City Council - Special Meeting

I think I'll put him for division chief.

Take an OVC.

Welcome to special city council meeting Monday, July 27, 2026. We will begin with a roll call on determination of quorum.

Yes. Here.

Maher. Here. Roberts. Stroman. Here. Armstrong. Here. Sechris. Beaverdorf. Tamang. Here. Evans. Meyer. Here. We have a quorum.

Thank you. Next, we will proceed with the Pledge of Allegiance. If you're able and willing, please stand.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.

Next, we will look for adoption of the agenda.

Second.

Motion by Lehman, second by Stroman. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Agenda is adopted. Next, we will move to general public comment. There are no comments in front of me, so we will open and close that. And next, proceed with non-public hearing items one through three. Number one is the 2027 Fire Department budget presentation by Chief Culberson. The floor is yours, sir.

Why, thank you. Uh, first, thanks for the opportunity to be able to present. Um, the, one of the things I truly enjoy is talking about our department and this fine, great city, very proud of the folks that work for us. Um, and the service that they preside provide not only to the city of rapid city, but to the surrounding community as well. So this is the 2027 budget presentation. This is the second year I've been able to give a presentation to the flow to all of you. Um, I'm going to try to be brief enough, but very happy that we have an hour this time. So if you guys all have plenty of questions, I promise I won't take all of that, even though I'm sure I could speak that long. So, uh, just like I did last year, I think it's very important to back up and really understand who we are. Um, the rapid city fire department, our mission statement is prepare, prevent, protect. We primarily focus on the efforts of public education and fire prevention and community risk reduction. Should those efforts fail, we are prepared and ready to respond to any and eventual emergency. Those include ambulance transports, structure fire response, wild land fire, hazardous materials response, vehicle extrication, water rescue, both diving and swift water, high angle rescue, regional technical rescue, ARF services, emergency management, and of course our mobile integrated health care program. This does not include all the other things we do, um, that include the public education and the prevention and investigation pieces that we do really something I need to bring out is that we're the only fully paid department on this side of the state closest next departments, 260 miles away. Um, it's either Casper, which is in Wyoming or Mitchell, um, Billings, which is even farther, Sioux Falls, you name it. But we are it for this side of the state. So again, going back through a year in review for 2025, I think it's important to show what we do and how we do it. So in 2025, we started the year with 184 employees. That's our current staffing level as of today. We do that through eight stations. Seven of those are 24-7 response capable. The other station is station two, which is located up on Maple Avenue in Anamosa, and that's where our BLM hazard mitigation crew resides. So they don't have a response capability today, but sure would like to have that ability to do that some day in the future. uh... last year we did twenty two thousand five hundred ninety one calls for service thirty two thousand five hundred and seventy two units dispatched with spending nineteen thousand two hundred and forty three hours on those calls so defined these calls for service they are truly calls for service calls that come into nine one one and or calls from places such as monument health requesting a transport a person. Our numbers do not include anything but those types of calls, truly calls for assistance from somebody for us. So out of that 22,591 calls, 16,177 of those were MVA or EMS calls. So those are your medical calls, which constitutes about 71.6% of our total call volume. We ended with about 2.1% increase in call volume at 2025 over 2024, which was significant in that Sitting at this meeting last year, I reported that projected data showed that we were going to be an 8.2% increase, which was alarming and concerning for us at that time. So through some of our efforts, which I'll get into with our mobile integrated healthcare program or CHWs, those types of things, I think you saw a significant reduction in that trend. So 2026, as of now, is trending at a 2.5% increase in call volume. and I projected that out to be a 23,156 calls for service. So just to go through, these are the districts within the city limits. Station one through eight obviously does not include station two since they don't have a response capability. The smaller number to the right is the numbers from last year. So you can take a look and see where the call volume is increasing and what that's going to do. So Station 1 has and will remain to be our busiest district, doing 8,557 calls last year. Extremely busy, goes basically from the south of the interstate up to the top of Star Village Hill and encompasses all the way over past West Boulevard and east about right in the St. Pat District area. Most of the other stations other than station 7 and station 6 saw a reduction, at least a mild reduction in their call volume last year. Station six is one that we're going to watch from year to year, a very low call volume, but also that area is expanding very quickly. That is one of the stations right now that we have four individuals that operate on the fire apparatus and they do what's called cross staffing. So there'll be both on the fire apparatus and if a medical call comes in, two of them will get off, get on the ambulance and respond to that call. At some point, we will have to make a transition from that and start moving to a fully staffed station up there. But that's a little bit away at this point. Everybody's curious about the county responses. 