Town Council - Regular Meeting

We can all rise for the pledge, please.

Walter, can you raise the pledge, sir? I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. A

moment of silence for men and women in the armed forces, our first responders, our veterans, those fighting the good fight in Ukraine, those suffering from military conflict in the Middle East and worldwide. Thank you. Okay, tonight we start with public comment. Is there anyone that would like to address the uh board of finance or town council? And Walter, while Diane is checking, would you like to Thank you. Motion to call the board of finance back into session. In favor?

Okay. Motion to uh bring the town council. Second. Thank you. All in favor? I. Thank you. Okay. First one up is going to be our voter registars, Sandro. And we got Chris.

We don't sign this part, do we? Come on. 106. We're not the public. 104. Um, so what do you need for questions on the budget at all? We did have an increase mostly. Can you talk can you talk a little bit about the department for those we have some new members kind of what voter registars want to tell us what we do? We're going to be all night. Glad to do that.

Um we do a lot of we do a lot of well besides running elections uh it's uh record maintenance of the voter records uh which is a lot of manual work in that. It's not as computerized as we'd like some of it to be. So, there's a lot of manh hours in that side of it. Um, we're just about to deal with a bunch of like record storage keeping stuff that we have to purge out of our cabinets, which I'm not sure how long it's going to take. Um, the I mean, most of it Yeah. election uh uh scheduling the employees, which is for general elections around uh just around 100 people. We have to schedule for that. Um, and have lots of spares for people can't show up or have to leave early, things like that. Some of the older voter u poll workers we have uh can't do a full day. We'll have them come in a half day. So, we had to like work around that. uh scheduling with the various schools and and uh organizations where we do hold voting at and working out with them the um logistics of that um of using the space, making sure there's security in in the locations that need it, that sort of thing.

Canvasing. Uh yeah, canvasing, which is part of the voter recordkeeping part of it is we contact all the voters uh within basically with certain date ranges. they haven't voted in some amount of time, we send them notices via mail uh that usually have return envelopes in them for them for them to confirm that they still live in New Milford or if they moved. Uh and then we also have to process uh death lists unfortunately. Um yeah, where we have to purge people off for that. Um the canvases we do like in some form or another at least four times a year. one big one usually the beginning of the year then we use smaller scale ones after that

and as you can see uh for the council members and finance members uh as Chris said there are some increases and that's because uh the main increases right now are with the in like the um tabulator like uh programming yeah well the programming the increased ballot costs mostly the programming costs are the biggest increase for that but there's also the contract the uh service contracts and warrant extended warranties for each of the tabulators. There's also an additional cost. We didn't have to pay for the tabulators. Thankfully, the state did cover that, but we have we're in charge of the maintenance contracts and warranty stuff. And you also have the primary and early voting.

Yeah. Any of the various elections we can this year we'll have potentially five uh most likely four different elections. We have for at least five. Yeah. Yeah, like the special election things that can happen sometimes we have to budget for ahead of time because usually the problem is there's sometimes very short time windows where we can't go and like come to you guys ask for money because it's like going to happen in too short of a window of time to pull it off. So we have to budget ahead of time for it. uh like last year's the very unexpected, you know, like dual referendum which we haven't had in a very long time and that was a very high turnout and so it ended up being very expensive because we had to print a lot of more ballots than we normally ever have to

like we came very close to running out a couple throughout the day, right? Like keep on getting more. So Katie, um did you you just said, you know, that you have a little extra in there case. So did you have a rollover from uh Oh, it's just money we didn't spend. Yeah. Um I don't know. That's would be in the mud side of things. I I don't usually see that side. We don't we don't have to have two too budget probably going to need more money. So you don't know how much you you didn't spend. So last year there was a little bit of of an increase. Not much. Right. I can get you those numbers. That's because we had the different because we had a different Oh. For for those we had an additional reference.

Yes. Right. I just wonder because he said he had excess. So I just wondered. Okay. The employees want Yeah, the mayor will get me the number. That's okay, Chris. Yeah. Does anybody Does anybody have any additional questions for Sandro or Chris? Okay. Well, thank you guys. Appreciate it very much. Thank you guys and the the whole staff when we have the elections for all your guys' hard work. Appreciate it. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay. Next, we have the tax assessor, Page J. Brian. Hey, Jatie. I'm

Brian Lra, tax assessor, Birdtown, New Milford. As many of you know, the assessor's office, our primary function is to discover, list, and value uh all the real estate pus personal property and motor registered motor vehicles here within uh the town of New Milford. And uh we compile what we call the grand list which is this tabulation of all the assessments of the real estate, motor vehicles and personal property. And then that is used to uh generate uh uh revenue for the town. Um and it represents the revenue that the town doesn't receive from the state in forms of state aid or uh the fees that it generates here uh within various departments. So approximately 80% of the revenue uh that's generated here in the town comes through uh taxes that are levied against the assessments uh on the grand list. So um we do generate a small amount of revenue in terms of fees. Uh these are fees that appraisers uh general public will pay us for copies of maps, property record cards and reports. So, so much of our data is online uh that we have less and less interaction with real estate professionals and the general public. They can use their computer to uh look up information concerning their properties or print out a map or so forth. So, anyway, we but we do generate a small amount of revenue. Brian, before you move on, some people may because you started with the revenue, that'd be page eight and it's $300, right?

Yeah. So, thank you. So, Brian, the expenditure side.

Okay. Uh, moving on to page 81. This is where uh we've listed our personnel. We have uh uh three members of the staff. Obviously, there's myself, Mary Zulo, our technician, and Joe Kubth, our our secretary. Um, you'll notice that this is pretty much the highlight of tonight's presentation. It's the fact, uh, as you know, the town of New Milford has implemented a homestead style exemption for uh, New Milford resident property owners. And to date, we've processed approximately 5,600 homestead applications or approved 5,600 homestead exemptions. And the homestead exemption program has created a substantial and permanent increase in the administrative work uh load in the assessor's office. The work is continuous. It's compliance driven. It's highly labor intensive and cannot be absorbed uh within existing staffing levels without compromising statutory responsibilities and service standards. So, as you can see, I'm asking for a part-time homestead clerk to basically work around 19 hours uh per week. And this will help ensure the proper administration and compliance enforcement and taxpayer service. the assessor's office uh uh respectfully requests the funding for one new part-time position. Just to give you an idea of some of the workload that we have, um each year we uh we administer a local tax credit for elderly and disabled uh uh senior citizens. And we process about 180 applications each year between February 1st and May 15th. By contrast, uh based upon historical

property sales and ownership transfer data, the homestead exemption program will require direct annual interaction with approximately 1,000 property owners. Now, that represents more more than a five-fold increase of what we do between February and 1st and May 15th. So more importantly, unlike traditional exemption programs, the Homestead program requires continuous year-round monitoring and compliance enforcement rather than just that seasonal processing that we do with uh with the elderly and the disabled. So, we're looking for uh a new part-time employee to help help with that that workload. Um overtime, we we sometimes need uh to pay some overtime to staff. Uh I think in the last five years, we've only expended maybe $150 in in one year, so we don't but it's there in case in case we need it. Uh property tax audits. Each year we audit uh about 20 uh businesses that are are chosen at random. uh businesses uh declare what personal property they use, they own and use in their business. So, desk tables and chairs, a supermarket like Big Y, they declare all the interior uh furnishings that they have in terms of computers, checkout lanes, uh coolers, um the the shelving. So, uh, we we have the ability under Connecticut state law to audit, uh, the business personal property filings to make sure that they're representing what they really have in terms of assets. So, we compare what they declare to us to what they maintain on their income tax records.

And, uh, we found that um that it's fairly successful uh, program in in terms of compliance. and we generate normally between 30 and $40,000 a year in taxes. So, it it does uh pay for itself. Uh professional dues and training, we now have a whole staff is now certified uh Connecticut municipal assess assessors and so we uh need to uh take continuing education each year uh to maintain our certification. So, that's where that that money goes is for for uh training classes and workshops. uh materials and supplies are very similar to last year. It's a little a little bit less, but here we uh print our we use this money to print the gr excuse me, the grand list, mail out assessment notices. Uh we it also provides us access to the DMV uh data. Um we also have to pay for a subscription to Price Digest. That's the uh uh company that we use to actually uh value uh motor vehicles. And of course office supplies, papers and pens etc. Uh computer software uh this has gone up but you know mostly most it's mostly due to our providers uh increasing their fees. So as many of you know we use vision government solutions and they provide our data on the web. Our data is also in the cloud that we use and maintain on a daily basis. And then we have licensing fees. And then of course we use uh quality data uh for our assessment administration package. And the uh costs there have also gone up. Uh then moving on to assessor's capital. Uh as you know we just completed five a statemandated revaluation. We have to do those every 5 years.

Page 214. Did I skip? Oh, thank you for putting it up there. I didn't see it first. Yeah. Um, this on page 214. So, this is basically a sinking fund. We're putting away money now to pay for our next reassessment in 2030. And then um also under assess, sorry to interrupt you, but this reval, if you could explain the difference. The ones that we're doing currently are just finished was a modified reval where this one's actually going to be they're coming to your house. Yeah. They're doing a hard reval.

