Board - Regular Meeting

September 10, 6.30 p.m.

Roll call.

Chuck Fermi?

Yes.

Bob Dorshevitz?

Yeah, here.

Kim Gatica, here. Sandy Groth? Yes. Bill Ikes?

Here.

Joe Riley?

Here.

John Stewart?

Here.

Okay, you have a quorum.

Pledge of Allegiance.

to the flag of the United States BEFORE WE APPROVE THE AGENDA, WE'LL HAVE A BRIEF MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR ONE OF OUR FALLEN FIREFIGHTERS, AARON BIGGER. OKAY. AND WHEN WE HAVE ANOTHER MOMENT OF SILENCE FOR THE 25th ANNIVERSARY OF 9-11, Okay. Approval of the agenda. Now we're going to have, I think, two changes. One is the closed session is not going to happen because we are not ready yet. There's some more details that have to be worked out with the title. And then we have an insert of a slightly modified minutes. Is that correct, Kim? Yes. I guess we can do that at the consent agenda. So I need approval of the agenda with the last item I, closed session, deleted. Do we have a motion to accept the agenda with that change?

I make a motion that we accept the agenda with the deletion of the closed session.

Second? Second. All right. Okay. All in favor, say aye. Aye. Aye. All opposed? Motion passes. Next item, approval of consent agenda. This is where we have item one, some proposed, a change of the proposed minutes.

Correct. The current version, we changed, we had to make an edit to page 6, and a statement that Bob Dershowitz made, and then I think Sandy Groth has some additional changes that are not reflected, so we would want to have those.

So how do you want to handle those additional changes?

We can approve it with those additional changes.

Because it's just a clarification of something that I said that's referred to. It's not exactly what was said.

Yep. Okay.

We can approve it with further amendments.

All right, we'll make that. And so we also have on the consent agenda, I wanted, we have an appointment to the Planning Commission. One person is not here.

55th wedding anniversary dinner going on right now.

That is Dan Callahan, and then a new person, Patty Posios. Patty Posios is a Ford engineer and vehicle program and manufacturing project management person, and she's in the audience. Just stand up, Patty. All right. So, I can have a motion.

Wait, I'm sorry. I have a concern I just want to express about the list of bills, and it's something that I talked about at the last meeting, but I noted that there are quite a few expenditures by our clerk for food for election workers and I did spell out last week that that's something that we need to stop, and I have discussed it briefly with Clerk Gaedica, but I won't approve this with those expenditures.

Just for awareness, I have checked with other surrounding municipalities, and there are some in our area that do not provide food to their election workers. We will move forward in that vein. Obviously, I don't want to do anything that would be questionable by state law. And so we'll move forward in that.

So going forward, we will not offer food. Why don't you just raise the pay by 10 bucks and collect 10 bucks from everybody?

Well, and that's the other reason. But that's the other reason why we're not going to provide food is because we did increase for the primary election. the rate of what our election workers are receiving, and it was pretty significant from what they had been paid last time. The other issue that we've run into is that we've got several of our election workers that do have food restrictions and allergies, and so it's just really challenging to try to accommodate everybody's dietary needs, and so we've always told our election workers to bring food for the day, and so I also noticed that there were a lot of election workers that didn't even eat the food we provided. So now I'm concerned more about them taking it home and maybe getting sick because it's been sitting out all day long. So I think this will just hopefully help avoid some of those issues and concerns in general, too.

So we were in a transition for the primary. We substantially reduced it. from previous elections, and now it will be phased out.

But it does add up, I will say this, and again, we really appreciate our election workers. They do put in a lot of time and effort, but I think the fact that we did increase the rate significantly for this election cycle will help offset that, and again, we just want to avoid issues with individuals that have certain dietary restrictions as well. And I want to thank you, Clerk Gattaca, for being proactive about that. And I think one last thing, one of the things that we'll do, what another municipality does, they actually provide a break for their workers. And I noticed that apparently our election workers weren't getting a decent amount of break time. So hopefully by offsetting it and giving them the time to actually go and get food or go home and walk their dog and things like that, we can try to accommodate that. that as well. And I've heard that in other municipalities where food is not provided, but they're given a break, that they prefer having the break versus being provided food. Mr.

Supervisor, I'm sure you'll allow the clerk to present solutions and new rules going forward I do want to acknowledge that the finance director, Carol Rochon, the clerk, Kim Gadeka, and Trustee Groth confirmed that in 2024, that election cycle only, three elections, $10,325.46 of these chicken. Now, if you do $10 a box, That's 1,000 boxes from Lee's Chicken were purchased and distributed. And I know Mr. Zantop acknowledged that he was in receipt of one of those. So this is an aberration all across Michigan. And I have talked to the head of the Clerks Association, Mike Segrist in Canton Township with 90,000 people. But I wanna help by saying the number of precincts are being cut in half. the number of election workers are being reduced, they're being paid more, and they're given a little more time to go get food for themselves. So I think that's healthy. I think that's the right thing to do, a good thing to do. So I just wanted to put that on record. Those figures were confirmed by Ms. Roshan.

They can't be right. Well, okay. We heard it. We have a motion to accept or to approve the consent agenda. Second.

I make the motion to approve the consent agenda with amendments to the proposed minutes.

Second.

All right. ALL IN FAVOR, SAY AYE. WE HAVE TO DO A RESOLUTION, RIGHT? WE HAVE TO DO A ROLL CALL.

YES, CORRECT. BECAUSE OF RESOLUTIONS. OKAY. BOB DORSCHEVITZ.

WHAT AM I, WHAT DO WE VOTE ON?

WE'RE VOTING ON THE APPROVAL OF THE CONSENT AGENDA.

YES.

KIM GATEKA, YES. SANDY GROTH. NO.

BILL IKES.

YES.

JOE REILLY.

YES.

JOHN STEWART. YES. CHUCK CARME.

YES.

Motion passes.

Next item is public comment on anything you want to talk about. Three minutes.

Where's the board that I have?

All right, we have none. You have another shot later in the meeting at the end. Sorry, what do you need?

I had a board. Ruth Harvey was going to be here. Who? Ruth Harvey was going to be here.

Well, she's not here yet. She can talk at the end if that's what she wants to do. But she's not here now, so we're going to move on. Is that okay?

Okay.

All right. So under new business, we're starting the budget cycle, and we're going to talk about public safety, fire and police budgets today, and an overall presentation by Plant Moran, which is a public accounting firm that is helping us handle some of these details. Carol, do we want to do Brian's presentation first, which is page 124? They're out of order, I think, right?

Yeah, we could start with that.

The budget, grimly detailed numbers are first, and then about page 123 is where this starts. public safety fiscal 2027 budget presentation. Ah, there you go, got it. So, Bob, you're rolling the slides, but you also, Brian, have it on your laptop?

I don't have control of the slides up there.

All right, so he'll flip them when you tell him or whatever you want to do. You got to give me the secret signal. So Brian Camiller from Plant Moran will give us an overview.

All right. Well, thank you very much. Good to see everyone again. It is that time of year as we look ahead to the subsequent fiscal year and do our best to educate and have an educated guess as to where things are going to go. Tonight we'll cover public safety, police, fire, and the forfeiture funds. If you could please flip to slide four.

So that's page 123 or 4? Page 126. Page 120, yeah, 124 is where you can start it up. You were there a minute ago. Yeah, there you are.

There we go. So this is the pie chart of the public safety expenditures. Now keep in mind, public safety is part of the general fund budget. We'll be looking at the rest of the general fund at a subsequent meeting. So here we're just looking at a portion of the general fund. Total expenditures expected as of now are what will be proposed for 27, just under $16.5 million. Of that amount, 88% is tied to the cost of people. This is not unusual, but it certainly does demonstrate how little room there is for error, and how little opportunity there is for things such as capital outlay. So as you can see, the very little tiny pie piece at the top there, capital outlay, is only 2% of the budget. And equipment breaks, there's always a need to keep that maintained, and so there will be future decisions as to how you can afford to do that. Next slide, please. So if you compare this current proposed budget to the 2026 current budget, you might say, oh, look, expenditures are going down. That's great. And yes, it is, but it's kind of confusing or misleading. If you'll flip to the next slide. So the expenditures in total are going down. But a big piece of that is the capital outlay. In 2026, the township spent $1.1 million on a fire utility truck. And so that is not recurring. So if you just look at operational costs, operational costs are increasing. So salaries and wages, 9.5 million, and that is for both police and fire. 4% increase over 26. Headcount remains steady as far as what is being budgeted. The increase is related to contractual salary increases primarily. Now, the second bullet here, health insurance, this is the painful one. So, 19% increase over 26. Most of that comes from medical. That is not uncommon, unfortunately. We are seeing several years in a row of double digit increases. I've seen several municipalities of a similar size have 20 or 23%. So you're in good company, but it's not a company you want to be in. We'll talk a little bit more about that as we go on. Next slide, please. The retirement benefits, so pension and retiree health care. The retiree health care, this one hurts even more. 31% increase over 2026. This is the way of the world right now, especially with Blue Cross. There may be opportunities there to control some costs, but it would take a change, either change in provider or change in benefits. which would be quite difficult. But I believe there are opportunities there. Overall, it's a 10% increase over last year, with the bulk of it being the retiree health care. The defined benefit pension plan, the contribution there is only an increase of 3%. The DC defined contribution plan, that's a 14% increase. Now, it's not that we are contributing more per individual person. It's just that as people are retiring, they're retiring from the DB plan or into the DB plan and newer employees of the departments are entering in the DC plan. So you're going to have a continued shift from the DB to the DC contributions. And I would expect DC will continue to grow at approximately that rate as your population of employees in these departments changes at that rate. Next slide, please. So this is the capital outlay I referred to before. Last year, or in 26, the year we're in, the fire truck was a little over 1.1 million. So we are looking at a 78% decrease overall, not buying another fire truck, but this is still a significant purchase, $325,000 related to the dispatch system. Some computer data switches, just some minor tech purchases of 26,000. There are additional police capital purchases that we'll see when we look at forfeitures. Next slide, please. So I mentioned that the personnel costs are 88% of the budget, 2% in change capital outlay, the other 9% in change are these two categories, operational expenses, things like uniforms, ammunition, some minor building repairs, and then professional and contractual services, which would include training among other things. So 7% and 9% increases here. As a percent, it sounds high, but when you consider that these are only 9% of the total budget, the increases in terms of dollars is not that significant when you compare it to something like the healthcare or the pension contributions.

So the first point there, 7% decrease, that's correct?

I'm sorry, yes, seven decrease on operating expenses, 9% increase to the professional. It is a net, it's about the same plus or minus a very small amount. But you do see the 9% increase and like, oh, hang on, what's that all about? But really dollar wise, it's a drop in the bucket overall.