2,623 calls outside of the city of Rapid City. You can see the biggest one is Box Elder. with Rapid Valley coming in a distant second. So these are total calls for service. This includes fire and ambulance. We provide mutual aid or automatic aid to the nine fire departments, the volunteer fire departments that ring around our great city. So that means if they have a structure fire, we will automatically send one apparatus out there and a battalion chief. So that includes those numbers right there. Most of these calls obviously will be medical calls in those districts and hence why we're talking about some of the things we are about County and ambulance response So one thing that I brought up last year that will Want to bring up this year again is how do we compare against other municipal fire departments? It's very important to understand how busy our folks are. Things have not changed in a great amount of time. The last station we built was that we added staff with station six, and that was in 2003. Station seven's been built since then, but they took the staff and moved them out to that district. So we've stayed the same basic response as far as fire response staffing since 2003. So as you can look in all categories, and I tried to do a blend across a couple different departments, including Sioux Falls. point two six calls per citizen Where you go anywhere from point one three up to down to point zero seven four calls per citizen in Sioux Falls? So we do more calls per citizen more calls per firefighter, and we averaged 3,000 plus calls per station that 3227 is significant several studies we've had done and the most recent one of the most recent ones calls out 3,000 calls for service and stay in there, it states that as a unit or a station approaches that 3,000 calls per service, they become unreliable for the next call in that district. So once we crest over that, they become unreliable to be able to respond to that next call within their district. So that's extremely important to look at and a number to look at. Our folks are busy. We ask a lot of them for what they do. We ask them to be extremely busy compared to other departments and similar. So Lawrence and Douglas County, Kansas and the Rogers, Arkansas, those are highlighted with a red asterisk because they do transport EMS also. So it's interesting to take a look and look at that data as far as it pertains to them with a same same type look. So we'll jump right into the budget. I want to start with the hazard mitigation. So this is an extremely, extremely successful program. The vast majority of this budget is grant funded, but it is a separate cost center, and we would like to keep it that way. What I'm asking of you is to raise the city matching funds from $200,000 last year to $250,000 in matching funds. The reason being is we're gonna start adding a few more mitigation crew members to our service. So we're able to respond and do more mitigation throughout the community. I think it's extremely important as this community becomes more drought ridden, dry, and more dense, we need to ensure that we have mitigation done. So to be clear, all those employees within that budget are 100% grant funded, including those that are our part-time folks. What's really, really cool about this program is this is a veteran's crew. So it includes them. So those folks that are transitioning out of the military and coming into the workforce, we'll bring them in. We can hire them. They can go to work, start doing some work here, and then move on and into the working world. Now, whether that means in the fire service does not necessarily mean that, but some have landed and gone on to the forest service and state wild land and have worked for us. So it's a great program. I hope you find that you'll fund it. Again, that $792,000 is a big number, but it is truly most of that's going to be grant funded. Half a million dollars of that is. So let's get into the overall, the three budgets. I guess I got our slides out of the order there. Sorry about that. Our 2026 budget is $29,974,052, according to those numbers that we've been provided. Big money, big dollars. Put it in perspective, Sioux Falls' budget is $50 million for their fire department. And they do about... six thousand calls less calls for service less than we do and they have uh... five more stations and a large large number more of people so let's go over two oh two the fire budget relatively it's flat from year to year truthfully we have about two point six million dollars in operational budget dollars that we have to work with this last year One thing I guess I do need to point out that last year if you're trying to compare to last year's budget We did roll all of the stations up into one budget into the admin budget so it's not broken out between station one two three four five six seven and eight and These will all be now up into one budget, into our admin budget. So we didn't feel there was any need to break out. We did that many years ago with the priority-based budgeting. We track it a different way. It was becoming more difficult for our admin staff to break that out and determine where those dollars amounts went. Operationally, we saw, like I said, $2.6 million, which is realistically a 0.81% increase over last year. The vast majority of that's going to be your utilities. Black Hills Power had a large rate increase. That's our largest increase in a bunch of our line items. So that operational budget dollar includes the overtime that we have, which then has some resultant changes that happen in all of the other salary and wages pieces And it also includes fuel and our lease at the our maintenance facility out on Creek Drive and We're seeing some increases in repairs. Our stations are starting to age out. They're starting to get older. They need some work being done. Some of our vehicles need some more work because we run them a lot. Typical lifespan is 10 to 15 years on a