Yeah. So, uh every 10 years we have to do a full measure and list where we have to visit every make a property, make an attempt to do an interior inspection. So, uh that was done in 2020. I think the price we paid back then was about 375,000 and then uh this reassessment in 2025 uh we reassessed the town by analyzing sales that have occurred over the last two years. So we basically revalued using the existing data, the existing inventory. You know, it's updated through permits and so forth from year to year. Uh that is less of a labor intensive. We're not going out to every property knocking on the door and the fee there was around I believe around 250. So, but you're right, the next one will be a a full uh measure and list of all the properties.

2030. 2030. Yep. Starting in 2029. Brian, I have a question. Just want to confirm. The Lexus Nexus for the Homestead fraud. Yes. Would you just explain for people what that's about?

Okay. So, Le Lexus Nexus is a data aggregator. Uh they compile information on uh uh all sorts of businesses, individuals, so forth. So, we use it to um identify second homes. For example, if a person owns more than one property, uh this will this is what we were primarily using it for was to check on uh homestead applications for example that we deemed as somewhat suspicious. So um we use less Nessus primarily to uh uh achieve the situs of an individual. Do they own multiple properties? Where have they lived in prior years and that sort of thing. So, um, we pay basically a monthly fee for access to their system. It's come in, it's been quite, you know, helpful to us. We've discovered a number of people that tried applying for the homestead here. They already had it in Florida, which is a big no no. They have they have laws, they have penalties on their books in Florida that are very severe if you get caught. So, uh, but it helped us discover, uh, issues like that. Uh, people that with our close proximity to New York, for example, they have a a homestead style exemption over there for school taxes. And I we found a number of people that were applying here that own property in New York and were receiving a STAR exemption, school tax assessment relief. So, uh, that's what that's what the Lexus Nexus is primarily for. Yes.

Consequences if somebody gets caught doing that. Yeah. So, with our ordinance, uh, we can go we can go back uh, for how many years that they've been receiving the exemption, take it away, and then uh, immediately send them a tax bill with interest. So, we have that penalty. So, it's good. Yeah. Any other questions for Brian? Great. Thank you, Brian. Thank you. Appreciate it. Next is Nancy Tax Collector 83. Well, first we Oh, you want Sorry.

We'll let Nancy We'll let her do her presentation first or you want to start with Do you have We start with her budget here. Do you have a slide? Yeah, it's right there. Yeah. Oh. Oh, she was looking at Okay. Uh, good evening everyone. Page 83 for everybody.

Nancy McGavoc, tax collector. Um, the tax collector's office collects taxes. It's pretty straightforward. Um my budget has just gone up um most in the personnel line and in the materials and supplies um due to the printing of the bills and the additional postage and so forth and other than that it's pretty straightforward. And any questions? Are you are you the board of tax review? No. Who's the board of tax review?

Uh I don't we have a board. I think they have a budget. Yes, they do. I'm looking at it. That's why it uh it happens to be right here after the collector. So I was wondering Oh, yeah. So they're not really they're independent of me. So you know, they hear assessment appeals. Um, if someone dis disagrees, property owner disagrees with the assessed value that we've placed on it, uh, there's a three member board. They're all elected and, uh, yeah, it's just sort of left by itself here. If you were to look at it as a somebody looking at our appointments and elected officials, it's board of assessment appeals.

Appeals. Yeah. Not tax review for for them that would be watching. People are confused about that. What's that? People get confused about that. They think it's a tax collector and they go after Brian over here. Nancy. Yeah, I see it. Nancy knocks on doors. Does anybody have any questions for Nancy? Pretty straightforward except All right. Thank you, Nancy. Appreciate it. Okay. Next is the personnel budget. Personnel page 93.

Page 93. brick. Let me get this here. Change this and 94 is the breakout. Okay,

good evening everybody. For those don't know me, I'm Greg Bolero. I'm the personnel director for the town. Uh the personnel department is responsible for all human resource activities for all town departments with the exception of the board of education, although sometimes we do give them some support as well, especially as it relates to the pension. Uh but we're responsible for recruitment benefits administration, workers comp compensation administration and reporting, employee relations, contract negotiations and administration, training, employee onboarding and offboarding, employee discipline, state and federal compliance tracking and reporting and much much more. Our office is comprised of two and a half people. So I'm the personnel director. We have our personnel assistant who is Diane. Diane's going to be retiring in June. So, I'll talk about a slight increase in this salary line because we're going to be moving that position from 35 hours a week to a formal full-time 40 hours exempt position. So, you'll see an increase in that line, but you'll also see for our additional hours in special projects, we decrease that overtime line because now that that position is going to be exempt, we won't be paying the overtime on it. So, it's a little bit of an offset there. And we also have our office coordinator, which is split with the fire marshal. Um that's March who's here today. So those are our salaries and the other expense that we really have is going to be our supplies. Uh we've got tuition reimbursement which we keep flat. Materials and supplies. This is up $800. It was actually a reduction of 500 from the initial request. I had a training laptop that we were able to put into this year's budget. So we were able to take that money and back that out. So I appreciate the help with that, mayor. And then um we also have our ID printer which now it requires maintenance but the police department is going to be getting all new badges next year. So congratulations on that and I'm looking forward to helping you with that. Um but we have to buy the printer ribbon, all the supplies, the cleaning, the

maintenance as well as the actual IDs. So that's why we have the increase in that line. Uh the recruitment expense, uh we use Indeed a lot for our positions. Indeed has actually changed their policy. So now you only have three positions that you can post per month for free and we're going to have to pay for, you know, additional postings. This $500 increase will help offset that cost. Uh drug and alcohol testing we can keep flat. Safety committee we can also keep flat. Our EAP and wellness program, that's an increase of $2,000. uh the council and those that are watching the EAP

how our employees have really used that um and you know that's part of wellness program that we have.

Exactly. And so this fund also does our retirement benefits etc. But our EAP program and we extend the EAP benefits to all full-time employees as well as all part-time employees and this also includes their immediate family members. I am really pleased to report the town of New Mauford has the best utilization and people will think of EAP as oh this is going to be employee counseling and emotional support. That is definitely one aspect of it but our EAT EAP program has retirement education. They have services for legal services. Uh there is training that goes through it. They've got a talk space go which is just like a group counseling session that will pick a topic and you can join into a common topic and discuss it. It's it's a great benefit that has a myriad of different resources and actually the mayor and holds a conference call you know with all employees on a monthly basis. We've brought our EAP rep onto that call to discuss some of the benefits that are there. So our utilization is about 30% higher than any other municipality in the state. So it's a really great program that I fully support for our employees.

Craig, could you just explain one thing which I know stop space go? Yes. Just briefly.

So stop space go what that is. So each month EAP or the stop space go will pick a topic right and it could be you know problems with teen children right and they will open up a portal where they will have a counselor in this portal and multiple people and everybody is completely anonymous but you're able to talk about what you're going through and talk with other people so that you can kind of relate to other people right so if you've got a teen who's struggling with substance abuse, right? Well, you're now going into a portal where you might have 15, 20, even a hundred other people that may have the same problem and a counselor there that might have some advice or you may have people in this that have just gone through it and have some suggestions for how to cope with that. And that is just one example of what the the topics could be.

And this is a at this point it is a person that's there. It is. And going forward, not too far away will be an AI. It could be counselor. Yes. Yeah. Well, a lot of these types of things, they have been going to that, but they do give an option at this point. I guess it'll probably be a while before it's all AI, but that is an excellent excellent program and it's being used. Yeah. And also because of the way that we offer this benefit, it is free for our employees and their families. So there is no cost for them to participate where if you were to be doing this outside there would be a contribution to it. So for the town to be able to offer this benefit it is a great wellness benefit.

Thanks for explaining question. Yeah. Um is it town specific or can other towns kind of join into the conversation for the talkspace go? Yeah. So anybody that is enrolled in talkspace go? It doesn't even have to be for an municipality, right? So people from any walk of life can join into this service. We're able to get it for the town and get people enrolled. But because of the way that it is set up, if people are joining Talkspace Go, it can be from the private sector, it can be from public sector, and it doesn't even have to be from Connecticut. Oh, wow. So it's a it's a really unique benefit.

Well, that's interesting. And then the my other question is what is the Saturday group orientation? So what we do for our part-time and seasonal help because we hired a little over what is it 197 part-time seasonal employees over 120

120 sorry so with a with the summer camp help instead of trying to get them peacemeal in over you know the process of you know February through June we'll hold a Saturday orientation bring in all 20 lifeguards do the orientation in one shot and it'll be done so we've been doing this for the last couple of and it'll take us about an hour and a half, two hours, but we get all of the paperwork and that way if there's an anomaly, somebody didn't bring their driver's license or, you know, any of the identification. Now, we're chasing one person instead of 20 lifeguards and then you've got your camp directors, you've got the camp counselors, you've got the the camp staff. So with all of that hiring, we try to do those in group orientations just so that one, you know, timewise getting it done, but from an organizational standpoint as well.

Any other questions? Thank you, Greg. Good job. Good job. Have a good night, everybody. Okay. Bye, Greg. Next is the fire departments. Fire departments. Page 120. Well, it's a lot of pages, but start with 120 because there's a lot of firemen. Start with uh let's start with water witch.