So how did you get $914,000 out of operating expenses? What were the major two or three or four things?

There are some building repairs for one of the fire stations, a new set of windows would be a big one.

Well, that's an increase.

Well, that's part of the, yes. Offsetting some of the other decreases. Carol, could you help me on this one, please?

Bob, I didn't hear your question.

You managed to decrease operating expenses by $914,000. What were the big items?

I can't give you specifics. Chuck and I went through the budget. We looked at the different lines. I know ammunition was one that we cut back on, so we looked at... I believe we looked at overtime. We backed some overtime down. So there was different choices we made on some of the higher items that brought the budget down on those.

Yeah, and that's not a $914,000 decrease. That's the total of the operating expenses.

Oh, okay. I misunderstood that. Thank you.

Excuse me, how do you... How do you accurately cut down on overtime because we really don't have any way of knowing?

If we need to amend the budget next year, we can go ahead and do that. We had, go ahead. Go ahead, no. We looked at it, we thought, compared to other years and brought it, you know, we originally increased it and then we came back down and realigned it some. So you don't know what's gonna happen year to year. At this point, that's our best estimate. If need be, depending what happens, it may need to be amended next year.

So over time in both dispatch and fire, is very high this year. So we're expecting some pullback for next year.

Can I comment that in dispatch center, we've had a 50% turnover, which has caused overtime. We have brought in a part-time dispatcher from another municipality that has assisted with that. We have also trained six of our police officers to work in the dispatch center as a result. And so we are seeing increases there.

And on our side, we're down four personnel.

All right. Four people are ill. And so that means people work overtime to supplant it or you don't have the person on, you don't have the seventh person in the fire service on that particular day.

Please go back one slide. Right, so here is the revenue that supports public safety, primarily property taxes. You have four separate millages, three that are combined police and fire, one that is fire only. But what you will notice is we were talking about $16 million of expense and only $12.6 million of funding that is directly tied to that. Public safety is not self-sufficient on only its individual dedicated revenue sources. It does require support from the township's operating millage, state shared revenue, or if necessary, using some fund balance. Next slide, please.

Yeah, that's an important point. Fund balance is the money in the savings account.

So again, we saw that expenses overall were going down comparing 26 to 27, revenue is as well, but that is again related to the fire truck. So the township did not pay cash for the fire truck, it's being financed over several years. And so the way government accounting works, the proceeds from debt count as a revenue. So taking out that, the actual, there is an increase from your property taxes and the other sources of about $376,000 or a 3.1% increase. Next please. That was the medical equipment

that we purchased from Stryker.

Yeah, we didn't spend a million dollars on a fire truck last year.

It wasn't part of a utility truck?

No, that was only 250,000.

It was a utility truck and there was equipment.

Ah, yes, thank you. Okay, I mentioned the three police and fire combined millages and the individual fire millage. Those, you still have quite a few years left on those. The police and fire combined ones run through 2035. The fire only runs through 2040. So there isn't a concern that anything immediate related to those specifically would have to happen, but if in order to take some of the burden off of the rest of the general fund operations. You'd have opportunities to go to the public or do other requests for additional revenues there for public safety. Next slide, please. So here in total, public safety, $12.6 million of expected revenue, 16, a little bit under 0.5, a million dollars of expected expenditures. So to a tune of $3.8 million that the rest of general fund absorbs. But really it's all activities in the general fund are supporting each other. And so those, your operating taxes, your state shared revenue, your interest income, those are all things that are not restricted for any particular use. So they go where the township needs them to go. And so in this case, a good chunk of it does go to supporting public safety among other things.

That number 3.8 million, it's a little bit under two mils. A mil is what, 2.3 million, something like that? Around 2.4. 2.4, all right.

Is that all we have is one mil for general? General operating?

You'll see that later on. It'll be less because of Headlee. It's in the package. It's about .8 something.

Okay. It'll come later. We're going to approve that for the county. Yeah, we're going to approve the lobby tonight.

So, we can skip through this. I made the points on the last slide.

Okay. Are we done on this slide? Yeah, we're done. Yes, please.

All right, so I think this slide's very telling. So the bars are your expenditures for public safety going back to 2023. The red line is your revenue. And we backed out the issuance of debt from last year on the equipment. to get a truer picture of what the trend is. And you'll notice it's very plain as day that the revenue is going up, but it's much closer to being flat when you compare it to expenditures, which have increased significantly over the past five years. That is very common, unfortunately, across the state of Michigan. That's pretty much the story everywhere. Your property taxes without a new millage or without a Headlee override, you're limited to the lesser of 5% or inflation. And even though we did have a year or two of inflation over that 5%, by and large, you can expect two and a half percent all the way back to 1994. So, Expenditures, as we've already covered, do not go up at the rate of inflation in most cases. They go up significantly more when you're looking at things like healthcare.

One thing is, most of the new building going on in Plymouth Township will result in no revenue for Plymouth Township because they are designated as brownfield tax increment financing units. and typically you don't receive revenue that you can keep, because the way it is, we collect taxes, the equivalent of taxes, and then it's returned to the developer for expenses of cleanup and interior roads and other things that are part of the Brownfield law. And they have, typically it's 20 to 30 years. 30 years is the cap. For example, Meijer. will be 28 years, and they'll never completely recoup what they invested.

So Plymouth Walk is a brownfield. Courthouse Grill, or whatever it's called now, Hillside Residences, is a brownfield. Farmer Jay's property is not. Right. So we'll get tax revenue off of that.

That's residential.

Yeah.

And all of MITC is a brownfield? Yeah, anything going on in MITC is brownfield.

Well, that's a five mile road project.

Next slide, please. So that concludes the general fund and the major police and fire expenditures. Now we are shifting our attention to the forfeiture funds. So during certain public safety operations, the township gets to participate in the money that is being forfeited by the bad guys. However, that has to go through the entire legal process before you get the money. And it does not matter when the operation or the bust occurred, you have to wait for the final adjudication of that case. And so while we know that there have been cases in the recent past, we don't know when that revenue will come in, and so we're not allowed to count it yet. The three different forfeiture funds have some nuances, but for the most part, they act basically the same. That, by law, that money can be used to supplement the budget, but not supplant, meaning you can buy something extra. You can't pay for something you were already planning on doing. That's what supplant would be. Now in this case, we are not supplanting because this budget is, it's just theoretical at this point, it's pure discussion. And so these things are not being replaced by the forfeiture funds. Now, these purchases still do have to go through the township's regular purchasing policy and purchasing procedures. I make that point because I do hear often in the public, not here, but just across the state that, well, the police have this money, they get to spend it however they want. Well, no, that's not true. There are laws about how it's spent and it is up to the township board to approve any purchase as you would with any other money. Next slide, please. So I'm not going to go through the detail on this. I'll leave that up to the chief. But this is what is currently planned to be purchased through the federal, the state, and the IRS forfeiture funds. If you, over the next couple slides, what you're seeing, next one, please. We're just counting interest revenue on the money that is currently invested. We are not expecting or planning for any of those cases to be resolved. If they are, great, we'll get an influx of additional money. But if they take until 2028 or later, we still have enough money in the forfeiture funds to cover the planned expenses for 2027. So in this case, the federal forfeiture fund would still have $81,500 at the end of the year. On the next slide.

This is state. That was federal. This is state.

This is state. $24,500 would be remaining. And on the next slide from the IRS forfeiture is $110,000. So that concludes the slide deck. Are there any questions that we can answer on the budget? Or if you have particular questions about operations of the two departments, I'd probably just default to the Chiefs.

I'm curious to know, previously we were setting money aside for OPEB, and I know we did not do that in 2026. Is that money included in this budget?

No.

Tonight, we're just going over public safety. That would be next week for general fund, but no, there is not any money for OPEB that we're paying additional. In the past, it was $250,000 a year. We were obligated through 2024, 2025, but that obligation is since over and we haven't budgeted to do that yet.

2025, we put in an optional $250,000. 2026, we put in zero. OPEB is future retirement medical premiums. There's somewhat of a debate on that. You have to manage to the state minimum level, or you have to have a workaround plan that you submit a state law. But one thing that I'm concerned about is if Laws change at the federal level, and we have a pile of money in there. In other words, if you get Medicare for all, then we don't have to fund this. So you want to be careful with your pile of money.

But we are putting ourselves in a, I just want to understand this, because I don't, we are by not funding it, we also are taking a chance that it's kind of like kicking the can down the road, and in the future we may end up having to make up what we're not doing now.

So far, no. We're paying as we go, and we're managing to the state minimum level. Is it 60%? What is the... For OPEB.

It's 40% for OPEB, 60 on pension.

60 on, okay, I've got it flipped around. Okay. So 40% of your anticipated expenses. That's what's required, right? It's required.

I think we're at 29 for OPEB. No. It's got to be more than that if the minimum is 40 because we're over the minimum. I'll have to look at that again. We didn't have to submit a workaround plan. Right, that was filed in June, I don't remember. I'll have to look at that.

I just wanna be sure that we all are cognizant of what that is.

Through your last audit, you were 49.03% funded for OPEB. So 50% and the minimum is 40.

He had a question down here.

Yeah, Ron, just to double check. I thought you mentioned the fire millage is good through 2040 calendar year, right? And then the combined police and fire three millages, what year? 2035.

Okay.

All three of them expire in 2035.

That's my understanding. Way out there. Okay, go ahead, John. You had a question?

Yeah, yeah. Well, I got a comment and maybe Brian would like to enlighten. First of all, I appreciated this budget and I will support it. It appeals to my conservative instincts of money. I appreciated the memorandum prepared by Carol and yourself, Mr. Supervisor. Two things that I noticed, Expected use of fund to balance to the tune of $734,500. I'm just commenting and we can continue to do that. Brian, would you care to comment on a decrease in revenue sharing of 9.5%? Understanding that on Tuesday of this week, the state legislature had a petition filed to increase state rep and state senate salaries 25%.

I'm not surprised.

You are. Well, there's always November and December, lame duck. But I was a little surprised at the decrease of almost 10% in revenue sharing. I served up there when there was a guy named Governor John Engler, and he was a bulldog on maintaining. John Engler, Republican, and he found me to be an ally. on maintaining our revenue sharing. So a drop in one year of 10% of our revenue sharing, you know, Where are we going with this?

Some of that is the reclassification of money going to the roads instead. So being put into the Act 51 formula, which as a township, you don't get the benefit of.

We don't get the benefit of it.

So the cities and villages, they're basically held harmless or perhaps they get even more in total, less state-shared revenue, more road funding, but you as a township are on the short end of that stick.

Okay.

Okay.