fire apparatus, an engine, 15 to 20 on a ladder truck. And we're starting to push, and that's usually on a normal mileage rate. We drive them much more because we're much busier. And so they age out much faster. So otherwise, besides the fuel and some of those pieces, it's really operationally a fairly minimal change in our budget. They are the things that we need in order to provide the service that we do. So we're talking about just fixing the things that we have. We will next year, just to do some foreshadowing, we will have some requests that will need to be done for our self-contained breathing apparatus. We'll be looking for some CIP funds to help replace all of that. They will age out. Much of the things that we do and have as equipment have a lifespan. They age out much like our vehicles do so all of our bunker gear our helmets our gloves boots Unas EVAs their masks all of that age out so that all comes with a significant cost So we'll get to the big cost for both budget Budgets will be the 15 new employees for the general fund and the six for the enterprise So I'll dig a little deeper into that So 21 new employees for Station 9. So how did we get to that? Well, minimum manning. Right now, our minimum manning is 37. That's set by us, set by the NFPA, and many others. So that has four firefighters on every fire apparatus, four on an engine company, and four on a ladder truck, and two on an ambulance. So out there, you need to have 15 total people to operate just the general fund, so that would be the fire side of it. So you have four on the apparatus, which is 12, and then you need one extra per shift to cover for Kelly's vacation, sick leave, et cetera, in order to minimize the amount of overtime that we will have to expend to do that. Today, we have 45 individuals that work on each shift is our slots, and our minimum manning is 37. So, yeah, we do have more than we would minimum. Otherwise, if we have the minimum number all the time, we're going to be overtime all the time, and I'll get into a little bit of that. that the new generations, they've seen a shift in their priorities. Back in my day when we first started, overtime was something you coveted that didn't happen very often. And so we constantly were fighting over it. There's rules in our department. There's administrative rules in our department as it pertains to overtime because it was so sought after. That's not the case anymore. We have some union leadership in the back because they wanted to hear the presentation along with you that they will tell you. These folks, they're not wanting to do the overtime as much as they used to. And I can't blame them. It's family first. They want to be there with their family and do things outside of work. The job we do is difficult. And so to have that time away to be able to recharge and rest and be able to come back and do the job again is extremely important. We went to the four-man engine company in 2015. We applied for a safer grant back then to push from the three-man engine company to four. We were successful in that safer grant, and we've been at four since that time. The reason why we were successful, the safer grant, NFPA 1710 is a nationally recognized standard that defines the minimum deployment, staffing, and operational requirements for paid firefighters or fire departments. They have several things in there that you try to follow. First arriving engine company must be staffed with a minimum of four firefighters and arrive within four minutes of dispatch 90% of the time. Full complement of 15 to 17 people within 10 minutes and 30 seconds for a single family residential structure. If we talk about a large commercial structure, It's going to be pretty tough for us to make it to that full complement if we truly follow NFPA. So we've tried our best to do that. So one of these things we want is make sure to maintain is the four-man engine company. Changing that staffing model from four to three will significantly change the operations of this department It will require us then to make sure we send another full engine to that Structure fire which then will take that away from the rest of the city in order to do any other response beyond that that initial alarm You think that what's interesting is that's happening a lot. We have a Multiple fires going on at one time that's happened multiple times yet this year as I was coming down here Chief Pavandra our new deputy chief is not here Because our battalion chief is down on a wildland fire, and he went out to a structure fire out west of town and So we're busy and we need those units to be there. Next thing I'll give you is proof why we need to have maintain that for is the National Institute of Standards or NIST did a study on two, three, four and five person engine companies. And they found that four person crews completed critical fire ground tasks 25 to 30% faster than a three person crew. The other part is a three-person crew, they get exhausted fast. You have four people on the ground, many hands make light work. It's exactly the concept that we're going for here. There's a lot to be done on a fire ground. Lots that needs to be done quick, much faster. Rescues happen 5% faster with a four-man engine company. Fire suppression happens 10% faster with a four-man engine company. My last piece, the last two pieces, will be the IAFF contract. Within that contract, it states the normal complement of personnel on an engine or truck company is four personnel comprised of one officer and three firefighters. And finally, ISO. ISO, when we went in 2015 for the four-man engine company, one of the reasons we went that route was because of ISO and the number of staff we didn't have in order to continue to provide that level of service and maintain our class two ISO rating. Yes, ma'am. Insurance Services Office. They are the ones that basically set the risk for your community as it relates to insurance. So we are a class two. Highest is a class one.