Uh good evening Chief Sha Delaney, Water with Witch Hose Company number two. Um just want to go over uh real quick who we are. I know we have a number of uh new faces on the boards. Um we are a active uh 60 member uh fire department with uh six line officers. These are uh 60 active members that are certified and are responding to calls. Uh we do also have uh veteran members that are no longer um serving as active uh firefighters but are actually working uh on the behind thescenes uh activities uh during fundraising and other things. Uh we cover about 49 square miles uh fire rescue and water protection and we uh supported 722 requests for service uh last year. Uh real quick just to take a look. Uh the last couple years we've been seeing an uptick in our fire service uh calls to service for Water Witch. Um last year was uh last year in 2025 we had 722. The year before which was kind of a little bit of anomaly was 763. Uh that was the year that we had all the uh wildfires uh the uh high fire dangers and the uh immediate calls for smoke investigations. So in that in 2024 uh in October and November, Water Rich ran 98 calls just in smoke investigations and uh brush fires. So uh very very interesting. Uh we we were expecting that there was going to be a down tick. We did not expect that there was only going to be 40 calls difference. Uh so we are going up by about 50 calls a year. Uh currently right now uh in uh as of today we've already responded to a 100 calls this year. uh to put that into perspective uh last year at this uh last year uh we would have hit 100 calls on March 1st. So it's been a very very busy uh start of the year. Um real quick just

by the numbers this is what we do and this is uh how what how we're progressing. Uh 263 fire alarms last year, 100 motor vehicle accidents, uh 38 carbon monoxides. Uh we also respond out mutual aid for the ambulance in uh support of them. uh during uh lift assists and other uh cardiac events. So 37 calls to that. We went mutual aid outside of this town 30 different times uh to assist other uh supporting uh departments. Uh that is as far off as uh Avon and as close by as uh Brookfield and uh and the other supports. Um, we also do a slew of other different uh different uh caveats as you see natural gas leaks, uh open burns, our structure fires. We had 13 structure fires last year. Um we also had water rescues and water emergencies uh on the lake as well as uh in the uhatonic for a total of 722. Our average response is 4 minutes and 30 seconds to the scene. Uh we are averaging two officers and 11 firefighters per call. Our busiest time of the day is between 10 and 11:00 a.m. and 4 and 6:00 p.m. And last year, 47% of our calls actually ended up being between that hour of 9 and 5. So that's 50 50 almost 50% of our calls are when our volunteers are actually working. So it's an amazing task to have that high a number. Uh we have a everchanging town and uh I've I've said it before, I've said it during our Lanesville uh discussions. Um we have over 300 units proposed for for condos. Uh we see all the different areas those are going to be uh those obviously increase the calls. The development of Route 7 corridor is going to continue. Our as our population and our businesses increase so do our calls. Um so uh we have an uptick. Uh we also have increase of traffic which is

increases hours on the roadway. Uh this year our budget request was two is 277,000. It's about a 10% increase from uh last year. And real quick to go over um the line by lines um where do we see the differences? Our line item uh for our DOT and our physicals. Uh we have since changed hands to uh work with new vance occupational med medicine. Uh so we did take a pretty big hit by going to them. Uh they are a little more expensive. Um, but they do give us um constant uh basically a constant medical branch of our uh department. Uh, so we can get our guys uh physically certified, but then if our guys do have any other types of issues um throughout the year, we can refer them to different resources uh during that time frame. Uh other than that, uh we've gone down on some of our uh on some of our line items. Uh we also uh do have our ED 19 which is uh coming up for uh replacement. We're going to be expecting delivery this year. Uh so we have that as a uh replacement of the equipment on that apparatus. So when we do buy a truck, we get new equipment for it. So it's a 25 to 30year truck and 25 to 30 year equipment on it. So um other than that though, um we do have a secondary line item uh which I'm very proud to uh present to you for the first time uh this year, which is our Lanesville budget. uh Lanesville uh will be opening up uh hopefully by the uh June July time frame. Uh JA Rosa Construction is doing a phenomenal job on increasing the footprint of that built that building. Uh this is our preliminary based on estimates uh done by our um architects and engineers on uh electric heating and different costs. Um those are going to be um pretty much they're actually it's uh pretty much the same amount that we asked for last year. So we're not

looking at a major uh difference. The only difference to this budget in yellow is uh what we worked out with the DOT uh the DPW as well as the parks and wreck. Uh the DPW will be taking on the lawn services, the annual sprinkler testing and the snow removal for the facility. Uh so that does not come into our budget. And then in talking with uh Jack Healey, we were also able to take and move that $5,800 over to the DPW side. So they'll be actually doing the cleaning in the firehouse, too. Uh that is a weekly cleaning. Uh that's not every day. So our guys still clean the firehouse. We still have pride in the facility. It's just once over uh on a weekly basis that uh the de the the facility services will come in and give it a cleaning. So, um, really one of the best things that we have this year that I can report to you is, uh, in the in 2025, we signed on eight brand new firefighters. Uh, these are new firefighters to the line. Uh, as many of you guys have heard in the news, uh, there is a great drought in recruitment and retention for firefighters. Uh, we have eight brand new firefighters currently uh, in their probationary year. We have seven new firefighters going through their candidacy process right now. That is the next generation of our fire department. So, we have 15 new firefighters on coming in. What that means though is that means I have to put gear on them. I have to train them. And that is our responsibility to give them the best of the best. Uh, a set of gear right now is running about $5,000 per person. So, if you understand where we are, we still have to we still have to keep all of those other guys geared up and trained as well. Our increase in annual cost and our other other uh engine 19. So, that's the reason for the increase. Uh, real quick, what do we have to look forward to? We have the Lanesville substation opening. That's going to be a major major uh benefit to the town and to the south end of town. We have a lot of new faces, a lot of positive attitudes. Um, we're going to see an additional call volume. Uh, the

affordable housing uh 830G is going to put a lot of stress on our department. Uh, I can guarantee it. Um, so there is going to be a lot more uh and a lot more call volume in our town. Uh, we are still continuing the push for recruitment retention. As always, I will always 100% say this uh right up in front of everybody uh any Wednesday or Sunday that any community-minded individual would like to stop by our firehouse, take a look at our firehouse, and see if it it's a place for them to uh hang out and give back to the community. I invite every single person to do so. So, uh it's a phenomenal time. Uh we will still be at the fires, we will still be at the events, and you'll still see the red fire trucks at any community involvement that we can put ourselves out for. Uh one, there are two there are three needs that I continue to talk about uh every year that I come in. Uh tower 25 replacement. We are on the sixth year of the tower. Uh let me just put this in 110% clarity. The tower cost $1.3 million and we received a $1 million grant from FEMA. It is now valued at $2.2 million. Six years six years. So in another in another 19 years when we need to actually take and put this back up, it is going to be a lot of money. We do not have a capital expenditure plan for this apparatus. The tower has always been funded through finding a way. Okay. Uh the tower that big 110 foot tower ladder that we have.

Hook and ladder. The hook and ladder. Yeah, the ladder. So is the only one in town. It is the only one in departments do not have a ladder truck. We rely solely on them to come to us.

And this this also plays into our ISO ratings that we are continually struggle. We're we're we are 100% right now at a uh a class 3 ISO. And that's the best of the best for a fully volunteer organization. We are one of 1500 departments or towns in the country that has a volunteer organization that is ISO class 3. So this is one of our big struggles is to keep our keep us above that line and keep that uh insurance cost low to everybody. Uh in 2027 and 2029, I'm going to be looking for uh replacement of our SCBAs. 15 years ago, we got a grant from FEMA for $450,000. I don't know if we're going to be able to get that this year. I'm going to try. We have taken and on an annual basis, we have squirreled away some money. The SCBA replacement, three packs, that $20,000 that went up to 25,000, we have put some of that money away. That is our squirreling. Okay. By the time that I'm ready to start looking at purchases, I'm going to have about 190,000 out there. Hold your breath because we have to purchase 41 packs

and roughly about $11,000 a pack. So, it is a very, very expensive cost. So, we are going to be working on a FEMA grant uh jointly with Brookfield. Uh we've already started working on it, but as you know, the government was shut down. They have not even allocated or released any of the 2025 awards. So, our 2026 packet for application hasn't even come out yet. So, it's going to push that schedule. The other thing is is the support of our townwide capital apparatus. Uh, as always, each of the three departments has a schedule. We work on a regular basis together to do that, and we need as much support as we can. As you all know and you've all seen with Richard Blumenthal in the in the news as well as the federal government, we have seen an extraordinary increase in the cost of fire apparatus. Something that we cannot cover just in annual cost of living inflation. Okay. An apparatus that once cost us $385,000 three years ago, we are now going to be getting with two uh engine 19 at $689,000. All right. So, we can't cover that. That's one of those things. So, um I really appreciate it. I thank you guys for your support. I'm going to if you have any questions, I'm going to hand it over to also to uh Chief Street and Chief uh Williamson. Before you walk away, there's something that I I

people are always astounded about this, but we have all these volunteers that have been doing this for years. And what is the weight when one of your firefighters puts on all the gear, gets in the truck, of course, you know, he's got the coat, the pants, the hat, comes out, puts on all that other stuff. What's the weight that they carry as they go into the fire? As they go into the fire, probably about 40 45 lbs with all the How much? 45 pounds with all the equipment and everything else. 40 45 pounds. Depends on what they're doing. Go up, go down, get on a ladder, walk in and out of the truck. Yeah.