That, who knows, some of that could change mid-year because we have an election in November. You have new people and they may decide to do something different.

I'll get bigger raises.

Okay, so any other questions on this presentation? And then we're going to have police and fire chiefs talk on their specific items. Carol, is that what we want to do? All right. Some of the detailed line items that are in the front, the earlier part that is blue and various other colors. Page, probably less than page 123. I may have misspoke here. It's page 144. There's a police car on it. 112. Well, I think you're... Chief Nytel, you might want to start on, I think it's page 144. Plymouth Township Police Department has a picture of a police car. Yeah, that would be our first slide. Yes, sir.

Do you want a PowerPoint? Do you have a PowerPoint that has this? Yeah, Bob, do you mind?

I can just let you know. Fair.

Maybe just X that in the corner there. Oh, it's a PDF, so we're good. Here we go.

Very good. To the Board of Trustees, it's an honor to be here today. It's an honor to be your police chief. I want to first start by acknowledging the 343 firefighters and 71 police officers who died on September 11th. It was the darkest day of my career and many of us as first responders, so if you could keep those you could keep their families in your prayers, that would be greatly appreciated, so thank you. I'd also like to let the Board of Trustees know Lieutenant Ryan Krebs is with us here tonight, who has worked very diligently with assisting in constructing this budget. Ryan will be retiring after 25 years of service here at the Plymouth Township Police Department in November of 2026, so I wanted to acknowledge that and thank him for, I've had a chance to work with Ryan over the last four years, He is a consummate professional with integrity beyond reproach, and we're going to greatly miss him, but we appreciate it. As I talk about Lieutenant Krebs, I wanna always start with what do we value at the Plymouth Township Police Department? We value integrity, professionalism, and customer service. Those are the building blocks of our department. That is the first discussion that I have with any new employee that's coming in and any employees that are probably walking out the door. Our police officers, our PSAs, dispatchers, and staff take great pride in protecting and serving the community of Clement Township. I sent a recent MLive article about FBI stats. This township is rated one of the safest townships in the entire state of Michigan, if not the entire country, and we're very proud of that, and we work very hard to make sure that our violent crime stats are at those low levels. And that just doesn't happen. That is the hard work of the men and women who are out on the street every single day. We were just out less than an hour ago on a mental health call where our officers had a petition subject. I mean, these calls are more and more frequent and more and more dangerous. So I believe that our officers do it. They're not only good, but they're as good as anybody in their profession. So and I believe that very strongly. Our calls to service, just to give you an idea of a call for service would be when a resident calls us for assistance. In 2023, we had 13,863 calls. 2024, it increased to 14,142 calls. In 2025, 15,000 calls. 536 calls. So we had a 12% increase over those three years and a 9% increase just from 2024 to 2025. As we all know and was already discussed you know with our West End developments certainly those calls for service are not going to in my opinion will not decrease. Enforcement, you see our officers out there every single day working hard. Our traffic stops, 2023, our officers conducted 4,338 traffic stops. 2024, it increased to 5,087 traffic stops. 2025, 7,082. That's a significant increase, 63% over two years, and a 39% increase just in 2025 alone. These stats reflect the proactive enforcement that is done every single day by our officers and I'm very proud of them. First slide of the slide show is our organizational chart. Starting with the chief of police, the deputy chief position, we're still working very hard to fill that position. On the patrol side, we have Lieutenant Ryan Krebs, charge of patrol. Our shifts are 12-hour shifts, so we have a sergeant and four officers on each of the shifts. We have two swing shift sergeants, and the strategy behind the swing shift sergeants is that when we have a sergeant that takes vacation training, excessive amount of time, they're going to be away from their shift, that we have one of those officers sergeants that plug into that position. During 2025, Sergeant Champagne also worked as our primary contact for the live golf outing. Sergeant Hinkle is also in charge of our training. He's the second swing shift sergeant. We also implemented a CMV traffic safety officer position as Officer Fetter. In our detective bureau, which will be our investigative section, we have Detective Sergeant Jason Hayes. He has two detectives. We have a school resource officer, a detective assigned to DEA. That position is currently vacant. We do plan on replacing that. I've had meetings with the group supervisor Jeff Moore, and the assistant special agent in charge, Dominic Bracchio, on replacing that. So we will go through a process and select one of our officers to go back and serve as a DEA task force officer. Officer Jackson Chalmers is our task force officer assigned to Homeland Security Investigations. Just this Monday, Noor Teha was hired as our administrative assistant. So far, she's doing a phenomenal job. and we're excited to bring her on board Cindy Feld is our director of civilian operations who's in charge of our dispatch center. That job has been challenged. As I mentioned previously, we've had a 50% turnover there due to retirements. Folks taking other jobs are going into different fields. And the dispatch center is also known as our nerve center. It's a tough place to work, and I think our dispatchers do a phenomenal job. If you ever called them, you see the level of service that you get. We have a records management analyst, Sarah, and then our senior records clerk, Glenn Miller. Go to the next slide. Okay, the pie chart in front of you, as it was mentioned previously, when you do The math, I believe 91% of our budget is people costs. So we have a very lean budget. 9% of it is operation, but 91% of it are contractual people costs. Next page would be the police department purchases anticipated for 2027. We have no capital outlay. Our police vehicles, generally we have replaced in the past two to three vehicles a year, depending on the rotation. This year we are not replacing vehicles. I would not suspect that that would continue in the future as the vehicles have got to be replaced. Forfeiture purchases, we have the taser lease agreements, multi-year agreement, that's less lethal. instrument that we have and then the FLAC license plate, license plate reader lease agreements would be year two, $36,000. General fund purchases, first aid kits and biohazard kits for each of our patrol vehicles. These are vital for our officers. Ballistic vests in our carrier replacements, For 10 sworn officers, those rotate. We also have a grant that I'll talk about further, but we do get a portion of the ballistic vest back through a grant. The MILO training pistols, I'll talk a little bit more about that down the road. MILO stands for Multiple Interactive Learning Objective. It's a shoot, no shoot type of system. Very sophisticated. We are currently in a proposed a grant with the city of Plymouth, just under $200,000 grant to have this system. Our portion of the grant would be purchasing these training pistols, all the other equipment. We're also looking to use a vacant room at the DPW to house the equipment. This equipment will be used by our officers, the city of Plymouth, another opportunity for us to partner with them. And that grant will go in front of MCOLS, which is our state licensing, law enforcement licensing committee. That'll go next week, September the 16th, it'll go in front of the MCOLS, and we're hopeful that we do receive that grant, but more to follow on that.

Do you have an answer on that day, or are there several months to wait?

No, I believe we'll get an answer that day, so... we're hopeful working one agency puts in for it it's a lot harder to get when you have multiple agencies that put in for it it's it's you have a much greater chance of getting the grant so we're hoping that strategy pays off we'll see Sergeant Ballmer and and my staff worked very closely on that Sergeant Hayes and put together what I feel is a very strong proposal All right, 2027 dispatch and jail budget. As was mentioned, our 911 system is due to be replaced. That's a significant 14% in $325,000 capital outlay purchase. This budget is about 74% is people costs. Next slide. The totals for police, as we can see, we had an increase in police, increase in dispatch. A lot of that was due to that Viper system. Decrease in our budget on jail. And the federal forfeiture numbers are currently down. That fluctuates, as was mentioned, and is not predictable. I can tell you that we work very hard to be involved with cases that could result in forfeiture as part of our narcotics investigations. but as my predecessor had mentioned many times, you gotta be careful of being addicted to forfeiture because it's, you know, no one that's coming. That was my joke. Was that yours, Bob? Yeah, he stole it. He stole it from you? We were addicted to drug money. Yeah, so. Yeah, so we, overall, we had a 5.15% increase. Next page. Police Department grants and reimbursement. The Office of Highway Patrol, that's an overtime detail. If you see our officers out there on St. Patrick's Day, New Year's Eve, the night before Thanksgiving, we strategically do enforcement for alcohol enforcement as well as distracted driving. There's overtime that's posted. We show the results to the state of Michigan, and then they reimburse us for that grant. Public Act One is continuing professional education funding, CPE funding, provided by the state of Michigan, which is really vital for us, $31,000. This year, we had 31 FTEs, although we have 33 total, there's some math that's done, and you have to have X amount of hours last year because of people that had left. We also have one officer that's on long-term disability that, that's why our number is 31, so we received 31,000 for that. Michigan law enforcement distribution funds, 5,900. The 911 training funds, extra duty overtime, We have businesses, houses of worship, who reimburse us for officers that work overtime. The reimbursement cost includes the overtime funding, their benefits, as well as vehicle, gas, and that information. Task force overtime reimbursement, we are now getting, we have a funded position with DEA, so that, what a funded position means is that any overtime that they work that is related to a narcotics investigation that is a DEA case will be reimbursed up to, I believe, I don't know the exact number, but it's around $18,000. We are now also getting OCDEF reimbursement for our Homeland Security Investigations detective, and OCDEF is Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force, and that's basically its alphabet for funding of overtime. You have to work very specific cases that are related to disrupting high-end criminal enterprises. I mentioned the Bulletproof Vest, and that's a Patrick Leahy Bulletproof Vest program where we get a percentage back for those. Next slide. Community Outreach. This is something that is very important through our accreditation process. This is also an area that we will be evaluating this year. Coffee with a Cop, we have those events. Our Senior Fraud Exploitation Program, We have that at various locations, including the Welcome Center. Run, Hide, Fight active assailant training. We have a group of trainers who offer free training for houses of worship and businesses on Run, Hide, Fight. Very similar to what the federal government offers, but we offer to our businesses and houses of worship One Pill Can Kill Opioid Awareness presentation that we generally will give annually. That's done by our Drug Enforcement Administration Task Force Officer. Police Day at the Ballpark where we partner with the Miracle League. We have used, our officers come in on their own personal time to spend time with the kids at the Miracle League. It's really a great event. The Faith in Blue and the Citizens Police Academy, unfortunately this year, they were on my slides last year, we canceled both of those this year just due to staffing and the ability to pull them together. March is reading month. Again, we were able to reach out to over 70 classrooms. We offered any of our teachers in the school district, as well as the private schools, as well as the daycare centers in Montessori. And in that process, touched and impacted positively close to 2,500 students in our community, which I think is significant.

Chief, what are those facts? How many visits?

We had over 70 in the month of March. 70 classrooms. So 70 teachers took us up on our offer to read to their classrooms.

A Plymouth County police officer went to a classroom.

Yeah. I did eight myself.

And promoted reading. I can't thank you enough.