I think we have a question from Councilor Strowman.

Thank you, Chair. Chief, do all of these stations currently have sufficient personnel, i.e., four personnel per unit?

machines the staffing requirement to keep up with the NFPA standards or we have some that are short or we short answer to that question is yes we have four on each fire apparatus we have two stations that do the cross staffing piece there are lower call volume stations so if they have a medical fire call all four go as long as the ambulance is not out but If there's a medical call comes in, two of them come off the fire apparatus and will go on the ambulance. That's how we've been able to mitigate some of the issues we've had without being able to get the extra staffing that we've needed.

Can I ask one more question? I will, sir. What's the status of the current discussions with the county regarding?

I'll get to that later in my presentation. So I've got all that in there. Yeah.

So additional staffing. Excuse me, Chief. Councillor Maher would like to weigh in. Sure.

Chief, I've been contacted by a retired captain about the west side station only being staffed with four people. So if an ambulance call comes in and two go out on the ambulance, then the fire call comes in, you don't have four.

Correct.

And is there another station that's put on alert, like the truck may have to come from another station?

Yeah, absolutely. So that's how we operate throughout the city. Exactly what I've been stating is the cross-staffing. So four-man engine company, so if the structure fire, they hopefully can go out as four unless there's an ambulance call. Then two of them are gonna be out. So those two will respond on the fire apparatus and then the next do apparatus will come in. Ideally, yep, we need six more people for each one of those stations to get that to be four strictly on that fire apparatus and then have two on an ambulance.