And we've been we've been very very uh fortunate. Uh Mayor Bass has uh allowed us uh to work with the the town at the town's gym. So, a lot of our guys uh utilize the town gym uh for the personnel to keep our health and wellness up as well. So, well, I appreciate that. Whatever they do, all of you. Thank you. That you're doing it. Thank you. This could be my house, you know, could be anybody. Thank you. The presentation. Yeah, that that they have that. Y any other questions for Chief SH? Chief, thank you. Thank you. Next is Gayersville. Chief,

good evening everybody. Uh for those of you that don't know me, I'm Chief David Williamson. Um got 39 years up in Gayardsville. This is my 13th year as chief. I took a four-year hiatus and was president. Um, so the Gailsville Fire Department, we respond to about 200 calls a year. Majority of that is mutual aid and EMS calls. We first respond up there. Ambulance being all the way down here. Somebody's having a heart attack. Um, somebody's having a car uh a car accident. any kind of medical, we we get there first and we try to stabilize the scene until we can turn it over to the ambulance and the and the professionals that do that. Uh we have 37 members currently. Uh we just got an influx of seven since January 1st.

So that's going well. Let's see. Um, just so you guys have a a little more understanding of what we do, we we not only protect the citizens of New Melford, we protect everybody that comes through New Melford. You look at the the traffic on Route 7 going up through from the center of town up to Kent on a weekend. All the motorcycle clubs, all the car clubs, the traffic is insane. You look at the amount of people that come up and we're using the Hustonic River. We've kind of shut that down a little bit thanks to Mayor Bass. Um, at one point we had 250 people underneath the bridge in Gillard. Swiftwater currents. Um, we it's impossible to pro to protect that. On average, we get two drownings a year in the Hutonic River still. So, and and the drownings are fatalities. That's chances of of surviving that are slim to none. Uh Valentine's Day, we had a fire up off Indian Trail. Everybody knows life's precious and priceless, but let's talk about the financial side of what we protect. That house fire house is probably worth a million dollars. All right. If we would have gotten there any later, we probably would have lost the house. We lost an ATV, a car inside the garage, but we stopped it before we went in. We had Water Witch and Northville there. Both both doing it. A million dollar stop. Yeah. There was probably $250 $300,000 in damage, smoke, that doesn't count your your contents and everything else inside that house. That's that's just the property. So when when you look at our budgets and stuff like that, houses have gone up

dramatically in this town. My house when I bought it was 120,000. It's now estimated around 450. So when you look at the the property values and everything that and the stuff that we actually protect to get in there, make a fast stop, try to save the belongings and the property, pets and family members. This is what we do. Uh my budget went up slightly from last year. That's mainly due to the purchase of two new air packs and our compressor to fill those air packs is no longer maintainable. So, right now it's functioning, but we can't even get parts for it. They discontinued everything and to try to find the replacement parts is impossible. So, that's our uh our two biggest uh increases. It used to be that insurance was our biggest expense. Um right now pretty much we're looking at um maintenance actually took over. All our stuff's getting old too. Um 2007 with the capital fund or yeah 2007 with the capital expenditure fund we sat down three chiefs I was chief back then too. We projected 30 years out. Uh some of my fire apparatus by the time they get replaced are going to be 38 years out. Trying to be fiscally responsible and still maintain the level of community support that we provide is challenging.

The radio, what um you have new radios. We have new radios. So, one of one of the things that every time you program, every time there's a change in the radio, everything like that, it's $1,500 for somebody to come out and reprogram all our radios. It's It's insane. Technology just the technology upkeep is insane. Does anybody have any questions? Any other questions for Chief? Thank you, Chief.

Is the old compressor really gone? It's not usable. No, it's it's usable right now, but when it goes like like right now, this this budget we budgeted for half a compressor. There's an old tired boy.

So, the next the next budget cycle we budgeted for the other half of the compressor. We we try to keep fiscally responsible. Um, I could easily sit here and present you with a $500,000 budget and watch you all explode on me, but um, we we try very hard to be fiscally responsible and to make sure uh, our rope stuff um, our rope stuff's out of date. A few years back um, about eight years ago, we stopped doing confined space. Um, just the the the cost of replacing the equipment was too much. We're since now the the three chiefs got together and had a meeting to where we are now kind of doing a town townwide response with the more technical stuff so that we don't have to have triples of it and that cuts down on on our expenses also. So we'll have a bare minimum to get started call in one of the other both other departments really and have them come in and support us and and kind of be the calvary.

There's no questions for the chief. Thank you, chief. Thank you. Going to Northville.

How you doing? Uh Jason Street, chief of Northville Volunteer Fire Department. Um so, as other two chiefs said, we're we're in the same boat. Um we have roughly 50 active members, not all interior qualified, but all doing their part, whether it's on committees, on, you know, firehouse maintenance, responding to calls. We have a roughly 12% increase in our budget. Um the largest of which would be in our radio equipment. That is mainly because we are replacing this year a 30-year-old piece of apparatus that needs a new radio. Um Oh, I see.

And then we no longer have the capability to talk to Brookfield um as they went to a different radio system. So we need to upgrade a few of our radios. And as Chief Williamson said, you know, there's a cost associated with that to have them come out and program. Other than that, we try to be very fiscally responsibly. We try to, you know, hedge any increases year-over-year. Um, we do a lot of fundraising in Northville to try to pay for any additional equipment or any needs that we we have for the firehouse specific. Um, you know, we budget out, you know, through our fundraising how to replace, you know, the driveway or the roof or the windows and, you know, really try to just ask for basics through our budget.

Have a question, Katie. Post testing. Do you do that like sort of in a rotational because I see, you know, one year it's something and then Oh, okay. So, it's 9,000. So, the cost of this went up as well. And in hose testing, we also have uh air testing and ladder testing. So, that's all of our required testing we put in that same category. Okay. Hey, Chief. Uh thank you for doing such a great job. Um how many calls do you get a year? We average right around 200 calls.

Around 200. Anybody else have any questions for Chief? How many How many uh guys do you have in Northville? We have roughly 50. I shouldn't say guys because I know guys, girls. We also run a junior program. So, uh we do take 14 year olds uh up to 18 before they But your total is that? Yeah. 50. Great. Any other questions for chief? Thank you guys. Next is the ambulance 139.

Sure. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Okay.

Okay. Good evening everyone. My name is Donna Hesby. I'm president of the New Milford Volunteer Ambulance. We're a nonprofit organization. I have two of my buddies with me here. Pam Spitzer, our treasurer, and Arie Mice, who is the operations manager. We are celebrating our 97th anniversary this year. Hard to believe, but we've been around for 97 years. We cover pro we cover the whole town of New Milford. So that's about 65 square miles. Currently we have a total of four ambulances. We have three sprinter vans and we have one of the large box ambulances. We have two medic fly cars. We're hoping to take possession of a new sprinter van this summer to replace one that's now 11 years old. Currently we have two paid crews on 247 and a medic in one of the fly cars. And the medic is on 12 hours a day from 7:00 a.m. to 7 pm. That's the biggest use of our medic. We've decided on that particular time. During the day, we run one BLS, which is a basic level, which has two EMTs in one of the uh uh ambulances, and then the other one is an ALS, an advanced that has one EMT and one medic. At night, we have both our ambulances staffed and they're staffed with ALS, one medic, one EMT. And we did that because no matter what's going on in town, no matter what crew goes where, there's a medic in it because we do not have that medic in the fly car. Volunteers are scarce. The time that is needed to devote for training, being in good standing, going to the monthly meetings, and just people find it hard to commit. You have to be reertified every two years. You have to be CPR and it goes on and on and on all the protocols and everything. So,

it's just getting tougher and tougher. We right now we don't have any new people at all. We've tried we've done a volunteer signs and everything. We've put it on Facebook and the people we get basically are a lot of I'll say the to me their kids. They come and it's part of the whole college program. They need to belong community service. So they try and join us so they have that check mark for their college application. So we don't get them very long. Okay. Having our own paramedic for our town definitely was the right choice. Our citizens are covered by our EMS service with the staffing we have. There's no gaps. If there is a third call and the crews can't clear up in time, we have a mutual aid agreement with Brookfield. They will send up if we need a medic or if we need an actual car. we do the same for them. It has worked out very very well. The medic is also able to help staff a third call and when Arie's in during the day, during the week, he also can jump in and that's how we can cover that third ambulance. Um, we have an agreement with our surrounding towns that if they need a paramedic because the regional, the old medic 4, if they're not available, then we can send our medic and or an ambulance to help them out. So we still do mutual aid and that's Sherman, Washington, Warren, Kent. So sometimes we travel to help them out, but they will in return. Usually most of our mutual aid is comes from I'd say Washington.

Washington usually. We are over 3,000 calls for the year past year 2025. That's approximately maybe about nine a day. Our call volume continues to climb. We have motor vehicle crashes are definitely increasing. People are extremely distracted. And of course, the one I always tell you about, help me, I've fallen a lift assist, which our fire help us sometimes because we have some bigger people in town that need help. So Donna, um because we're talking budget and for some of the new members on the council and on the board of finance,

so CO pretty much reset the ambulance where a lot of the volunteers because of CO decided not to ride the bus anymore. Oh yeah. We we lost a huge amount with CO. People just stood back because they were a little bit older. A lot of them had been in uh our organization 30 years plus and they just stepped back and it was just a long enough time, a year, two years depending that they just didn't feel like going back again. So we went from here being able to do things. COVID came and we just crashed and we kind of just didn't get people back. A lot of people weren't interested like you know right

you can have co I'm looking at Mary Jane. you you know you go into someone's house we're going in we don't know what they have you know we put our mask on and everything but lots of times even now we don't wear masks because we were called in it was help me I fall in I just need to be help lifted up and we go in there and we look at them and go yeah right you know there's a little bit more than you fell so there's a lot of people who just don't want to come in contact with that so with the support of the at that time the town council we pivoted and now we're pretty much paid paid service. Yes.