Thanks, John. Okay, next slide. Budget needs beyond 2027. So cars are gonna be reoccurring. We did not replace any cars this year. I think Lieutenant Krebs has done a masterful job with our fleet to make sure that we get the maximum amount of mileage out of the vehicles that we have. So we're working very diligently on that. Replacing Detective Bureau cars, that's 2028. the mileage will, as we estimate those mileage, will come up at that point. The HVAC system is something that I've been bringing up for a number of years, and it's concerning to me. I think, I don't want to speak on the HVAC system on this side, but I can tell you on our side that It's at some point. It's going to have to be replaced and the concern I have is the system as I'm told was Too small the system put in when the building was built and if it's a 250 or 300 thousand dollar replacement, and there's there's time that needs to happen to get that system up and running and you know, can't close the police department. So that's not an option. So we're going to have to come up with another issue with that. So I think that's something that we need to monitor. And what I want to have to do is come back.

We're doing preventative maintenance.

Pardon me?

Preventative maintenance is going on. Okay. Wow. I've personally been up there to inspect it. I recall that. That's what we heard. So we're monitoring it.

Okay. So can we do some of this stuff regionally combined with other agencies like a canine program? It's nice to have a dog, but you don't use it every day. Or a drone, you know, you have to have a trained operator. And how often are you going to, if you need a drone, it'd be nice to have, but how often are you going to use it?

Well, we're the only... agency around that doesn't have these assets. So they're, you know, the, um, they already have them. So, well, maybe they could split the cost of, well, we, they help us, you know, if I need a drone, I either get a, we get a drone from Northville township or Canton or Farmington Hills or Livonia. Uh, they're gracious to help us. But, uh, the question I ask is you're pulling a township and you don't have the drone. So, We have $25,000 that's coming for violent crime reduction. It's a one-time payout for the state of Michigan. My recommendation would be that we use that $25,000 to have a drone program. So sharing a dog, we couldn't share a dog. The drones, you know, we're not... We could use a drone for, you know, missing persons, for tracking bad guys, for there's a lot of different reasons that you could use drones. You know, I would say in a month's period, we probably have anywhere from, you know, five to 10 times where we could use a drone. So they're a vital piece of equipment and, you know, Again, we're the only agency in this area that does not have drones. It is, but I think people need to know that.

Is a drone program a one-time cost for equipment, or is it an annual cost that you have to keep?

Well, the upfront cost would be the equipment cost would be more upfront, but then there would be training and things that would be lesser as it went on. And then, of course, the equipment would last X amount of years.

Okay, and how about on the canine? What is that? Guestimate, a canine program for dogs and training and food.

Yeah, a canine unit can be used for what many municipalities have done is used it for, it's a drug sniffing dog, partially, but also for tracking. If you have a missing Alzheimer's patient, missing child, things like that, that you can use it as a tracking. And a bad, you know, bad guy. If you had a criminal that you're looking for, you'd use a dog to trace it, so. Most of the time with canines, and a lot of times, they're utilized by drug units. For example, the DEA crew, when I ran my DEA crew, the dogs that came and helped us made a lot of money because they were cut into every forfeiture that they were a part of. So there's benefits that way, too. So the other side of it is I can tell you because I've been with Northville Township's dog when they go into a school, and the dog is the MVP of the police department in Northville Township. It is what it is, but the kids love it. If you go into a senior's home, the seniors love the dog. You know, for community outreach, it's probably one of the best strategies there are. Agreed.

I just want to know, from a cost standpoint, annual budget, is that a small outlay, a big one?

Yeah, we've had the Lions Club has offered to donate everything. The big issue is the car. You have to have a special car with the... you know, the special heating and cooling. Thank you, Chuck. Yeah, the cars is the big thing with the, and then finding, you know, you got to make sure you have an officer that's going to do that. So I think in my career, they've been both my time at the Farm and Tittles Police Department at the University of Michigan, they were outstanding uses. We used to have one.

25 years ago, we had one.

Yeah. I don't know when he aged out. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and then with the HVAC system, you know, we have a, uh, a garage door, our Sally port doors by law, we have to have Sally ports where, and a Sally port is where we make an arrest and the police car goes into a Sally port and the Sally port doors close. Right. So that's in the back of the police department. Um, the, um, Our doors, we continue to repair them, but they're on their last leg. So we're going to need new garage doors. And if you look at them, they're rusting all the way around from the bottom and all the way up. And I know Chuck has made some changes as far as salt and things like that, but what damage was done was done. But at some point... The Mevo system is an updated, refreshed 911 system. If we have an issue in this building, the Mevo system gives us, and we had an opportunity to use it in 2025 during Live Golf. We were able to have all the 911 calls that came in on the grounds of St. John's all came into Central, into our command post, which was inside of St. John's. If we have a gas issue or if we have some kind of threat at the police, if we have to evacuate that building for whatever reason, that gives us an option to remotely run our 911 system. We have redundancies built out with Norfolk Township and with This is another system.

Is a geofencing involved in that? You can, and we did. Yeah, we used it.

We did the geofencing with the Inn at St. John's. So any 911 calls that came on that property went directly to that Mevo system. We still operated normal business here, but we were able to run that system during that event.

So that means if somebody called 911 on the grounds of, ST. JOHN'S, IT WOULD GO INTO THE MEVO? CORRECT.

SO, YOU KNOW, SOME OF THE BUDGET THAT I THINK, YOU KNOW, AS WE MOVE FORWARD, OUR AMMUNITION WAS REDUCED FROM 22,700 TO 15,000. There are areas, which I don't like to do, but if our officers need to go to the range and they need to shoot, and this ammo is not just bullets, it's also all of our non-lethal, which would be our gas and some of the other devices we have for non-lethal. As I mentioned, the drone, I would look to use that $25,000 that we get from the state to get that up and running. Our uniform expenses.

What's the name of that state program for the $25,000 as an acronym?

It's Violent Crimes Reduction. It's a one-time. It's a one-time.

It's based on your violent crime rating.

Yeah, yeah. We're getting a lot less than everybody else because we're doing violent crime. It's pretty bad, right?

We're glad we're a lot less in crime rating.

Chief, would the drone program have helped us? Locate and apprehend the three dogs from Beacon Hill Court.

We utilized Canton's drones and Norfolk Township's drones during that, yes. The night, or the early morning that it happened, because it was kind of right at daybreak, we had Norfolk's out there. We also utilize them. We had a window peeper. This is a year, year and a half ago in Trailwood, and we utilize them also in the middle of the night. Yeah, they're very effective. So they're, yeah.

How many patrol cars do we have? I'm sorry? How many patrol cars do we have in the recurring?

The patrol cars, 11? 10. 10, okay.

And detective bureau vehicles?

Thank you. So three detectives and two task force officers. Yeah, so any questions?

We will refine this budget as we get closer. There'll be adds and deletes, most likely.

Yeah, and I think it's important also to note that retention and recruiting and people want to come to this police department because of the culture that's created here, but the competition that we're dealing with is significant. We have Livonia's getting a $56 million building, Novi, $73 million, Northville, $44 million. we're not, I'm not asking for a building. I don't think we need a building, but I, but this building is starting to have problems. And I, you know, I just, I'm hopeful we address them. And what I don't want to do is come back in front of you. And then somebody asked me why we didn't know about the HVAC system.

So. Carol, how much do we have set aside in building? Is it 50 or 200? that emergency fund.

I think there's total in there of 250, but police, fire, township have all put money in towards there. So if you decide, I guess you could use it all, but only a portion of that is for police.

All right. So we have a reserve that is outside of this budget.

Any questions?

One last one.

Do we lease or buy our patrol cars? We buy and we've done Sergeant Scott Titterington is currently in staff command training and he's doing a very extensive research on buy versus lease. You know, I preliminarily The short term, for a couple years, two, three years, the lease saves you money. In the long term, I don't think it's going to save us money. So Redford Township is an agency that utilizes lease program. They like the program. It's been good for them. rotate the cars quicker. We're trying to get our cars to between 90 and 100,000 miles. When they get close to 100,000 miles, because a patrol car out on patrol that's running constantly, that 100,000 is really equivalent to 300,000. We are looking at that as an option. I'm not ready to come back with a proposal of that. I know I've talked to Chuck about that numerous times, so we're But, you know, I wanted Sergeant Timmonson to collect the data and make sure it was a good fit for us. The other thing with leasing cars, I think if you go to a leasing program that is, for example, Redford Township, they do all their cars. The entire township is in the leasing program, which is another benefit to the leasing, depending on, but we don't have the number of cars that they have either, so that would affect the volume as well.

So presently we have almost, I think, six to eight vehicles that are essentially new, that have zero to 20,000 miles on them. So we're going to use up the inventory before the warranties expire.

Chief, could potentially one of the vehicles we have now be outfitted for a K-9 unit? Or do they got to be completely new?

You could. The problem is the net limits are the remainder of the because when you have a canine, it's it's it will be one person using one car. So ours, we have four shifts. So the cars rotate between. So, yeah, I mean, it's traditionally in other police departments. When I worked in the city of Farmington Hills, University of Michigan. They were committed cars to that. Certainly they could drive them if the officer was off or something. They're police cars, but their fundamental job is canine.

Well, to adapt them, it'd probably be $50,000 to adapt the car with all the equipment.

Yeah, it's about $100,000. We looked at it.

So with that kind of investment, you want to do it in a brand new vehicle so you get the most life out of it. So it's a... It's a lot of money to put in modifications. It's about $100,000. It's $100,000? That's in addition to, that includes the lights and all.

Lieutenant, was that accurate? It was about $100,000 for that.

Yeah, $50,000 for the car.

And I think what else is important with forfeiture, this township has benefited. The township, and I'll give the previous chief credit for this, their task force officers were involved with significant seizures. The vehicles in our fleet, majority of them have been purchased with forfeiture money, probably over the last 10 to 12 years that I'm aware of. So a majority, I would say 90% of the vehicles out there are purchased through forfeiture.

Last comment here is with bigger townships and cities, Livonia, Canton, right? I didn't know if there's an opportunity to try to leverage their bigger buy with our buy to try and help us, whether it's 3%, 5% when we replace them. I just wanted to put that out there to see if we have considered it or may want to do that.

You mean we're buying the vehicles? Yeah. Yeah, we're all under state purchasing. So we're all getting the same price, which is, I believe, the lowest price that you get through the state.

Most of them are being delivered from a dealer in Owasso, Michigan.

Is that correct, Lieutenant?

Yes. Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you, Bill.

Thank you for your thorough presentation.

Thank you.

All right, so now we have Chief Patrick Conley. We'll talk about fire budget for 2027.