So what happens, so I know there's sometimes, depending on the nature of the 911 call, the fire truck goes with the ambulance. Yep. So how do you do that? Do you just have two people in the truck then?

Correct. So in that case, a lot of times, station five or six, they'll respond two in the fire apparatus, two in an ambulance.

Okay, thank you.

And if they need further assistance with more manpower, they'll request another unit.

Please continue, sir.

OK. So some more justification on why the 15 out of Station 9 will decrease the response time, making faster care, more units available as our community continues to grow. We're positioned well for the future growth towards the airport. Also, as you saw, station one and four and seven are one, two, and three highest call volume locations. So station nine will start breaking that apart. That station nine will redistrict both seven and four and one's district in order to take some of that call volume away from there. I remember I talked about the 3,000 calls for service and unreliability. What's interesting is using our 2025 numbers, call for service numbers, by adding station nine, that drops this down to 110 calls per firefighter and then drops per station down to 2,824 calls per station. So gets us below that 3,000 call limit that we shoot for. Any questions on that portion of the staffing before I move on to ambulance.

I will move to Laura Armstrong.

Thank you. Chief, could you define what cross-staffing is, like specifically? I think we get a concept of that, but for the people watching, those returning to council, if you could refresh our memories and educate us on that, that would be beneficial.

Yeah, the definition is how it approaches. So every member on our department is what's called, I'm going to really try not to confuse you. So everybody's cross-trained. So everybody other than our peak load ambulances and our mobile integrated health care program, all of those that operate 24 hours a day are cross-trained. So they're both a firefighter and an EMS provider. So at a minimum of an EMT, an advanced EMT is the next or a paramedic. So a couple, three years ago we made the change where everybody will eventually have to be an advanced EMT within their first four years of working here, so an advanced provider. Regardless, so they're cross-trained. So cross-staffing is you are going to staff the vehicles that are in your house with the existing people, personnel. So, four personnel on an engine, whatever apparatus are in there, that's what you're going to staff all of those vehicles, an ambulance or a wildland truck. Every station has at a minimum those. So they will have, so if a wildland fire comes out, two will come off the engine and go on that wildland rig, also at a minimum. Depends on which apparatus we have at that house too, so. That's the cross staffing. I can get you a better Webster type definition, but I don't have that right off the top of my head.

You're good.

Do you feel that we are fully staffed? You keep mentioning how busy we are. No pun intended, there's burnout that could be a very real thing. How do we navigate this?

This is what we'll have to know. We've been trying to navigate for years. That is the constant balance of adding staff members to locations that we need them. Five and six have always been one of those. Eventually, we'll have to get to that point. It's worked out well. It's starting not to. So we will have to start having those conversations about adding basically 12 more people in order to fill up those two stations.

are we at the national standards where we should be? Cause you mentioned that there are other cities that are doing more.

They have more loaded question. It depends on which you're talking. There, there are many departments that do provide cross staffing like we do. Um, and we've done that historically for many years. Station down at station one, we cross staff, um, depends on which apparatus. Again, um, But that's the risk management piece that we're trying to juggle as we move along. That's going to get a little more difficult to juggle that as we continue to grow and continue to be more busy. Fortunately, we've had to basically put all of our eggs downtown, meaning everything, because the call volume has gone through the roof there. And we're trying to stay ahead of just pockets of call volume versus staying within some response capabilities on the outside fringes.

So it seems like this is a practical solution. Is it working in reality?

It's working in reality today. Okay. It won't be for long.

I just want to make sure I'm understanding that.

So this will be conversations that we, we, we have to do the juggle between having a response capability out on the east side of town. Realistically, if you look at our data, which I'll talk about a little bit about the cost of what our data says we should be doing, it's high. I mean, it just flat out is. We should have had three more stations by now in conjunction with our call volume and our response time requirements. We have 12-minute response times at the Red Rocks. So it's difficult to get out there. The only way you change that is putting a station out there. And right now, we don't have that ready.

Thank you. Chair recognizes Councillor Sechrist.

Thank you, Mr. Chair, and thank you, Chief, for the information. When you were just, this is not my question, but when you were talking about cross-trained, Are we still training each of our firefighters as the ambulance response and and vice versa. So they're both trained in the not just.

They are not just single role.

Not just EMT but also paramedic or is that completely separate.

We're doing all of that. We have our own internal paramedic program.

Oh OK. So that's kind of in response to the WDT loss of their program.

Yeah, that goes back to 2013. We were having some issues with them being able to provide that level of education. So we started our own paramedic program and we're accredited through CoAMSP and CAHEB.

So in addition to all of our firefighters being trained as EMTs, they're also being trained as a paramedic.