And the reason why I bring that up is for those that have been on here, the cost, if I'm correct, right, um, Donna, to really run an ambulance to a home is around $8 to $900. Yeah. Approximately. Yep. And it's Donna just said the number one call for them is a lift assist. Yeah. And a lift assist, guess how much money they get? Zero. Mhm. And then, Don, if there's somebody that's on a Medicaid or Medicare and they do go to the hospital, what what do they reimburse the ambulance?

I have that right here, sir. Um, we have if let's do this way. 63% of our calls are Medicare, okay? With 15% being Medicaid. 80% of our call volume is I call a loss business. there's just nothing there. Uh this might seem like a wow factor, but when the state tells us that we have to bill, they set the billing amount for all everyone. We can't do a penny more. We can't do a penny less. Okay? A regular call is $980. Medicare pays $494 and Medicaid pays $352. So you can see it's like we have to build them, but we know that's all we're going to get. We don't even get half of it.

Reason why I bring that up is if you just take a look at the numbers of calls to service the Donna was saying over 2,000. You just take the numerator 63%. Mhm. Right. And then you look at the lift assist is that this uh we're always going to be uh supporting the ambulance monetarily because there's no way. Yes,

that they can that they can make it up. And that's where you see the higher number for the staffing was because of those two big main numbers which is COVID and then now really these these additional quantities and the costs that we have to support because we want to make sure everybody gets service right levels of service even if it's someone on Medicaid Medicare regular hospital doesn't matter that person is in need they need to go to hospital

we go yes and there's some of them they've learned because they try and use this as their lift assist because the they're trying to live in their home and maybe the wife's a little teeny thing and the husband's kind of a big guy and when he falls he slips out of his recliner, he slips out of whatever and she has to call 911 to help us pick him up. I mean, you know, we know them by name. We know the color of their bathrooms. I mean, you know, on some of them, you know, we just do. But of course we go and sometimes if they don't let us take like vitals and stuff then we definitely it's just a free call.

How about the aging population in Milford? It's just going up and up. I mean it's amazing and everyone's trying to stay in their houses. We see it when we go to the houses. You know you just you take a deep breath and you know they're just hanging on by a thread living in that house. It's not as warm as it should be, you know. It's you you can just tell. You can just tell. It's kind of It is sad a lot of the times. Walter. Walter. Yeah. Just um two questions real quick. One, does private insurance pay pay you enough to beat the states?

Private insurance, it's very small. Well, if you do 63 and 15, that's what's left for private, but that also is no pay, you know. So, and you know, if the people don't have anything, it goes to our billing uh um company and they try and bill them, but you know, you you can't get blood out of a stone. So, that's another short end, too. It's rare that we have someone that has full insurance. The ones that are good are like Medicare and they also have a supplemental United. Everybody knows United. And then we're we're okay on that one. How how's the trend going? Still going up for the Medicare, Medicaid?

Oh, yeah. There's just there's a lot of there's just a lot of older people in New Milford. I was just asking um Arie, he's from uh Winstead and I said, "Do you have and he's also we just there's a lot of older people around." Thank God. I appreciate Thank God. I kind of like that, you know. But um Okay. I'm sorry. Did you want anything else, Pete? I was just going to say, Don, I was going to ask the chiefs, but they had left, but just for people on the new council. So, uh, we had the American relief funds of which we were able to help request for us and the fire and the police. How beneficial was that for your department?

Oh, it was extremely beneficial. I mean, we just we able we were able to replace a lot of Do you remember exactly what some of the equipment was? Okay. It was everything. That's a solid answer. I mean, we did we got equipment. We got Y and you got Arie. Yes, we

we got a lot of things. But the downside is we got all that then and guess what? The life of the a lot of the equipment is only five to seven years. So guess what? Everything we got all of a sudden now we need it again. So, what we've started to do is kind of do like they were talking about capital, we're doing that little bit uh a year to try and build up and hope we can catch up, you know, in time. Here's a our billing company builds just so you have an idea. 2,9321 156. That's a lot of money, right? But we only received 1,255 248 because of Medicare and Medicaid. I hate to beat that up, but our expenses, staffing, medical supplies, fuel equipment, maintenance contracts, purchasing of new equipment is supplemented by the budget we have with the town. If we town didn't give us this, we would be in a really bad way. Most of our metal equipment has a life, as I said before, between seven and nine years. Stretches cost $35,000. The life pack heart monitors, they're $70,000. the power loader that takes the stretcher and helps load it up into the back of the ambulance. That is $33,000. We don't have cheap stuff. And more important, the ambulances are now approximately $240,000 for the sprinter van because we buy a sprinter van and then it goes down and is made into an ambulance. You know, back's all stripped out and radios, everything. But the 240 is not all that equipment in it. It's basically the ambulance, the four wheels and the whole thing. That's about it. We have to put everything still in it. Um the if and this is I put a blur. I said if anybody happens to have, you know, a spare ambulance like in your back pocket, now

would be the time to offer it up. You know, we'd we'd like that. But anyway, our repair bill keeps going up because our equipment is getting older. You got to remember our ambulances aren't sitting, they're out, in and out, in and out. constantly all kinds of weather. It doesn't matter if it's snowing, we've got a snowstorm, we're going out, you know, we've got our studded snows on or whatever because we've got to get wherever. And the town has been super and the fire department too and helping us. We've had a call and have them plow the road because they hadn't been plowed yet and we've got someone that's fallen and hit their head or something. And thank God the town has been really good that way. We just call and they're right there. And lots of times we have the fire. Sometimes we can't get the patient from the house. This happened again not that long ago. They actually had to put the patient I don't know did they put him on the u

Stokes basket from the fire department. You've all seen that. And they kind of let him down the front hill because there was no way anybody could get to the house and that was the safest way to get the person down to the bottom of the hill. So we do a little bit of everything in our business.

That was fun. Um, another thing I'd just like to say, and this is kind of exciting. I'd let the pre the residents of New Milford know that New Milford Ambulance has been working diligently to get a very significant program developed and with New Milford Ambulance leading the way in this area, whole blood transfusions, a new approach. We've been working with Nuvance to get this established. We're almost at the finish line almost in getting it up and running. We had to do extensive planning, obtaining medical director authorization, coordinating with blood banks, acquiring necessary equipment, paramedic training, but for individuals experiencing life-threatening bleeding every single minute is crucial. Now, using this whole blood transfusion in the field allows us to deliver hospital level care immediately. We don't have to put them in the ambulance, cross our fingers, and drive really fast to the hospital and hope they can hold on because sometimes when it comes to you're bleeding out, that's about where you got going. So, we're honored to be the first in the greater New Milford area that's going to offer this service. It demonstrates leadership and a commitment to provide the highest standard of emergency medical care for our community. We're very proud of that. And it's not signed, sealed, and stamped yet, but it's it's very exciting. Oh, that's going to be amazing.

It really and truly is. EMS is changing constantly. New protocols, new regulations. It changes all year long. The state requires it and isn't being funded by them. They tell us what we have to do. So, it falls to us to take the courses. For instance, domestic abuse counseling, suicide prevention, human trafficking, and then we have to buy a sort of different pieces of equipment. In addition, our crews have had to prepare for active shooter scenarios through training and we had to go and get equipment, etc., etc., to prepare them for all that. So, as always, we thank you for your time and letting me present our budget requests to you and explain any of our concerns. And if you have any questions, we'll be glad to take it.

Any other questions for D? ship if it's over, sorry, it's over 3,000 calls that we do. And the equipment, 5 to seven years is not what it lasts, but it is what the vendor allows us to use it for. After that time frame, the vendor says, "We will no longer maintain it." So now you have a piece of medical equipment that you have the potential of something going wrong and then you're on the hook alone. The vendor is no longer on the hook with you. So just to clarify, 5 years sounds a little short, but it's it's not our definition of time. And the the heart monitors, the $70,000, trust me, they're not you don't buy a $200 plug-in thing. It's like they're thousands of dollars. So, we a big expense of ours is maintenance contracts.

Any problems over the ambulance barn over there? No.

Building is okay. But I hate to break this to you. Somewhere along the line, not in the too near future, uh, one of the things they're telling us that right now we have people, of course, four people at night because they're on call. They sleep. We have two bunk rooms. We used to have two do a room. It was easy. Now they said, you can only have one person in a room. So, we have two bunk rooms. And right now we have two beds in our training room that one sleeps on one end and one sleeps on the other end. So somewhere in there we're going to have to do some kind of a change to that. So that's coming. Oh, I'm sorry.

I just have a question. If you're going to give a blood transfusion in the field, how do you type in cross? I mean before you Arie negative or positive. does not require that and that is part of most programs. Y it's it's exciting to me. I'm glad I'm not doing it. I just want to say that anybody in any town we talk about Milford or anybody that's here who's ever needed to call an ambulance, I mean 911, not a help I fell, but really needed one. Sure. All of this is worth it 10 times over.

Yeah. because I had recently had to do that and uh it was snowing, kept snowing, people were falling on the ice, the truck couldn't get in the driveway, but they did it and it was, you know, what what would we have done without it? Yeah. So, they're they're very dedicated when they do it. You know, that call goes out. They're going to get to you one way or another. I've heard some really funny stories and I've done some funny things too through the years to get wherever you need to go, you know, like windows, you know, doggy doors.