Good evening, Bart. Thank you for having me tonight. Just to echo, this new microphone is pretty good. Chief, and I tell the sentiments about 9-11. Not only did we lose the firefighters and police officers that day, we've also lost another 453 firefighters and 469 police officers due to 9-11 cancers, and there's been over 49,000 people diagnosed with 9-11 cancers as of just that one incident. Keep those folks in your prayers, please. And before you, our fiscal year 27 fire department emergency management budgets. The fire department budget's $6,822,500 and emergency management is $44,500. Next slide, please, Bob. Once again, just as Chief Nytell said, the majority of our costs, our personnel, roughly 86% of the big green pipe charts are personnel costs, the wages, salaries, insurance benefit, retirement benefits, leaving us about $651,000, $652,000 for operations. Capital outlay next year is relatively small, which I'll get to in some other slides further down at $26,000. And then we have our debt service, which is not included in the whole amount, but that's always in our slides. It's not included in our whole budget amount because we budgeted for it before. Carol confuses me the way we do that, but that's how we do it. And actually that's, I have, can you come back please? I decided the capital, the debt service is for the 10-year payments of Ladder 3. We're in year 7 of 10 of that. That should be paid off in 2030. And then we're in year, this will be year 2 of the EMS Plus program, and I actually have a misprint on there that's a five-year program, not a seven-year program, that we paid the EMS Plus for $218,000 a year. The latter payment is 113,000. Next. So these are capital improvements. We still need to replace the apparatus windows. Apparatus room windows is a fancy name for the garage. Station three, if you're driven by it, the entire south wall is basically windows. So they need to be replaced there. That building was built, We took occupation, I think it started in 1990. We took it over in 92. So it's some 34, 35 years old, and it's showing its age. We've replaced the windows on the living quarters a number of years ago. Now we need to replace the windows in the apparatus room as well. They're actually failing at this time. And then at station two and three, we have some replacement of window blinds for about $5,000. Next. Our other 27 capital purchases, we're gonna be replacing all of our SCBA masks. Our masks currently, we have masks that are probably 10 years old and that's not acceptable. That's a huge point of failure. And when your mask fails on a fire, you die. It's that simple. So we need to be replacing those. I do have, and I've sent out to the supervisor to submit, but we did put in for an equipment grant from the state of Michigan. I've been working on that. Hopefully we get that to free up some funds, but I don't know what our chances of getting the grant are. We also have a training laptop. Our current training laptop is obsolete. We don't even use it anymore because it's so old. I think it's an XP laptop, and our IT department just totally flips out if we even turn it on, basically. So we need to replace that. And then last, our IT department also has us replacing our data switches for $26,000. That's from the 90s. It's, well, early 2000s. It's pretty old. These are our equipment and maintenance service agreements. We have alers for our HVAC. We're currently also looking at some other bids for that right now. The striker... Service agreement we have on all our equipment, but that's also included in the EMS Plus program. That was a separate line item before, but that's all included in EMS Plus now. And it's covered. And then we have Apollo fire equipment for our air packs. They get serviced. They have to be serviced every year and run through tests to make sure that they're up to proper specifications. Emergency management, we are still working with the police department and working on getting our mechanical updates complete and conversion of our old senior van into just a small command post for us. So that's ongoing. And then a very large portion of this budget I never could figure out why, but it's mine. It's the school crossing guards for about $30,000. I just always owned them. There was a significant increase from 25 to 26, $15,000. And then, so we went from 13.5 to 28.9, and we don't really have a lot of negotiation power with this.

The school district went to using contract labor and they, in some places, doubled the number of guards, so instead of having one at an intersection, they've gone to two.

Fortunately, this year, the increase is only 3% of $900, so hopefully we don't get another $15,000 increase soon. Future capital purchases, this is stuff we really need to be looking at. I have a 26, almost 27-year-old engine now that really needs to be replaced. It's approximately a two-year delivery on those, two to four year on fire apparatus. There are some things you can do to get them sooner. It really needs to be replaced. And then our 15-year-old engine, the one we actually bought from the city of Plymouth, that one will be moved to a reserve status. And that one really needs, at 15 years, you're getting towards the end of its NFPA life. It needs to start being looked at and being replaced. That's been a great truck for us, and we bought it. at a very good deal from the city when they sold it to us. However, it is getting past that usable service life as what NFPA likes you using your stuff for. And we have the ambulance we need to replace. I have two ambulances that really need to be replaced, so they're going to have to be replaced soon. It's approximately, they're a little less than two years out on the ambulances. Note on the ambulance, it's $350,000. That ambulance down there is Rescue 3 that we purchased in 23. I think we took delivery on that So buying a good quality ambulance, this is a Lifeline brand, it's the brand we buy. Buying a quality ambulance is gonna save us money in the future. It's a little more money up front, but that box, I'll be over 100 years old the last time that box is mounted on a chassis. We can put that box on five chassis. We can take it off, put it on a new chassis. Saves you about 20% off the cost when you do that. So essentially, by the fifth time you do it, you got the first one for free. So, but you have to stick with a quality brand. There's only about two brands I would really think about doing this with because you run into problems with a lesser quality brand. You're welcome to look at Rescue 3 sometime and compare it to our other ambulances. It's built like a tank. And that five-time remount limitation is imposed by the manufacturer. They have ambulances that were built in the 80s that the boxes are still on the road in high-volume systems. And they finally came out and said, just recently said, we're only going to remount them five times. It's not just simply taking the box off and throwing it on new. They go through the entire thing. They bead blast all the paint off. It's an entirely new paint job. They will replace all the handles and fixtures, replace anything on the inside. And you essentially have a very brand new ambulance. It's an excellent option to go and saves us a lot of money in the future. Finally, we still have the original kitchen in Station 3. It's a time capsule to 1992. You walk in there, as you can see, the old... cabinets, that really needs to be replaced sometime in the near future. We have replaced the floors in there, but the cabinets are really showing their wear and that kitchen needs to be replaced. That's all I have. Any questions?

Question I've got is that you talked about needing two ambulances. If you looked at all three fire stations, have we laid out a plan, projected total equipment over the next five and 10 years for replacement?

I have a CIP, yes, that's been laid out, but it's gotten way off track. I'm way behind on it, just from purchasing. I basically had, I believe it was, so my CIP for the ambulances was every two years, and then we would be the entire fleet In four years, it would be all lifelines. And then basically, we'd keep them for 10 years and remount them after 10 years. So every 10 years, a truck would get a new chassis. I imagine after all of us, it'll be long gone. The last time they'll be remounted. All right.

Thank you.

Any other questions?

The crossing guard charge, are those passed through? Does the school district charge us 10% to pay it?

They pass through. It's a 1981 lawsuit that the township lost. It says that we have to pay a share. We're paying typically half.

City covers the other half.

City pays a quarter. What we share, they pay a quarter, we pay a quarter. So it's a half. The school district plays the rest.

Chief Conley, it was just announced that you're going to retire after how many years of service? 25. 25 years of service, and we want to thank you for your service.

Thank you. Thank you.

So, do you have a question? Yeah, out of habit, it's right to go through the chair. And if you don't want to acknowledge, that's okay, but you do acknowledge me every time. So, yes, I have several concerns. Number one, overall budget concern of mine is staffing. Number two, closing stations is unacceptable. Number three... I want to acknowledge the firefighters who are here tonight. Number four, fire department open house, I believe October 10 fact sheet on the increase and substance of calls. Last night, 24 hours when I was on my three mile walk, there was Ian Culver loading a resident onto a gurney and HVA came by and they had to say, go away. At the Fire Department open house, which I'm projecting October 10, a fact sheet to inform the public. But without a doubt, the inquiries that I hear from the public at my first floor office of 42 years on Main Street is staffing. Striker equipment on display October 10. Firefighter Zmuda, credit to him for enhancing the displays on the fire department open house, projected for October 10th. Final comment, the state has funding, I'm sure you know this, and I do appreciate it, the state has funding to purchase fire trucks. It was a great benefit to me. that as a freshman state representative, 25 years ago, I was asked in the Republican caucus, who has a highly respected, credible fire chief that can come up here and testify for a need for a pumper? Well, I had Larry Groth come up there. And it was all credibility. Same was approved. So I want to see if we can't recognize some of those things. I want to see if we can't accomplish some of those things. My good friend Carl Berry is here tonight and I will remember community support for a fire and police millage of 1984. Overwhelmingly passed. Now, I'm not, you know, nobody wants to be labeled as raising taxes, but we have to deal with intellectual honesty also. So, and recognition of the problem is the first step to correction. So, Chief, once again, thank you for your service. I'd like to please ask you to introduce your firefighters in the back of the room.

Captain Ian Culver in Firefighter, North Tacoma.

Thank you. Thank you.

All right, next item. Any other?

Yeah, I was not aware there's an open house on October 10th, so thank you for mentioning that, Trustee Stewart, number one. And number two, I am aware that there's a charity pumpkin patch starting October 1st at Fire Stations 1 and 3, so I sincerely hope people actually take a look at that and stop by the fire stations to purchase their pumpkins for charity.

All right, we're going to... Go on to item two, which is a small item with a recycling grant that Sarah Viesel worked to get. It's a $7,500 grant for recycling education from the EPA, Environmental Protection Agency. Did I skip? Did you skip assessing? No, we're number two. And we've reduced the expenditures, we think, down to below $8,000, so we won't, I don't think we will use the full 10-9. It will be in an envelope, a postcard in an envelope, and a sticker to put on your recycle bin. So we're trying to increase recycling awareness and debunk the myth that recycling is a hoax and they're really dumping it in the landfill. So any questions? This will be mailed out sometime at the end of September. So if we don't have questions, we need a motion to receive the money.

Move that the Plymouth Township Board of Trustees hereby adopt resolution 2026-09-10-65 to accept the grant award and authorized the Finance Director to amend fiscal year 2026 budget by recognizing revenue in the amount of $7,500 in account 596-000-51-000 and appropriating expenditures in the amount of $2,400 in account 596-528-851-100. Point 000 and $8,500 in account 59252A dash 900 decimal 000.

Second.

Okay.

Yeah. Yes.

Yes.

Joe Riley. Yes. Bill Ikes.

Yes.

Bob Dershowitz.

Yes.

Sandy Grove. Yes. John Stewart. Yes. Motion passes.

Item three is a presentation by our assessing department, which sets the values that the millage rates are calculated against. And they are a contract company that sounds governmental. They're called Wayne County Assessing, but they're not a government agency. They're an independent company.

Good evening, everyone. Yes, it's actually WCA assessing. I'm at Wayne County assessing, but yeah.

At one time, wasn't it Wayne County?

Yeah, absolutely.

Okay, so the name has changed. I'm getting old, I guess.