They sure can be. We don't make the paramedics not mandatory, but the advanced EMT is. So all of our folks will become an advanced EMT sometime within their first four years of working here.

And so out of the 184 positions, how many of those are active firefighters and EMTs?

Yeah, you're really going to make me work for that. I'd have to subtract out. I'll have to get you the exact number. We have about 25 admin staff. Well, that's not even true. We've got... realistically, um, I gotta go through this every time because here's the problem. You asked that question, but our mobile medics are all paramedics are, um, and you can count those.

I mean, yes.

So that's why I got to go through. It's like, so basically our two, um, admin staff or secretaries to billing, and then six CHWs, but some of those are, so I'll subtract 11 out of that. The rest of those will be going to be certified. With that being said, some of our CHWs hold a paramedic and or a community paramedic, which is a hire, and our EMTs also.

And so does that number include fire and?

Right now, for the most part, yes. We probably have. I suppose that are not don't have never had any fire training whatsoever how I say that that's There haven't been a firefighter also for our department.

Okay. Thank you How often are we sending an engine out with an ambulance per call? I

that i don't have the exact data for but significantly less than ever before we have what's called priority dispatch so when you call nine one one you give them what the problem is they will ask you a bunch of questions in order to get down to determine what level of service you need to be provided. And then they deter, we've went through on the backside and built that protocol out on who goes. So it depends. When both of those go, it's usually bad or they need a lot of resources like a cardiac arrest. You need many hands to be able to perform a cardiac arrest.

Makes sense. I think that's great that that's been changed and not just every single time.

That was probably 2007, 8 when we started doing a bunch of that. And it's just improved over time.

Okay. I think I knew at some point in time we were sending an engine per every ambulance call and, um, just for the safety of our firefighters. And I understand that, but good job and, and assessing that strategy there. Um, I was curious when you do send out an engine and an ambulance, does that count as two calls for service then? Cause you have a call per both, whereas that that's just one call call for service.

That's why you saw the difference call for service versus a unit dispatched. So a call for service is no matter how many apparatus go on that call, that's just one call for service. And then the units dispatched will take into account all those units that were sent on that individual call.

Thank you so much. Appreciate the information.

OK. So let's get into the ambulance. That's going to be six folks that we're requesting there. Again, just like the fire portion, all of the stations were rolled up into that one admin budget in order to make the budgeting a little easier for us. To be clear, the enterprise fund, which ambulance is an enterprise fund, so fee for service is what pays for that today. That pays for 33% of everything that happens at that station. So a door breaks, 33% of the cost to fix that door will be borne by the enterprise fund. It's what we set up many years ago in order to try to make it a little more equitable across the enterprise fund into the general fund. They don't pay rent, so felt it important that we pay the utilities and some of the repair. The ambulance basically, other than the wages and benefits and the associated costs that we have with the addition in Station 9 and the folks there, we're going to have increased disposable supplies. increased due to the call volume and just adding another unit. So we've added in there. There's a fair jump in that budget, but we added in an ambulance in order to try to purchase that. But let's be clear with the enterprise fund. It's just like your checking account at the end of the year. You don't have the revenue in order to support that purchase of $150,000 ambulance or whatever. We aren't going to get it. So we'll have to find different ways of doing that and purchasing that equipment. We're also looking at some different ways of new revenue to deal with some of the rising costs. As you all know, the conversations with the county, which I'll get into next. Before I do that, the revenue side of that, at some point we're going to have to have a conversation, not about the revenue, but about the call volume for our fire apparatus. We do what's called a lift assist, and we're going to nursing homes or assisted living centers where they have a no lift policy, and our firefighters are having to go in there to pick folks up off the ground to assist them. It's becoming more and more of a problem that we're probably gonna have to talk about a fee in order to do that level of service at a location. So just something to keep in the back of your mind as we talk about revenue. So outside city limits response, I came to you guys late last year discussing the letter I was sending to all of our folks that we respond to outside of the city limits. And we've been working on that since that time. Custer County, I am glad and happy to report that Custer County had a vote this last year in June, or just in June, to set up their ambulance taxing district and that was successful by 82% of the voting population down there. So they're in the midst of setting up their ambulance taxing district. Custer County was one of those that we did have a contract with in the past. It was only for $2,000 that they paid us from 2007 until today in order to respond all the way down to Buffalo gap basically. Um, and over to red shirt table. So it was a wide swath. So we're excited about that. I think we'll get in a good place with them. Um, I'll just go down the line need County. I've had some great conversations with them and the Meade County Commissioners. They're a little bit behind everybody else at this point. They're looking at doing some different things. Quite honestly, I'm not sure which way Meade County is going to go. They may elect to go with another ambulance service at some point, which is wholly fine, that they can find service. Piedmont Ambulance operates up there, and they operate on minimal funds, so if they can Get their district a little larger and either add funding so they can pay more than $14 an hour for a highly qualified paramedic or EMT That would be great and their level of service should go up significantly Somerset I just got requested to renew the contract at the new contract price for next year just this last Friday which I have agreed to, so that contract will be coming forward. But I believe they'll probably move forward with Piedmont after that. They're trying to wait for Meade County and what they're going to do. Meade County's discussed about putting together a countywide ambulance taxing district, which may just happen, but we'll see. And they may end up contracting with us. Box Elder had some great conversations with their new city manager. They are fully on board wanting to move forward with a contract with us this next year. Um, we've talked about funding, uh, at least a portion until they can figure out their taxing district or how they're going to structure it. They're wanting it to match basically their fire protection district because they're making some changes on that side of it. Also growing community. They're having to make some, some big changes within their community as it pertains to public safety. So I foresee some of that moving along pretty quickly. But in conversations at this point, I feel fairly confident that they'll have something worked out next year. New Underwood, they're the lone holdout-ish. Had a nice meeting. I did a public forum out there last month, and it went fairly well. Surprisingly, I expected it to be much worse, but they understand. New Underwood's one of those that had an ambulance in 2011 that they could not provide services anymore. They couldn't get people to volunteer or respond any longer, and we took it over. So trying to unravel that at this point is where we're at. And now finally, Pennington County, lots of great conversations with them. They're trying to decide which direction they're gonna go, but I am very confident that they will come up with something. So all of this being said, we might have to carry next year with minimal increase, but that's okay. But really looking at 28, I honestly, to get government to move, I figured when I sent the letter in December of 25, thinking that in 26 you could get something accomplished, I pretty much knew that was not going to happen. It's hopeful. Some could move fast enough, but it's also not. realistic. I don't think so. I think we're on a good path at this point that we'll get some funding or they'll find other ways to get that service provided out in those counties areas.