Yeah. Well, that didn't get that bad, but I will tell you that it just it's an it's a scary feeling uh you know, when you when you need one and but thank God you're there. So, thank you. I'm glad we deserve all the thanks that you get. Thank you. Any other questions for Don? I have a question. Sure. Hey Don, thank you and your staff for everything you do. Thank you. Um, do we have a plan though? Like have have you gotten together with the mayor and do we have a plan for the future as we talk about almost in in every meeting how we are an Asian community and and we are getting older as a whole and not just New Milford and the entire country is having that problem. Yep.

Um, so do we have like plans so it won't be like something that's going to be an emergency? You're talking capital items. Our fiveyear capital plan shows that we're Yes. having that. And also when it comes to patience, when we found that out, we've been working with the senior center.

They've strengthened balancing classes uh so that seniors can uh strengthen their core. We continue to try and push that out so that they won't have that need of when they fall having someone get up. So, we're kind of looking at progressively in that respect. also with our health uh our health district with Amy doing the same thing. But it is working within uh the ambulance, the fire, the police who will be coming up in a minute or two. Uh we meet all the time and talk about you know our capital plan 5 years, 10 years. You'll see in your capital plan those needs. Pete's been great in listening. Yep. Thank you.

Just a quick question on the Medicare reimbursement. You mentioned the supplemental plan. else where people have traditional Medicare. Is there a difference in what you get for Medicare the traditional versus Medicare advantage? I I couldn't answer that in detail. I'm not I'm okay. We have a billing company that does that because we just I wouldn't even dream of getting I'd just be curious if you could find you're just roughly Oh, you don't? Oh,

yeah. I'm not I just know there's a huge difference in Medicare flatout Medicare and someone that has Medicare with like someone that belonged um worked for a huge corporation or something they have all the extra that goes for it that usually pays almost everything in full which is great for the patient and there is so many different type of so many trust me I know Medicare very well it's advantages and disadvantages. Yep. Any other questions for Donna in the group? Thank you, Donna. Appreciate it, guys. Thank you. Thanks for listening to us. Next is the police department chief 108. Everybody, one of the

We do have we do have some revenue. Yes, we do. You have your you have your revenue.

Yep. And uh going to the revenue real quick while the chief is uh gearing up. That's page 18. and uh chief, we'll go to the revenues after you do your presentation. This starts good evening uh mayor. Good evening, town council, Mr. Chairman, and board of finance. Thank you for having us here today. We're very proud to be here and I'm very proud to be representing the fine men and women of the new Milford Police Department. Tonight I have with me my command staff and um we couldn't be so successful without them. As you can see, they've got this under control and we're working together as a team. Uh Deputy Chief Will Coxson, uh Lieutenant Lefand, Lieutenant Rier, and Lieutenant Wheeler. Lieutenant Wheeler is our senior officer. 32 years of service. Couldn't be more happy and proud of him and the entire command staff. So happy to be here uh this evening and I can't believe uh the progress the ambulance uh corps continues to make and we're so proud to work with them. As we're proud to work with our fine fire department friends, uh we've been working together as a team. We've been coming together more and more for what's best for our community. Uh very happy to be here tonight to discuss our budget and also tell you some of the successes we've had in the previous year because of the budget funding that you provide us and the community provides us. My goal is to provide a budget and a reasonable budget um that provides quality services for our community. The community expects and deserves these

quality services. We also have a responsibility to our officers. Our officers deserve proper training and proper equipment and support so they can do their job safely. It's a very dangerous job and we want to give them what they need to do their job. Now, we want to do all of this obviously in a fiscally responsible manner. The budget's our plan. It's our plan for public safety and service to our community. It allows us to operate in a manner to keep crime in check to address concerns of the community, for example, traffic safety, to address drugs in our community, help those who need it, and then also arrest those who are selling it. We also are very concerned about the safety of our children. Safety of our children in our neighborhoods, in our parks, in our schools. But we know that we can't do it alone. And I've said this before, community policing is the cornerstone of what we do. We work with the community. We work with all aspects of the community. Whether it's uh at a citizen police academy, a coffee with a cop, whether it's a car seat program, our cadet program, um or our community outreach officer. We're always looking to improve how we better connect with our community. We say that we want to get to know our community before they need us. Our staff works very hard every day, often in very dangerous conditions. And we just want to show you some of the things that our officers do day in and day out and some of the things all of the things that our budget supports. As you can see at the top, we have our number of calls. Each year uh we answer uh almost 20,000

calls and as you can see we had about a 4,000 call increase from last year to this year. That call increase is due to many different responsibilities we have and also the hard work of the officers who pulled over about 4,500 cars this past year. So you can see there's a lot of work the officers do. One of the things we do is respond to accidents. Accidents are down this year. Still, a lot of accidents. We really need to work on that. We're going to continue to work on that. And we work on that through education, enforcement, and engineering. So, we really take a multiaceted approach to reducing accidents. As I said, we do uh enforce and we have given out many many infractions over 1,800 infractions, which is about a third of the number of stops that we make. Domestic violence is a very difficult uh crime that we respond to. And not only are there the victims, the husband or the wife, but also the children are often victims in these cases. Children are very important to us. And in the schools, we have school security officers and school resource officers. And they work with the youth agency um in what was once called the juvenile review board and is now called the youth diversionary team. You can see there's been a reduction in the number of cases that these teams handle. And we think that that's a result of the uh positive role models we have within the school and the uh close eye that our school security officers are keeping on certain areas. For example, stairwells and uh uh the the laboratories. We're very happy to see a reduction in certain other areas of crime. For example, lararsenies from motor vehicles. And we connect those to burglaries. uh very similar type uh

crimes where they enter someone else's property and steal someone else's property. So, we see a reduction in both of those areas. Um and there's reasons for these reductions. Obviously, um if we can keep drug dealers out of our community, we can keep these crimes at a at a minimum and we've been doing a real good job at that. Criminal mischief is one of those crimes where we saw a slight uptick. And as a result of that, this year we're going to start watching these quality of life crimes. Um the detectives and our officers made an excellent arrest on somebody who was uh doing graffiti in our downtown area and uh we're going to keep the pressure on to keep those uh quality of life crimes down in that area. Assaults are somewhat static. We uh really really work hard to keep uh you know the community safe and we want to see that number come down. uh drug overdose is just a continual uh effort and not only on the police department's part but on the uh community's part. We uh do have a multiaceted uh approach to this. We really try to help those who are in need. Um five years ago that number uh would be 43 overdoses and we've uh had a sliding scale over the last five years. Now it's no victory lap. We need to keep going. We need to keep working hard to help people who need help. Next slide. Okay. Um this is a very important uh slide related to our budget because a lot of what we do involves budget avoidance and um Lieutenant Leand is our administrative lieutenant and he works uh with administration of grants and he does a fine job not only over the administration of those grants and the proper deployment but also in getting gaining these uh grants each year.

Sure.

Good evening. Thank you. Um as uh chief said I do administer the grants. Um this slide has uh to do with specifically traffic grants and uh there is some statistics there and I know the chief will go over um motor vehicle stops in general. Um obviously we get the message we know uh traffic in New Milford is one of the highest priorities uh our agency oversees. Um and as far as um implementing what we can do for that with budget avoidance um we implement traffic grants where we can find them. So, uh, last year in 2025, we were able to utilize, uh, $155,000 in traffic grants. Um, you can see the different ones in there. You you hear the, uh, social media posts and push out DUI, click it or ticket, um, aggressive, uh, speed and aggressive driving, rural speed enforcement. These are some unique ones that we haven't had in past years. And what this lets us do is, uh, frees up our officers outside the normal responsibilities of, uh, patrol sectors. Um, so this is in addition to their shifts. So instead of the normal patrol officers who are doing a fine job of uh also responding to calls, going to domestics, doing burglaries, criminal mischief, quality of life, and making motor vehicle stops and looking for those enforcements, this allows us to have extra hours of enforcement to focus on just those things, which adds to those numbers. And I looked it out um over almost 2,000 additional hours of enforcement resulting in over 2,000 extra stops just based on that. And um yeah, that's extra overtime that goes out for extra ships that is directly out obviously not budget funded by the state and the utilization from the officers has been uh getting better every year. More officers are taking it. They're going out there and I think the state sees that Nilford is one of the better participants in it. Um which I think allows us to uh qualify for more of these. So um it's definitely part of the overall mission. I know the chief's going to touch on more motor vehicle with this slide and the next one, but uh yeah, grants is a small part of it. Um

but it's been successful over the last couple years for sure.