Yeah, no, that's okay because we started here in Wayne County and actually one of the first jurisdictions that WCA ever started with was a city, I'm sorry, was with Plymouth Township. So we go back quite a ways with this municipality. And as an introduction, my name is Aaron Powers. I am the Plymouth Township Assessor of Record, and I'm also a Managing Director and a partner at WCA. And with me this evening, of course, we have Tracy Haley, and she is the Plymouth Township Assessing Supervisor, and she kind of runs the daily show here in Plymouth Township. And as Bob indicated, we certainly are a contracting company. It's a very common place in the state of Michigan where the majority of the jurisdictions in the state do use contractual assessing. And certainly that is the case in Wayne County where I believe 40 of 43 jurisdictions are currently utilizing contractual assessing. It's a very common practice. So what we'd like to do is on an annual basis come before you and kind of update you on some characteristics and statistics about what's going on with our department and what's going on with the assessing information in Plymouth Township. And we've got that in the agenda. We're gonna go ahead and move along to our residential sales. And this is just an annual update and indication of how many properties we have transfers of ownership on an annual basis. So we have about 10,200 residential parcels that of course includes homes and vacant lots. And it's pretty typical in municipalities of this type and makeup. We have about three to 5% of those properties, which typically have a transfer of ownership on an annual basis. And you can kind of see the numbers that we have there in 2025. We had about 377 residential sales and we've added that year to update that. And of course we're tracking 2026 and we'll report back to you next year with where we're at with that. And this is an interesting slide that we wanted to go ahead and illustrate for you this year. What I want you to also realize is this is the average SEB increase. It doesn't reflect necessarily the average increase in market value of an individual property, but this is looking at the residential class. So every year we have the necessity to increase each of the six classes of property in the township in accordance with a checks and balance process that's established by the state of Michigan called equalization. So your assessment starts here at the local level and we have to meet particular county criteria and then of course we have to meet particular state criteria. That's how you have an assessed value become a state equalized value. So on an annual basis what occurs is that the county performs a study on all the six classes of property and makes a determination of how much those assessments have to increase. Obviously individual SUV changes could be greater or less than what the particular average is, but what we experienced FOR 2026 WAS, AND IT LOOKS LIKE IT'S A YEAR AHEAD, BUT WHAT WE'RE LOOKING AT IS YOUR 2026 ASSESSMENT IS OF COURSE PREDICATED ON YOUR DECEMBER 31, 2025 EVALUATION DATE. AND RIGHT NOW WE'RE ACTIVELY WORKING ON OUR 2027 ASSESSMENTS ALREADY. INCREASE IN 2026. THE TIMING IS ALWAYS A LITTLE BIT THE TIMING IS ALWAYS A LITTLE BIT WEIRD WHEN YOU LOOK AT SOME OF WEIRD WHEN YOU LOOK AT SOME OF THESE, BUT YOU CAN SEE THERE THAT THESE, BUT YOU CAN SEE THERE THAT THE AVERAGE RESIDENTIAL INCREASE THE AVERAGE RESIDENTIAL INCREASE IN 2026, SLIGHTLY BELOW WHERE IT IN 2026, SLIGHTLY BELOW WHERE IT WAS IN 2025 AND HIGHER THAN WHAT WE WAS IN 2025 AND HIGHER THAN WHAT WE WERE IN 2024. WERE IN 2024.

PLEASE EXPLAIN WHAT SCV STANDS PLEASE EXPLAIN WHAT SCV STANDS FOR AND WHAT IT GENERALLY derived from?

Certainly. SEV is state equalized value. It's just the value as it's achieved equalization. You know we start off like I indicated with an assessment and typically all values end up being the same when you have to assess value. After the process of equalization occurs it becomes state equalized value and it represents 50% of true cash value. So we have a statute in the state of Michigan which defines true cash and your SEV is representative of 50% of that true cash value. So what we're looking at here are properties, we've been tasked with looking at properties that are non-principal residence. So in the state of Michigan, you receive a principal residence exemption for your property, which is your homestead. It's the property which you intend to return back to. It's your primary residence, for lack of a better terminology. There could be a number of reasons why we might have non-PRE properties. It could be that the property is a rental property. It could be that it's a second home. It could be a property that's in the transition period of a sale where an individual may have bought a home and is looking to sell their home, and they could have a conditional PRE for a year or something like that. But we've been tracking that information back from 2022 through 2026. And the number's been relatively the same for 2025 as it was for 2026 and a little bit down from, you know, I believe where our high was there in 2023.

So that's about 146 non-primary residents. That's correct.

And if we'll go to the next slide.

Out of 10,000.

A little bit less than 10,000. If we go to the next slide, I'm gonna give a little bit of information on that. But out of that 10,200 residential parcels in Plymouth Township, about 9,867 are what we term as improved. Like when you receive your assessment change notice every year, you'll see classification that says residential improved. It doesn't mean you improved your property that particular year. It just certainly means that it's not a vacant piece of property. So improved and vacant is how the state nomenclature works. But we've got 9,867 properties which have a residence or some other structure on them. And when we look, we had about 146 non-PRE parcels. And from what we can tell, about 140 are rentals and about 15 of them are short-term rentals. How do you know they're short-term? Basically, based off of our internal review, and I'll let Tracy kind of speak to some of the efforts we go through.

Sometimes it will come up through state denial. We do the research on the property. It could be somebody trying to partially lease it out for an Airbnb on the weekend. We do go through and try to When these items come up or they're brought to our attention, we have resources going through the MLS listings to try to find any rental. We will reach out to a taxpayer if we can obtain it through our regular search fields.

So people call up and complain to me and then I report it to you. That last night there was a big party.

We cannot find any information, but sometimes it will come up to just from a neighbor of the property. or through the state denial list as well.

So this is a very, very low number, 15 out of almost 10,000.

Certainly less than 1%.

I've heard that in urban areas like Plymouth, the profitability of short-term rentals has plunged, and so they're moving away from it. There isn't as much money. You can't make the kind of money that you really need to justify a $600,000 investment in a property and then short-term rent it. The rates aren't high enough in Plymouth. So hopefully that stays that way so we don't have too many short-term rentals.

And then lastly in closure, one of the things we wanted to illustrate is just how does Plymouth kind of look at it as a comparison for the rest of the county? And this is something that we've been sharing with some of our clients as of late. But Plymouth Township has the seventh largest SEV of the 43 jurisdictions of Wayne County. It contributes about just under 3.6% of the overall valuation of the entirety of Wayne County. And I've just kind of illustrated, you know, the top... top seven in this particular instance of SEVs and kind of where we're at as a municipality comparatively to the largest, which is, of course, the city of Detroit, and followed up by Canton Township, Livonia. I'm sorry, Livonia, Dearborn. Actually, Dearborn's larger than Livonia. Nope, sorry, smaller. Livonia, Dearborn, Artful Township. Westland and then of course Plymouth Township. And then of course we have the taxable value as well. Of course the SEV, as Chuck had me indicate earlier, that's an indication of what the total valuation of all the property is within the municipality, both real and personal property. But of course, something that's important to try to take a look at is the actual taxable value. And that's, of course, the value that taxes are predicated and based on and what you actually receive revenue on. So as you can see, what this also illustrates is the disparity between the SEV and the taxable value. And of course, we can get into the explanations upon how that can occur if you'd like us to. And of course, in the future, if you'd like us to address additional items for our annual updates, we'd be happy to do so. I'd love to answer any questions you might have.

Go ahead. If we're able to track that there's 15 short-term rentals, are we also able to put some sort of fee to discourage anyone else from doing it? A big lump sum, $50,000, something that will limit their ability to do Airbnbs in the township.

Well, we'd have to pass an ordinance, but... Most people who have done it, like Traverse City, there's an inspection fee and an annual fee. My judgment is the problem is not big enough with 15. Let's say there's 20. out of 10,000. So far, it hasn't gotten big enough. So we're monitoring it, seeing what kind of police calls we get, what kind of complaints of the neighbors. It's dried way down this year compared with last year. And I think that may have something to do with the economic model that I just described, that it's not profitable. So the owners are either selling them or converting them to conventional long-term rentals. Good. So we're watching it, but it's not getting worse in Plymouth Township. In your neighborhood, there's one street that I think has seven on it, but they have converted to longer-term rentals that they've hooked up with insurance companies for people who are burned or flooded out, and the insurance company is looking for a more economical solution to a hotel or... something that may be more expensive. So I think that that turned out to be more profitable versus short term. So six months to a year.

That's better. You just don't want someone new there every weekend.

Any more questions? No? No. All right, well, thank you for doing this.

Mr. Oh, you have a question. Well, for you, have you begun to decide who you want on the Board of Review?

Not yet. Those terms expire in 2027. Yeah.

Having been on the Board of Review in 1988, and it was an extremely enlightening experience because Supervisor Breen wanted me to be enlightened. I would hope that our two new trustees would consider same and perhaps Mr. Baker would like to be on the Board of Review. It's going to be an interesting season.

So for the benefit of everyone, the Board of Review is three residents that are appointed by this board. to take challenges to assessments of taxable value. Every March is the primary month, and then they meet in July and December to make correction.

Evaluations begin March.

March is the big one. That's where you come and you appeal your tax assessment. You're not appealing your taxes. You're appealing your assessment. Taxes are fixed at a rate, a millage. In Plymouth Township, we're going to talk about it here. We're about $5 a thousand, five mils. Our overall millage, I think, is about 32.4. Give you an order of magnitude. Dearborn is somewhere between 65 and 70. So there's a big difference in tax rates throughout Wayne County. I bet the city of Detroit is probably over in the around 70s. eCourse is like 100. They might be a little over 100. Anyway, thank you for coming and doing this. Sorry you had to wait, but next time maybe I need to rearrange the agenda to get you in here and get you out earlier.

Thank you.

Okay, the fourth item is the annual tax rate submission to Wayne County, which is a form that begins with the letter L, and it's required to be submitted every year by September 30th, and it tells the county what our tax rate is, and Bob Dorshevitz will give you some more show-and-tell details. Is it in the packet?

The very last page.

Pardon?

The very last page. It's 184. Page 182, 183, 184, Bob.

Right here. Yeah, I got it.

So, as Chuck said, this is the annual L-4029. I get one of these from all the taxing authorities. And what it says is what the... Oh, thanks. What it says is that... If you look at the top, our total taxable value of all properties in the township is $2.5 billion. So if you had one mill, there would be some exceptions, but roughly you could assume that it would be taxed on $2.4 billion. So one mill would generate about $2.4 million. Okay. And it's pretty self-explanatory. The first is the general operating when we became a charter, in our charter, there was no millage. And it is reduced by the Hedley Amendment, not every year, but almost every year. So this year, the factor is 9967. So currently, or last year for 25, our general was 0.8033, and it's reduced by a factor of 0.9967. So you do the math across there. And the permanent reduction is now .8006. So what that says is that originally this was one mil through a series of reductions because of the Headley Amendment, which came out when in 1978.