So one moment, chief will recognize Laura Armstrong.

So as busy as you are and as busy as you're projected to be, is it realistic that we can contract with these other entities? I mean, obviously, we want to be good neighbors. We want to be supportive. Rapid City is our priority. I just want to make sure that we're not biting off more than we can chew. And then again, burnout is a real thing.

So I appreciate that question. It brings up the other half of this conversation. You weren't part of it when I first gave the presentation. So I'm glad you asked that question. So the real goal in all of this for the county and to get their money is about $1.5 million out of those agencies outside of the city of rapid city in order to provide two ambulances. So we would be able to increase our ambulance coverage by two ambulances. They will stay within the city limits. Yes, we'll get some benefit out of that, obviously, but it also allows us that capacity in order to continue to respond out in those communities. If none of them go with us, we don't get the two ambulances, but then we need to have a conversation on how we look at in the city subsidy and what's that look like because this is realistically, call volume's increasing here. within the city. All right, so let's talk about revenue for both fire and EMS. This will be very specific to fire right at this point, the first parts. Current federal grants, we do the wild land, which is the BLM, we do western states, so those will maintain, they will continue to maintain. I don't foresee any of that changing whatsoever. I can tell you the BLM is, ecstatic about the work that we're doing with the wildfire mitigation crew. They constantly and have on multiple occasions referenced the city of Rapid City and our program nationally. We actually had the chief come out from BLM and give a presentation and thank us. So it's a great program, it's a good program. The second option we have, really, we don't have a lot of options for grant funding. AFG is one of them. That's the second largest option we have, and that's the Assistance to Firefighter Grant. It's funding for equipment for fire and EMS. So what we applied for this year was the extra equipment for station nine. So new SCBAs masks, some other associated equipment from there. We're hopeful we'll get that. We always apply for the HLS and the HMEP grant, which is the Homeland security and the hazardous material. I just totally drew a blank on P, but, um, we always apply, but they're small, um, typically less than $20,000. We've gotten some bigger ones here and there. I believe we'll get some rescue equipment out of this latest round of HLS grant. But beyond that, we'll look for some smaller training grants out there where we can continue to outfit our training grounds. Chief Harlan applied for a training grant for a door prop where we can practice breaking the door open We were successful in that Seven thousand dollars, but it's seven thousand dollars. We don't have to come up with out of our operational cost So the last two were really talked and I will get into a little more detail on both of those is the safer grant the rural health transformation grant whoops Okay, let's get past that one. So we're asking for the 15 folks. The one thing we're going to do is ask for a safer grant. We've already applied for it. Um, there was assumptions made between myself, Daniel and Jamie, that if we're going to ask for 15 individuals that you would want us to apply for this safer grant and if awarded, you'd probably accept it. So we went forward with the application. It's the staffing for adequate fire and emergency response We're initially going to ask for 21 But we've been unsuccessful the last couple of times because we have added ambulance folks in there They say that that's acceptable but the previous time we the last two times we've received a safer grant it was very fire specific and 1710 compliance So we requested the 15 to maintain that compliance. So what it will provide if we're awarded it is new positions for three years, 75% each year, one and two, and then 35% year three allows us to slowly increase that dollar amount over the course of time. The unfortunate thing is we won't have a decision about it until later this summer. Quite honestly, I don't think we'll find out about it until after you have all ratified the budget. But I'm pretty optimistic we'll receive it. A lot of other services that have had a similar grant request have received their grant. So the Rural Health Transformation Grant, I'll try to go quickly because I know I'm running out of time, but CHWs and mobile medic success. So we've had a ton and just a bunch of success on our CHWs and mobile medics. The combination of services that we provide have held call volume down for our fire department. And when I talk about our CHWs and mobile medics, I'm gonna give a shout out to our brothers over here in the PD, the quality of life unit, and also the park rangers. That big combined group to include some of our other co-response folks, Oyate, Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board, VOA, and many others, journey on has been huge for us. Need to give a shout out to them so that whole bucket of how we approach this has made a significant impact. But a rural health transformation grant, we shot big. One of the big things that they wanted to do is a regionalization of the CHW programs, because we've seen some success in it. So that's what we're trying to do. We're not trying to take over and make sure we spread this out, but our service that we provide with our CHWs is within the city limits. But many of these same patients live in Rapid Valley, They live in Box Elder. They live in Black Hawk. They live in Whispering Pines, et cetera. So we're trying to take a regional expansion to this much like we do many of our education programs. That's a huge piece of this. Try to make sure we're able to educate our community health care workers and regionally start educating community health care workers so they can go out and provide the service throughout other communities. So for us, with the big grant request, we're asking for five CHWs and two licensed addiction counselors. The equipment, the vehicles, the training, everything. And even to add on a workforce development coordinator in order to provide that CHW training and the other half of this is trained our existing mobile medics to be community paramedics and then continue on on that with some of our other paramedics throughout our service. Why that's important is we can bill for both CHWs, the license addiction counselors, and the community paramedics for non-transport work that they do. So they're able to help provide a level of care and service to individuals where they're at. So whether they're at home, they're down by the creek, they're here, no matter where, and then if we can bill for some of those services. And that's becoming more prevalent throughout the country, not just with Medicaid, but with other payers also. We did apply for a second grant, somewhat similar, and we're trying to get one or the other. We shot big with the regional grant, but we also did a local request for just Rapid City, which included three CHWs and one licensed addiction counselor. We'll continue to provide our mobile medics. We'll do the training for mobile medics to community paramedic also, because we found that we need to do that. The biggest piece of that is we think we can come close to cost recovery with doing that program. The cost was about $290,000 with a conservative look at reimbursement. We're sitting at about $240,000 to $260,000. So basically cost recovery and the impact we could have is I'll show you. Also, we did a DOJ grant to increase our mobile medics, which eventually would be community paramedics. So this is what we're talking about, the impact. When I talk about the CHWs, there is a significant impact between CHWs, mobile medics, quality of life, and those folks that are hitting it right here, right now. So super utilizers, patients that we see 10 plus times or greater. We had a high of 80 people that saw CHWs we saw 10 times or more. With the highest number, one gentleman, we saw 80 times. So in that 2022 to 2025, we saw a 63% reduction in that superutilizer usage. I will tell you that was one of the main goals back when I started the mobile medic program in 2013. It was a program trying to reduce that superutilizer, our frequent flyers, our reward zone members, whatever you want to call them. There are folks that use that service multiple, multiple, multiple times. And now we have some tools in order to take care of that. Where you see that big jump and that big drop, what do we add? Community health, along with the mobile medics, community health care workers and JourneyOn. Huge change and a huge drop in that utilization. So I can go through challenges and all that stuff, but I know you guys, we've talked about some of this stuff. I do bring up many of those about cross-staffing and bringing back in those folks. So we haven't added until hopefully Station 9, if you guys approve that, we haven't added a 24-hour ambulance since 2009. Um, we have no new stations, additional with additional staffing since 2003. Um, so station nine is going to help on many, many, many fronts. Recruitments becoming more and more difficult, um, changing work life, changing how people approach their job and what they do. So I did bring up some of this, but the cost of implementation of what our data shows, I can show you a lot of data. Just a lot of times we don't want to hear it because it's going to cost There's a significant amount of money that's spent, especially on some of our prevention programs. So I bring up opening station two, stopping cross-staffing of five and six, and then eventually we're going to have to really have conversations about 10 and 11. We already own the property on the north side on Kimberly Drive. As that continues to grow there, we're going to have to have a station out there. So in my perfect world, I'd like to be able to plan for stations and staffing like we planned for our large vehicles. It's there. It's in CIP. I know it's coming. I'm very jealous of Sioux Falls. He knows exactly when his next two stations are coming. They're already in works to do station 13. And you already saw what they do as far as call volume. So very jealous of them. But we have a piece of this puzzle. We need to start teaching folks proper use of 911. It's not just to utilize it for your primary care provider. It needs to be an emergency unit period. So go over some things that we, if we had to cut, but I can talk about those if you have questions.

