCE, WE COULD DO THAT. BUT LET'S DO IT AFTER THE BUDGET IS DONE.

NO, I'M OKAY. OBVIOUSLY I'M STILL LEARNING ENGLISH. SO ENACTING MEANT TO ME ENFORCING CERTAIN. BUT I'M FINE WITH THAT. THANK YOU.

Thanks, Giuseppe. Anything further?

Thank you. Steve. First of all, I just want to thank you for your grace on my absences this summer. Summer's always a busy time for me in terms of not being around and doing things, and then I hurt myself. I had to leave early at the last meeting, so thank you all for your grace and my absences. And then I just, you know, this whole, the fire station thing just brought up something to me that is very frustrating, is that when, you know, we're given a great opportunity by the Iron Horse and the HOA over there, and the golf club, and it seems like we can act within a year to get something like this done that's gonna cost taxpayers up to a million and a half dollars a year, at least, depending on what the whole levy looks like. And at the same time, we've been working for six years on trying to manage, figure out a way to rebate the taxpayers of the city who live here full-time versus those who don't for six years. And I think we're at about square 0.5 at this point on moving that forward. And it's just tricky. It sticks in my craw a little bit. that when it comes to finding ways to provide better services at a higher cost to the taxpayers, we're able to do that, but when it comes to providing a service that lightens that tax burden a little bit, it takes us years and years and we hardly get anywhere. And I just want to bring that up because it does stick in my craw a little bit and I think you all kind of sense my aggravation a little bit with this tonight and at the work session. My apologies for coming across as aggravated, but that's that's where that's coming from and other than that Thanks again for your grace.

Thanks Steve hope your ribs are healing up. I've been there. Scott thanks again for coming and please give my gratitude to the HOA and the golf course for bringing this proposal forward to the city. My only comment this evening is just sending thoughts out and prayers to the folks in Spokane. I think over six hundred and forty structures have been lost. over the past week it's disastrous and it's very sad and families displaced and homes ruined and lives disturbed you know for who knows how long and I don't think it's a question of it not happening in Whitefish it's a question of when and I think this proposal that we consider this evening is a good stride in the right direction to provide better fire service and emergency services to our entire town. So I just wanted to leave on that note that our thoughts and prayers are out to the folks in Spokane. And if you don't have the app, I'm not a big app advocate, but there's a great app called Watch Duty and you can download it. It's free from the app store and it's pretty amazing and compelling when you pull up a map of the Western United States. It's insane. So, everyone be safe out there. That's all I have this evening. Ben, any comments? Thank you, Ben. Rebecca?

Yeah, I have two comments. One, well, three, thank you for coming and thanks for your willingness to solve this big problem that we've been trying to solve for a long time. Secondly, I spoke to Justine. I don't know if she got in touch with you, Dana. But she is our fish wildlife and parks bears management specialist and lion specialist. She's she wanted I was calling her because I was wondering if we need to prepare for animals coming into town given that we have a. fire on the western edge of town well not edge but it is there and she said it's gonna be a pretty bad fall because we have a really horrible fire huckleberry season I thought we were like had gotten in her good graces because of our bear management trash can thing and she goes The cans are working great, but the people are still feeding deer and filming bears eating in their yards and all that stuff. So she really wants people to know that it's illegal and dangerous to feed animals. and that we still have a pretty significant bear problem. We had a grizzly that she had to put down in Haskell, but otherwise it's black bear activity. But she does anticipate that we're going to have a pretty rough August and September as the bears come into town. because they'll be hungrier with the huckleberry issues. So she's going to talk to Dana about writing something up to give people. She still is concerned about people also putting up bird feeders, even though John made fun of her. But anyways. I did not. You kind of did. Yeah, you did. We just can't regulate bird feeders in town. I'm sorry. Anyways, and the second thing is I just wanted to remind people to stay. It's really hard when people commit suicide because they don't know until they're on the other side how much they were loved. And so there's a lot of campaigning out there about just stay one more day or reach out to someone. And it breaks our heart collectively when people decide to go early. And I'm sorry for the people in town that lost someone that they loved, that they cherished and knew their whole lives. But if anybody's out there that's feeling that way, just try to stay one more day. and do take care of your mental health and reach out for help, even if you're just calling a friend. Just one day makes a difference. Anyways, that's all.

Thank you, Rebecca. Appreciate that.

Andy? No comments, everybody. Thursday night at 5.30.

Sounds good. And dinner will be provided.

Dana, anything further?

Not this evening.

Okay. Thanks, everyone. Thanks to the public for attending this evening. We are adjourned.