Dick Headley was the chairman of Hamilton Life Insurance Company in Farmington Hills, Michigan.

I thought he was a... State rep or something. No, okay. Well, Dick Headley got his amendment named after him. And then the equalization value is set by the county. It's usually one. Aaron alluded to that a little bit. So the maximum in column number R, I'm sorry, column nine, The maximum allowable millage that we could levy is .8006 mils, and that's my recommendation to levy .8006 mils on that one. And then you just move down. The next one is fire. If you look to the far right, it expires in tax year 2040. That millage would be $9.9749. The three voted ones, one was voted in 2015 and that expires in 2035. The second one was also voted in 2015. So in 2015, we put two millers on the ballot and both of them passed. They expire in 2035, you know, with the math extrapolated across that way. Those are the numbers that we would usually see on your tax bill. And the last one was voted in in 2018. That was intentionally co-terminus with the other two mills. So in 2035, for, And that's about it. So the total is 5. Currently, this year was 5.1248, but it'll drop to 5.1076. So what we tend to see with these readily reductions is that our millage rate drops every year a little bit. but our taxable values are growing. So they're growing at a pace that's faster. So we see either a flat revenue stream or a little bit of increase due to the increase in property values. And it tends to offset it. So it is what it is, if there's any questions.

So if you, when you do a Headlee override, what does it restore the millage to? If you vote a Headley override, the residents. I've never looked into that. I don't know. So this is the combination. Go ahead.

Yeah, absolutely. This is our township attorney. Good evening, everyone. Tony Chubb. Yeah, so if we did do a Headlee override on the main charter component, which is the 4227 or any of the other components, then they would be authorized to be levied back to column four, but would again begin to be, would still be subject to Headlee just being reset. And so it just resets the clock on that.

Unless you do what Schoolcraft College recently did, which is they have eliminated the Headlee override. So they're not subject to this decrease every year. They're back to the original.

Right. So they convinced the voters to pass something that exempts them from the Headlee. Over a Hedley Amendment.

Yes.

That was clever.

They used the students to do that.

So, yeah, the Hedley Amendment of 1978 and the Proposition A of 1994 were both referendums. with the people of the state of Michigan, spoke and said they wanted some controls on property taxes, and it has worked very well. Prior to Proposition A, especially, and definitely before Headley Amendment, you could experience an actual 25% to 50% increase in your property tax bill year over year based on appreciation or if you did a... maybe some improvements. So some people were getting chased out of their houses or off their farms. So that's what drove a lot. California, I think, was the first to do a proposition in the 70s. Maybe it was 103 or something like that. People were getting taxed out of their homes. So that's where the trend started. And then Hedley was an offshoot of that. Things start in the west and they move east. Trends.

So one other thing I would note, if in the future this board decides to go out for a millage, I would recommend that you go out for a millage for more than is needed and don't levy it all because then it gives some room for growth. because we keep running into this perpetual problem where we pass a millage, we levy it, and then we spend it all because costs rise and we don't have the ability to increase within the permissible boundaries. We can't increase the levy.

So- Key words. You approve a millage and you spend it all. Yeah, all the time. Right, all the time. So that's... But you don't have to levy it all. You don't have to... Cannon Township has something. They made the entire community an SAD, Special Assessment District, in the late 70s. And that's one of the reasons that their millage rate is over two and a half times what Plymouth Township is. Just to run the township, not the total millage. It's to run their government. Northville Township is about 70% over Plymouth Township.

Isn't part of Canton Township?

Dearborn is four times Plymouth Township.

Isn't part of Canton Township what you're talking about is tied to public safety, police and fire?

Yes, the entire township. They drew an SAD for the full 36 square miles sometime in 1977 to 79, somewhere in there. And he gave them up to 10 mills to levy. So they had all this overhead room. They're starting to bump on it, I think. But they have a lot of millage to work with.

Who chooses how much they could levy? If they could go up to 10, that's the board.

Which is a lot like a city. So they figured out a way to circumvent levy. the big benefit of a township, which is controlling taxes.

Okay, got a motion?

I make a motion. I move that the Charter Township of Plymouth Board of Trustees approve resolution 2026-09-10-66, thereby approving the attached 2026 tax rate request form L-4029 as completed by Treasurer Dorosiewicz, reflecting a combined millage request of 5.1078 to be levied on December 1st, 2026, and further authorized the Township Clerk and Supervisor to sign the form and submit it to the Wayne County Equalization Division prior to the September 30th, 2026 deadline. Second.

Second.

Thanks. Okay. Call vote. Joe Riley?

Yes.

Sandy Groves? Yes. Bob Dorchevitz?

Yes.

John Stewart? Yes. Bill Ives?

Yes.

Chuck Cermy?

Yes.

Kim Gadeka? Yes. Motion passes.

Okay. Do we have any comments beginning with public comments? Excuse me. Any public comments? Come up. You have three minutes. You can talk on anything you want.

Not necessarily public comment. I just want to acknowledge since we acknowledged our two good firefighters are here. Thank you. Sergeant Michael French from the police department is also here in attendance. Thank you, Sergeant. Thanks.

No comments? All right. Oh, you do have a comment. These microphones are working great. People can stand way back and it picks them up. We finally got three times the charm.

Picks up every one of my witty comments.

Thank you. I just wanted to stand up to ask, given that the recently effective Township Police Department procedures and policies for the administration and use of the flock cameras includes an auditing process to be conducted twice a year. by the Lieutenant of the Township Department. This was put into place in effect of August 21st, 2026. Tonight we heard that the Lieutenant is retiring. And so I would like to bring the attention of the Board that well, first of all, I think twice a year is a very loose auditing process and should be reconsidered. But secondly, that if there is a delay in replacing the lieutenant, what is the fallback for auditing? And should we even consider that perhaps the auditing process should not be in the direct chain of command of the people being audited to begin with? Thank you.

We will replace the lieutenant, and until he is replaced, there will be someone in the chain of command that will do that work.

I would like to ask, because this is one of the things we talked about when the plot cameras were leased. We talked about what the operating policies and procedures were going to be for those particular cameras. I would like, as a board member and maybe the rest of the board, to see what those policies and procedures are, just so that we have, when people ask us, so that we have an understanding.

Yep, I can send that to you. I sent them to the supervisor. And if I can comment on the, thank you for your comment, the new deputy chief would take that role. If not the deputy chief, then I would take that role. I'm not utilizing the cameras myself, so I'm not an investigator that's utilizing the cameras, but that would be the process.

Are they in place? I saw in your report that the first one was installed. You referred to that. Are the actual flock cameras in place and operational?

Yeah, we have two right now. I believe the third one is in the process. I'm waiting for an update from FLOC, but we have solved crimes already with the two that were up.

And they are within the Ann Arbor Road corridor?

Correct.

Okay.

All right. Any questions from the board? Otherwise, we're going to do comments. We'll start with...

Mr. Supervisor and Trustees, I spoke with Township Attorney John Clark. Boilerplate sample resolutions for ordinances are readily available to extend a moratorium on data centers, which just occurred notably in Zeeland Township. I would like us to consider a draft for extending our moratorium on data centers at the September 22 meeting. The second thing that John Clark and I talked about was an ordinance regarding some more regulation or teeth to Airbnbs driving through old Blake Point I observed more than a dozen yard signs like this. Then I was informed- I think they're working. Then I was informed that police resources were used to quell a disturbance at an Airbnb in Old Lake Point a week ago Saturday night. So I think we can look at those. two ordinances to be provided by the township attorney, which would not take much time and they're readily available, according to the Michigan Townships Association. Finally, I look forward to all of you joining me, especially our supervisor. On September 30th, my wife has informed me there is a ribbon cutting at Five Mile and the shelves are stocked and Meijer will open. So we're all invited.

May I respond to what he said as a planning commission member on the- Airbnb or no, on the moratorium. The moratorium.

For data centers.

Yes, the moratorium for data centers was 18 months and it was, we agreed to that in January of 2026, which gives us until like July of 2027. and the Planning Commission is in the process of putting together, reviewing, and talking about the moratorium on data centers.

Good, thank you. Hopefully the state of Michigan will pass a law between now and then. that will make it easier for everyone to have a guideline, or at the federal level. I think electric rates is the biggest stumbling, and then the second one, stumbling issue, and the other would be maybe noise. All right, Joe Riley.

Yep, two things. The Plymouth Farms neighborhood on North Canton Center Road is well underway of construction. Residents living near that construction area, if you have any questions about the work taking place, I talked to the Pulte project manager and the construction manager. They're trying to contain all their work on their own property. But if anyone has any questions, feel free to reach out.

What happened with that big rain on Thursday on their spot, on their lot?

Just turned to mud. The road's pretty bad now. So the water was contained? It did not? They're building a... Potential basin? Yeah, and that got, not full, but it got pretty, got a lot of water in it. So they built that first? They're building that first. Yeah, that's still being dug out, but that is the first thing to go in. That's pretty mushy clay normally. Okay, that's the first thing. And the second thing is I received a complaint from a Plymouth City resident that Plymouth Township garbage cans are being delivered or were delivered to their property. I'm not sure if this is happening more than just once, but can we verify what's going on there and who can they contact to get rid of it? Sarah Wiesel.

and I'll be handing out, well, at your workstation, there is a phone list, a new one. So Sarah Fiesel is the solid waste coordinator. So it looks like priority waste, both City of Plymouth and Township of Plymouth use priority waste, so they may have been confused somehow. The same crew, most likely. Either had the address wrong or instructions wrong. Okay, thank you. Bill.

Our waste management friends, right, they were summoned last year for a noise ordinance, banging the dumpster of the First United Methodist Church repeatedly between 5 a.m. and 6 a.m. They got caught on camera, right? And they corrected the problem thanks to Danny Atkins' help, right? So it's been resolved. The gentleman came early last week, but he sat there and idled. at 6.50 a.m. because he was well aware of the ordinance at 7 a.m. thanks to our ordinance team, which I have to compliment. The second thing is the floods that we had on Thursday last week, September 3rd, and then Friday the 4th. My favorite intersection is Goldsmith and the Fouillard plant, right? But the flooding that occurred under the CSX Viaduct is actually on the City of Plymouth property there, and I'm not sure what they do. I know what they don't do because they don't have a satisfactory pump, and generator to get it to a drain somewhere. But every time we get record floods, there are first responder vehicles parked on both sides and it slows first responders in need of emergency. So I'm wondering if that's something that Supervisor Kermy, you might want to help with. Because I'd love to partner with the city to get that red, yellow, green light to a blinking yellow. Since we lived here for 190 years with a train track that blocked the traffic every day. And then 10 years ago, we built the viaduct only to have that light red, yellow, green. So I see two problems with one stone in one meeting. I'd be more than happy to help because previous communications with County Commissioner Terry Marecki have not moved the needle. That includes meeting with her face-to-face on September 2nd and sitting down with her again at the end of July.