Thank you, LT. Um as the LT said, we need to be responsive to the needs of the community. One of the primary needs is traffic safety and uh the officers are doing an excellent job. This number of stops is um a high number. It's the highest number we've ever had and as you could see it's uh about 1,200 more than uh last year and we think that correlation with accidents coming down uh is a result of that. Uh five years uh four years ago we had five fatalities in our community. Terrible, terrible uh fatalities as they all are. Three years ago we had five. Two years ago we had three. Last year we had one very unfortunate fatality. the work uh that the men and women of the New Milford Police Department are doing is saving lives. You can see that we give uh infractions. That's our enforcement aspect. But you can see we balance it and we're fair to our community. We want our community to learn uh to slow down and to drive safely and to not uh be distracted while driving. You could see DUI arrests are way up and they're up for a reason. We're really paying attention to drunk drivers in this community. We want to stop drunk driving. It's a terrible crime and um you know, people are getting hurt from drunk drivers. Nevertheless, 114 drunk drivers in this past year and uh we're keeping the pressure on. We want it to be uh zero, of course. Now, one of the things we did uh last year for the first time in over a decade is a DUI spot check. And that DUI spot check brought a lot of awareness in our community. We stopped uh and interacted with over 600 cars during that spot check and we brought a lot of awareness to drunk driving. We got some drunk drivers. We also got some other um issues and um it was a very worth worthwhile effort and we're going to do it again this year. We're planning

for one around Labor Day. These uh misdemeanor summons are another type of arrest. These are very high speeds. Um Yes, sir. Um, and first of all, thank you for your service. Uh, so with all these DUIs, are they predominantly people who live in town or people driving through town? Do do you have any It's a good question. It's about a 50/50 mix. Um, the number of stops we make are actually more so from people out of the community. So, um, on DUI, it's about a 50-50 mix, but in all stops, the majority are from out of the community.

Thank you. So on to the next slide. This slide shows um a heat map on the right side. That heat map uh just shows you that we try to concentrate in all areas of our community. Not just one area, but all areas. We really do try to reach out into uh Gaithersville up 202 uh Northville and up and down Route 7 and Grove Street. We try to get over by the uh lake communities where people are uh uh unfortunately traveling traveling too fast. um that question that was asked on where are uh people from that we stop. If you look at that far right graph, you could see that shows 51% are from out of town. Uh 49% are from town. Um the bottom uh line graph concerns me because you could see this uh 15y old uh age group at the beginning and then that spikes right up at 18. So, we got 18 year olds to 21 year olds who are obviously very new drivers, sometimes very distracted drivers, and um uh basically uh youthful drivers that we really want to uh prevent from having an accident.

Where are the elderly on that? The elderly are way down here. And you can see that that uh line declines the older you get. So, I think the more experienced drivers uh do uh I must just be running around with all those that are too old to be driving. they do a better job of not getting pulled over, I guess. But maybe that's it. Yeah.

But nevertheless, important data that we consider uh often because we want to determine uh how best to deploy our uh traffic enforcement staff and uh we also want to know where we have to focus to kind of reduce uh accidents most. Okay. Um here we have uh highlights of our great year. got a lot going on this year and these are just a few highlights, but I wanted to highlight the officers and I wanted to highlight the good work they do within our community. In the top left, that's our officer of the year, Officer Palmer. He's a 20-year veteran. He's a military veteran. He's an attorney. He's uh done an excellent job for us. You're going to see a video uh shortly of him and another officer uh actually saving a family from uh uh real harm. Um you could see in the middle we're hiring new officers and um you know right now we're down two officers. We had two recent retirements so we're in the process of hiring uh to replace them but we're on a continual uh basis uh hiring uh new officers. We have new sergeants uh moving into the mix. So our senior sergeants are retiring. Our new officers are bringing uh forth new ideas. And we're very happy to work with the community. We have a toy drive every year as you can see in the bottom middle off to the left St. Baldicks. We really support uh cancer research and do a fundraiser for that. Down in the bottom right, for the first time, we had a uh female self-defense uh program. Really wellreceived and really um important for us to uh connect with that aspect of our uh community. Now, the deputy chief has been really uh helpful in hiring, and I want the deputy to come up and just discuss the hiring process real briefly. Sure, Chief. Uh, as the uh chief mentioned, uh we have a pretty pretty robust uh hiring process.

It's a lot different. It's changed a lot over the last few decades. Uh chief and I have both been doing this over 30 years. And when we started, you would generally have a pool of 400 candidates come to one test on one day. uh and uh they take three or four police officers. Uh but as you saw the fire chiefs and the ambulance corps and the military for that matter, it just doesn't work that way anymore. The uh the pool is a lot smaller. Uh and so what we are doing is we are focusing on a smaller pool and being more agile to use a business term. uh and try and pick the best of the best and move a lot faster. Where we used to have a a testing process and you'd rank those 400 candidates and they would stay on that um that pool for a year or two and you would pluck people off there as uh openings happened. We're actually anticipating those openings ahead of time years in advance. We can see when people are getting ready to retire, reach year 25. Uh and we've been working with the personnel department. So, what we're doing instead of putting someone on a list and keeping them waiting, uh, we basically bring them in for an oral board right away. If they pass an oral board, they can go right on to meet the chief. If it meet meets the chief, we also incorporate a a ride along so that our officers can interact with that candidate right up front and we can get feedback from our own officers uh, immediately. And then it takes generally about uh probably about 90 days on most cases after that because you have to do a background investigation, a polygraph, psychological, medical testing, and we lose a fair number of folks from there. But what I can say is uh we're definitely uh in front of the power curve. There are some agencies in the state of Connecticut that are short well over 100 officers and as the chief says, we're down two to retirements all anticipated. And I can say that we already have uh a total of four in the pool right now with more interviews tomorrow. So, we're being very proactive

and I appreciate the uh the ability of the personnel department to help us out and push us through the process very quickly. Thank you, Deb. Thanks. I have a question. What What did you mean by the all aboard? What happens then? Excuse me. All aboard. Is that what you said?

Allboard pizza. No, it it takes a time. So unlike a a a civilian getting hired after you get your interview, you know, usually within a week or two, you get a thumbs up, thumbs down, or you go on to another interview. But to on board or or get someone all aboard on a police department, you have to do a background test, uh background check. So they get a thick packet. They have to fill out a whole bunch of questions. They get in their neighbors are interviewed. Usually their family members, their references are all checked, their credits checked. um uh police, FBI, fingerprinting, all has to be done. Then after that, they would have to go to a polygraph. Uh and that is done through contractors uh within the state that are approved by the state of Connecticut and licensed to do polygraphs. If they pass that, that polygraph result then has to go on to a uh psychologist, and they go for usually a two-hour interview with the psychologist. Uh and you don't know what you don't know about someone. uh despite all that intensive uh background investigation and they'll give a thumbs up, thumbs down. There's usually several boxes that they'll check and if they pass that, then we send them along to the medical through uh the personnel department and if they pass the medical, then they're hired. So, it's a lot it's a lot more intensive. It's much like the military uh how long the process takes to get through to actually, you know, get someone on board.

I'm glad I asked. It's really comprehensive. Thank you. It is. Yeah. Thank you. Thanks.

And the depth gave you the short answer. So um but nevertheless you can see it is a project uh process an arduous process and we refuse to lower our standards. So we're only looking to hire excellence. Um in this next slide I want to just point out a lot of our successes. This is just a very small portion of our successes in the last year. Um we are a very safe community. Our crime rates are down. We uh don't have a lot of violent crime. Um, and we are ranked uh fifth safest town in Connecticut. We're very proud of the work the officers do to maintain those low crime rates within our community. We're uh also uh letting uh the public know that we're very concerned with their safety and we always want to provide better uh safety for them especially at large events. So you know our community is growing. Our community also likes to uh involve uh the community in different large events. So, for example, the Memorial Day parade or the fireworks or these rock the block situations. Um, we recognize that there's certain potential there and we're doing a better job to address that. We're doing a better job with uh intelligence gathering before the event and during the event. We're doing a better job with deployment of our uh staff and just managing the the large uh crowds. We're also very proud of the new badges that uh we have uh uh got this year. Um two years ago, we were given the uh money from the council to get these badges. Very proud. They're individualized uh badges and very uh focused on New Milford. They also have our badge numbers on them. So, we're more identifiable where in the past we didn't have that.

That was a requirement of law.

Yep. So, if we go back to the accountability act, that was um to to make sure that we were very identifiable to the the public, not only with our names, but with a badge number. And uh we were uh very happy to comply with that. And we're very proud of the badge that we worked uh as a team to to develop. Active shooter training is uh something we do every year. We are at the uh run stage and we are working with the fire departments and the medics and it's amazing teamwork and if it happens or if anything similar uh to uh uh things that happen around the country happen here we are going to be able to react. We don't have our head in the sand. We realize it could happen here and uh we as uh emergency response personnel, fire, police and medics work together. We have continuous deescalation training at the PD. No longer do we just go to the range and qualify. We go to the range and we discuss scenarios and we talk about other options rather than a deadly use of force option. We talk about deescalating through communication. We talk about deescalation through posture and through distance. We continually talk about deescalation. Now, last year we had 20 use of force incidents. Um, of those 24 uh use of force incidents, they include uh two taser deployments. They include uh five uh pistol uh uh points. In other words, not firing, but just pulling the pistol and pointing it would be a use of force. Uh hands-on pretty much encompass the rest of those. And um to me with all the incidents we handled and that low number of use of force incidents, it just shows that our training and the UN officers understanding that there's other ways to approach a situation than to use force. So I'm very proud of them for that concept and that thought process.

We uh do uh many many welfare checks. As you can see, there's uh over 500 welfare checks that we've done during the year. And we do more and more of that. The more we connect with the community, the more they feel comfortable calling us, the more families feel comfortable calling us, the more checks we go on. In the last week, we've had two saves uh with officers just going knocking on the door because someone called them concerned about a neighbor and there were two saves. That was of course in conjunction with our uh excellent medics. Our citizen police academy is an amazing program and it continues. Um, each year we have a new female SSO in the high school and I think that's made a difference. You know, there was a void in the female bathroom areas and dealing with female students and she's done an excellent job of uh being a role model for the female students in the high school. So, we're very proud of her. Um, we're also proud of our detectives and I have uh detective uh Lieutenant Reelia here just to give you a brief on uh some happenings within the DPD.