All right. Some information. 2008 is when that viaduct became operational. It's operated by, the pumps are operated by Wayne County. And I discussed it with them and they said it was because they had a power failure and And when they have power failures, they provide backup generators. The city of Plymouth has no equity in it and no control, so it's a Wayne County issue, just like the traffic light. So we need to get the county. They don't install typically permanent generators. They bring temporaries, but by that time it's flooded. So it's their process. The same thing at Ann Arbor Road. They have a new pump station there, but there is, as far as I know, there's no generator in that pump station.

Okay.

So there's two opportunities in the same exact XYZ.

Yeah, right. It's at the same location. Sandy Gross.

A couple of things. I want to I am with the understanding that the property on Gold Arbor that we've talked about, that progress is being made, that things are being taken care of.

Backyard got fixed up somewhat. Yes. Or maybe a lot.

Yes. So I want to thank you, Supervisor Kermy, for leading the charge on that and also our building official and our ordinance officer for doing what they're doing to make that happen. I'm looking forward to reviewing the results of the fire study from ESCI at our next meeting. And there was some talk with the approval of the master plan that some language was going to be corrected or changed. And I just want to make sure that as a planning commission representative that I can kind of be in tune with what's going on with that. And then I just want to tell everyone that today, this is the first time I've done it, but I went to Macomb Township Fire Department because they have a very large organization of people that do what is called Walk for the Red. Cancer has been identified as an occupational hazard for firefighters. It's been identified in legislative issues and an organization was formed actually by a volunteer, no, a full-time firefighter in Macomb Township. There were probably 300 people there today and they walk 140 miles and each person who participates has to raise $5,000. And what they do is they take all of the identified firefighters in the state of Michigan, right now there are 86, and they will divide the money that they raised between all of those families I think there's like a minimum of 3,000 that each family will get. But I just want to say how humbling it was to see a community work so closely together to recognize and attempt to help with the occupational hazard with the cancer, Kroger's donated like $28,000 and there are a couple of businesses. So I'm hopeful that at some point in the future that we may be able to perhaps just host a fill the boot drive or something to start publicizing it so that people are more aware of the fact that cancer is a leading cause of illness and death in the fire community. And my stepson passed away last year from pancreatic cancer after spending 32 years in the fire service. So it just was humbling to me and refreshing to see the support that's going on in the communities towards that goal. And that's all I have to say.

So I wanted to quickly provide an update. Chuck, Chairperson Sapolsky and I did have a very impromptu discussion at the end of a site review on another matter. And we did go through a couple of the words that were in there. I received a marked up copy yesterday that correlated back to the master plan documents we got. And that was part of the problem. There were so many revisions that it was 110 pages and it was 105, then it was 124 that we had, change control issues, and now we know what they are. They're all very simple verbiage that referred to the comment I made about minor nits, and I think those are correctable, right? with language consistent to not having missing middle or townhome or townhouses things and stuff from the state that shouldn't have been put in at the very, very end of the document that some of us did not get the page 124 on, right? With the fact that we had copies that day of.

So what's the next step?

The next step is I will summarize it, right? For trustee growth and you Chuck and chairperson Cebulski to go through it, to make sure the planning commission can take it back and look at a minor little amendment. And that would be the next step.

Okay. So change control, that's one thing I've tried to convince people to keep a change control log for documents, but it just, it's not something that people are used to doing, and so it doesn't get done, and then you get out of control. So that's the way to lose changes. We've talked about that for years, but it would be great if we use the change control document, or log of some kind. It's pretty simple. All right, Dr. Shevet.

Chuck, I was just gonna say, what about a Google Doc?

I mean, that's... I'm not real Google Doc, but that may be even better. Does it have an automatic change control? Well, it updates and... It says version X, Y, Z? Absolutely.

I used them when I worked at the University of Michigan. I mean, you have to learn how to use them, but I think they're very effective.

Are you sure you want to announce that you worked for the University of Michigan after the football game last week?

I will say that in a football game, there are 60 minutes. Correct. 59 and 50.

Bob? Taxes are due Monday. We have, as of the end of the day today, we had about 2,400 residents still due. So we're going to have a couple of busy days. I'm one of them. I keep saying bring the check in, and every day I forget. So, but get your taxes in. It's too late to mail them, but we have the 24 hour drop box out in front. And so really no excuse. So thank you for those that have paid and for those of you that wait till the last minute, I don't mind that, but just bear in mind that we have a small staff and we have to process a lobby, taking tax payments probably most of the day tomorrow and on Monday, because we just, that's what we have.

Kim. We should be receiving our ballots next week sometime. I think the process was delayed just because of final language for the ballot initiatives. We just received our proofs on Tuesday and approved them on Tuesday. So the county will be sending the approved ballots to the printers. So we've already have our requests into the printer, so hopefully we'll get them next week. They're due to be mailed by September 24th. That's the deadline that the state sets. So we will be very busy getting those processed and prepared to mail out. The other thing we've been working on is a mail piece that will go out to all voters. It'll be a postcard type mailer. that'll just talk about early voting and the nine days, the dates and times here at Township Hall in this room from October 24th through November 1st. And then it'll also note the election day and the precinct that each voter, voting location for each precinct. So we'll be sending it out by precinct. One of the issues we had for the primary, we did have a lot of people come to the township hall asking where do they actually vote because it was a change for this year since we consolidated all our precincts. So we just thought we would send out that information in advance of the election so people would know about early voting as well as where their actual voting location is if they should decide to vote on election day.

Will your name be going on those postcards?

Yes, because there's no law that prohibits it and I'm not on the ballot. So in 2028, I will not have anything that will go out with my name on it.

Okay, thank you.

That card is not required by law, right? Correct, no. You already sent out the precinct notice in March and people threw them away or didn't read their mail. What will it cost to send this new round out?

We're getting an estimate, but it won't be that expensive. I mean, we sent out, no, we sent out, $15,000, and it was under $2,000. Really?

Yep. Is it postcards?

We do bulk rate. Postcard, bulk rate? Yep, bulk rate.

Good. All right. Anything else? Okay, I have a lot, so please be patient. Let's start with two meetings. Tomorrow morning at 9 a.m., we're having the Conference of Western Wayne. In this room, we're hosting it. So it's about 18 communities that send representatives. You're welcome to come. Just remember, if we have a quorum here, don't be hanging out together too much. Police and fire are invited if you wish. So it's here at 9 a.m. September 11th in this room. The other meeting is coming up on September 24 at 6.30 is the Homeowners Association President's Meeting. It's not intended as a everybody, you guys can come if you want, but the public is generally not invited because it's the presidents of the Homeowners Association. It is their meetings. So to convey information to them, one of the biggest ones we're trying to convey to homeowners associations is stormwater systems on their property are being neglected, and they have no idea that it is hundreds of thousands of dollars expense that they will have to pay, not the county or the township, to keep their stormwater systems operating properly, which age with time and excuse me that's kind of redundant just age and then they plug up and they on rains like Thursday they don't work and then they flood basements but it is not a township responsibility and we will be handing out the agreements that were signed by generally the developer when they saying they're transferring the responsibility to the homeowners association So if you are a member of a homeowner's association, you should be talking to your leadership. They may in the future have to levy increased fees to fix some of these storm systems that are not working or not working properly. The wood play structure is well along its way using millage money from Wayne County. Bill Ikes is acting as the project manager to marshal the forces, and we're doing the project phase we're in right now is we're repainting all the donors' engraved fence rails. So Boy Scouts and other volunteers, I think Kim and her children came there. I'm going to go over there and do a couple. They're kind of an interesting blue color. I don't know how it was selected, but we matched the original blue. The CSX sidewalk on Ann Arbor Road is progressing, not as fast as we'd like, but the target is to have it done by September, excuse me, October 15th, and that is a month later than anticipated. They ran into a lot of water problems there and other hidden structures that were not on the drawings. They didn't clean the storm drains out, probably. They did. They've cleaned them out, but they were all filled up with dirt and buried. The sidewalk program is scheduled to be completed in the west end of the township, District 5, by September 30th. That is going to be a home run hit, but it'll be the earliest it will have ever been completed. It will allow Bob Dorchevis to send out the invoices and allow 30 days for payment. to encourage payments so we don't have to carry the debt for another year by putting them on the tax rolls. What else do we have? Oh, the 200th anniversary of Plymouth Township is coming up in 2027. I have established Plymouth Township Heritage Fund for donations to do maybe a banner or a logo and the Museum is planning to do a special display in the museum. We're trying to raise $2,500, and you contribute. It's tax deductible through the Local Impact Alliance, which is the back office operation for the Plymouth Community Fund, the Canton Community Fund. It's based in Canton, so it's localimpactallowance.org, and then you go to the Plymouth Township Heritage Fund, which is they show all kinds of there's many funds in there for donations been left by for scholarships and things like that. And ours happens to be in there also. It was mentioned here that we have Meyer opening up. We also have a couple of. Manufacturing companies, one company that's doing converting vans to daily rental fleet shuttles and attempting to figure out a new model of the way they're homologating the vehicle to have a very low load floor so that handicapped people, it's very low lift over. And it's being done in the Burroughs building. The product engineering and assembly line, which they plan to make one per day, is located there. So that's all I have. Next week, the next meeting is September 22nd.

Would you please kindly give us notice of those openings and forward them on a regular email or give us a piece of paper? I will be here tomorrow morning at 20 to 9. It is my hope I'll be joined by a couple of police officers and a couple of firefighters on the 25th anniversary of the bombing of the Twin Towers. What are you going to do here? I want to make sure that flag's at half-mast.

Remember, this room will be occupied by Conference of Western Wayne.

I understand that. I will be here to greet a lot of people I know. I didn't know about Western Wayne until... You just announced it, and then likewise the homeowners will see. Please forward notices of these things. Let us know.

We get about a dozen of these a day that are all mixed with the city of Plymouth. The best way to get them is we'll get you registered with the Chamber of Commerce. They'll send you the notice directly. Okay. Because that's who organizes it, the Chamber of Commerce, not Plymouth Township.

I'll see you tomorrow morning at 830.

Okay, we have a motion to adjourn.

So moved. Motion to adjourn.

Who's seconded? Riley? Or you? Doesn't matter to me. Riley. All right. All in favor, say aye. Aye. All opposed? Aye. Meeting adjourned at 8.55 p.m. My favorite drink is...