Thank you.

Good evening and thank you. Um so for our detective vision we have maintained three detectives on the internet crimes against children's task force and this works diligently to help children uh prevent children from being sexually exploited online. So through our participation on this task force we received a $2,000 grant that assisted us in purchasing advanced intelligence software. Uh this technology has been instrumental in our investigations while also enhancing our ability to proactively monitor large events that the chief was talking about earlier and thereby strengthening overall public safety. Um over the past year, the detective bureau conducted 30 sex offender compliance checks to ensure ad uh to adherence to all statutory requirements. In addition to protect our youth, we conducted babe shop compliance check uh checks utilizing undercover operations to ensure businesses were not selling products to underage individuals. Um our newly assigned detective to the statewide narcotics task force has played a key role in regional enforcement efforts and was also directly involved in two significant drug arrests. Uh one being a couple months ago. In that arrest, he sees 28 grams of fentanyl, 7 uh.5 grams of crack cocaine, and the recovery of four firearms. Chief, I'll turn it back over to you.

Thank you, LT.

So, as you can see, it's a team effort, and as you see, we could try to address everything in the community and there are a lot of important issues in the community um to include uh uh drug overdoses and we really want to help people who are in need. Now, this next one is very important, this accreditation work. And I'm very happy to announce that yesterday we found out that our organization uh has been accredited at a tier 2 and tier three level within the state. Those are the highest levels of accreditation within the state. We're very proud to say now that we are a level one, two, and three uh accredited organization. And I want to thank the deputy chief for his hard work and leadership on that project and also Lieutenant Lefon for his coordination that project. Thank you both very much.

I want to thank you because uh when you came on board, one of the goals that we looked at there was no accreditation at the department and through your leadership now you're a level three. Thank you very much, mayor, and thank you for your support. We uh worked very hard and it took all of those uh five years to get to this point. So, I really appreciate all your hard work. That's quite an accomplishment. Congratulations. It is. We're very proud of it. Thank you very much. Yeah.

Um, let's see. Moving on through a few other issues that we uh had accomplished last year. We had uh standardiz standardized our roll call training. So, we really are working on internal communications at our police department. We think that we've done a very good job communicating to the public and now we're really trying to improve how we communicate within the police department. So, we're exchanging information on a daily basis and also in a standardized manner. We had the distinct honor of uh hosting the Polish National Police this last year. The uh Polish uh National Police Commander came here to New Milford and he was very impressed by our welcome. Um we have been invited to uh work with them further in the future and we look forward to seeing them uh again next year. It's very important for our officers to collaborate not only regionally and within the state but now we can say that our officers collaborate internationally and we're very proud of that uh opportunity. Um I did mention our officer of the year. This is kind of a new recognition we're giving. We've not noticed our third one this year. Officer Palmer is an excellent officer who I said is a 20-year veteran, a military veteran, and also an attorney who does an excellent job on investigations. And we're going to show you a video in a second of him in action. Uh our fleet is improved. We're doing a a really good job in so far as uh fleet maintenance. We're starting to uh keep track of the number of hours that our vehicles run and the number of hours that our uh vehicles idle. So that will help us better understand uh our our fleet needs. Nevertheless, our maintenance costs are somewhat flat and that's an indicator that the vehicles are being wellmaintained and uh uh the officers are using them in an appropriate manner. So we've promoted two new sergeants this year and that's a big step forward to

us. You know, a lot of times uh we progress with new ideas and new uh people, and we're really looking forward to seeing these uh new sergeants grow into the new position. Now, we're very happy with our communications uh division also, and I want to thank our dispatchers. Boy, if they get it wrong, we get it wrong. And uh they're that first ch uh link in the emergency chain. So, we can't thank them enough. We have some upgrades in dispatch coming up. One of them is this Viper software and this uh is going to allow us to utilize the text 911 in an advanced manner to exchange videos. So somebody's at a crime scene, they can take a video, text 911, send us the video, and we could send it out to officers and it'll really be helpful in our response and understanding uh the scene. So, um, at this time, uh, we want to close our presentation by showing, uh, you a video. And, uh, I want to show you this video for a couple different reasons. You'll see in our budget, we, uh, request, u, uh, uh, funding for body cameras. And this is an example of the body camera footage that we get. It's also an example of the work that the officers do. to uh give you a little preface on this video. The officers responded to a vehicle hanging off of a a cliff. They went over the guardrail. They're uh hanging on the guardrail and the car is actually slipping down the cliff. There's uh children in the vehicle. There's a woman in the vehicle. The officers arrive and they do their best to help them and they do. They save their lives and uh it's amazing the work they did. They went so far as to smash the window and try to get the people out. They went so far as to grab the car and hold it from sliding down the hill. And again, I just want to show you this video just to show you the type of work the officers just do every week.

Oops.

Okay. There you go.

This was in New Milford. This happened in Milford.

Yes. Okay. So, you can see the officers arriving on the scene. You can see they're trying to reach for the door. There's people in the vehicle. The officer's flashlight is on the uh vehicle. The officers will actually pull out a tool to break the windows. That's what they're doing now. You can see the glass just shattered. And the officers are giving instructions to the people inside to have them move more to this way, this direction. And here the officers are uh actually going to be grabbing the vehicle and holding on to the vehicle to stop it from sliding down the hill. So, it's amazing work. And as I said, one of those officers is our officer of the year this year. We're very proud of uh him and the work that the officers do day in and day out. I want to thank you all. Thank you for this opportunity. We appreciate the opportunity to come and tell you uh the the hard work the officers do, but also the work that is supported by the the budget. The budget really is our plan and we really appreciate you being considerate of the uh asks.

Um Walter. Yes, sir. Two quick questions. Um the body cams are just visual. They don't have audio. No, they do have audio. I'm sorry the audio didn't work in this case. Yes. Second thing is How's the distribution of dark? Were you guys involved with that as part of the drug prevention? Yes. As a matter of fact, I think that's one of the reasons that we do have a a lower instance of drug overdose deaths is because all the officers have uh Narcan. The medics of course have Narcan. Narcan is uh available within our community. So, families actually have Narcan and it is being used uh really often. Katie, um,

you mentioned it, but I think I'd like to let you know that it's not just me, but people say this to me. Your dispatchers, and you know, you've had many over the years. Yes. But the ones that are there now are not only efficient, they're pleasant. Yes. Which is, you know, important. And I want to say your internal staff ma as a matter of fact specifically your person uh Christine is very very great to work with and for people who need to get things done through the department you know various paperwork items. She's just great and my favorite of course is Denise. I I I know she does a great job.

Yes. And I haven't had to pay her salary in at least two years. I've been so good at not getting any tickets. Thank you very much. We have a st We uh have a staff of 70 and each one of them is very important. Absolutely. They're all there. And the dogs, you didn't mention them. Uh they're excellent. We we love our K9 K9. And Chief, a couple things that you are very forward thinking in the department. I know I believe it's in every car now. You and I had talked about uh the need in case someone uh was in a restaurant or someone was out uh picnicking or whatever choking. You actually now have the

machine you may see on TV and actually you can cut someone and actually save a life. So we're always forward thinking. We're always trying to be ahead of the curve and um you know one thing we do is respond to medical calls. And it's a terrible call to go to when a child is choking or somebody's choking and you can't help them with the himlick and uh you need to move to another option and these medical tools obviously give us give us that option to uh actually potentially suck out suction heard about that. So,

and uh just real quick for all of our members, just when you look at revenues, they're up 3,000 from the year year prior. And did anybody have any questions when it came to the expenditures that we saw? Okay. Any questions, uh, thank you, chief. Thank you, officers, for all the great work you do. Uh, this was always a concern here in Newford since I got here. been hearing it. But the 638 uh infraction, they it proves how how much work is being done. Uh especially on Route 7, you know, obviously one accident is too many, one death is too much, but you know, you guys been doing a great job.

And the town, I think everybody notices it, especially the numbers, they prove it. Thank you. Um and another thing is on the hiring, um New Muffers are growing. Uh the Latino community is growing in the miler. It's uh are you preparing as when you're hiring to have more representation, more Latino officers, more minority?

Yes. Uh actually we're so proud that we are a very diverse uh organization. We do have uh people that speak multiple languages to include a number of people who uh speak different dialects and uh Spanish. Um it's very important to us. We uh have two officers who are actually from Brazil. Um so we do and are very mindful. We want to have an organization that is very reflective of our community and we believe that we are. Okay. Thank you. Any other questions for the chief? Maybe you can grab a Polish officer.

I'm not a very capable interpreter. Okay. Um, under on page um I guess it's 202 on mandated expenses um 82,800 was cut. What is that for? That was for the cameras. Okay. For the body cameras and instead of doing it as a one-time payment, okay, they were able to negotiate and spread the payments out. Okay. That's for the reduction. Okay. Thank you. All the officers have them now. Yes, it's mandated. We all have them. And um you know, we even have spares. If one breaks, we make sure we get them another one right away. Any other questions for the chief or the Great job.

Yeah. Thank you all. Thank you very much. Have a good night. Great job. Thank you everyone everyone. Thank you so much. Thank you. Okay. Okay. So, all right, Walter. Motion to board of finance to recess until tomorrow evening at 7. Second. All in favor? I I motion from the town council to recess till tomorrow night. Second. All in favor? Oppose. Any objections? Thank you everyone.