So thank you, chief. Any questions from the council?

I will say one thing that I want to kind of leave you with. Our department is efficient. It's lean. It's high functioning. We do a great job. I think we give a great value to this community. And even providing and adding Station 9, that value is still there. It actually increases and makes it better. And as we continue to provide the high level of service we do, it's one thing you're probably not going to hear too much of. It's how terrible these guys and gals are. They do a great job. They're here. They wanted to hear this speech also. It's the first time they're hearing the budget and what I have to say. So we had a few of our folks, and I'm so glad PD showed up. He really wanted to listen to me too, so I'm honored. But realistically, if you start cutting us much more, it's going to mean programs that do have an impact on this community, things that are nice to do because we have to maintain the 911 service, and we are about as lean as we can get on the 911 service right now So that, done.

Thank you, Chief, and thank you for everything you and everyone in the audience does. We can move on to number two unless anyone on council wants or needs a five-minute recess. It would be. All right. It would require a motion for a five-minute recess if we want it.

Motion to recess.

All right, I have a first and a second for a 5 minute recess on favor. The post OK, we are in recess for 5 minutes.

Thank you. Enjoy.

Every once in a while I get .

Yeah. Okay, okay.

OK, the meeting will come to order. And with that, we will move on to item number two, the 2027 Police Department budget presentation by Chief Hedrick. Sir, the floor is yours.

All right. Thank you, Mr. President. Just before I get started, I want to thank the folks of the RCPD. Just daily, I'm struck by the amazing work they do. And as you can see, they care about our department. Got a pretty good showing here. And they care about our community. Pretty challenging work that they do on a daily basis. It takes not only dedication, but courage and integrity. And I'm proud of these folks. So we have our first slide up here. And I wanna briefly, before we get into it, just mention a couple trends from the 2021 era because they still impact some of the work that we're doing and they impact our budget today. And firstly, I wanna mention our response to violence because in 2021, we sort of had to upend the way we responded to violence and change the way we thought, change the way we did business. And really what I'm getting to is we had to adjust with the times and we had to focus very heavily in some of our primary hotspots. At times we had to station officers in a particular area. And on top of that, that heavy resource allocation, We couldn't just do that by policing alone. We also had to focus and work with the neighborhood, work with the community, and it really took a lot of effort with our outreach and engagement with the good people living there. Building neighborhood watch groups, empowering the folks in the neighborhoods to not only build trust but to have that level of comfort where they felt like they could call us. And you're seeing some of that still today with our Star Village efforts. And thirdly, working with our elected officials. You saw at our last council meeting, support from the group up here at the dais pushing on property owners that weren't doing what they need to do to meet the most basic needs of Good people in the neighborhoods that that need these places to live so This this effort of police community elected officials all working together as a team and we're still utilizing that concept here today The other trend that we witnessed back then and we're sort of coming out of that due to support from folks like you is we saw officers leaving the profession. And at one point, we were 35 officers short. That's a big number for us. And I'm pretty happy to say we're in a lot better shape now than what we were. Essentially today, we'd be very close to fully staffed. However, Last year we applied for a couple grants to get us some more officers, and right now we're in a couple hiring cycles to make sure that we can get those 12 positions filled. So we're trying to fill those positions for these grant positions right now. As a result, we didn't opt to request any additional FTEs for this 2027 budget. as we're still trying to fill these grant positions. However, as we fill these spots, we're gonna reevaluate for 2028 and see where we're at. So we have some of our goals up here on the screen and we appreciate the support that we've had for the North Precinct. We've been working with our city partners and we're at a spot right now where we're looking to get the remodeling accomplished for that building. AND WHAT YOU'LL SEE HERE ON THE PUBLIC WORKS AGENDA, WE'VE GOT TO THE POINT WHERE WE... YEAH, THAT'S TOMORROW. TOMORROW, TUESDAY? WHAT DAY IS IT? IT'S BEEN A WHILE LAST WEEK, AND THIS WEEKEND WAS BUSY. WE'RE ABOUT TO ADVERTISE FOR BID. IT'S ON THE AGENDA TOMORROW, WHERE WE'RE GOING TO PUT THAT ON FOR OUR REMODELING PROCESS, AND WITH THE GOAL OF BRINGING OUR TRAINING DIVISION our current substation we're operating on next door as well as our outreach teams all under that one roof. And we hope to bring some more accessibility for the rabbit city police department to the north side neighborhoods with that, with that project. I think it's going to be great. Uh, I mentioned data driven policing. Uh, not every police department leans on data to drive their resources. We feel it's important. We've had good results from that. We're constantly monitoring to the point of weekly finding out where our hotspots are because they do shift, putting that information out to our shifts and to our supervisors and to the officers so they know where these hotspots are occurring so we can address them before they get bigger or more of a problem. And for us, it's been a great formula for success. And personal growth, I'm gonna let... personal growth and leadership. Assistant Chief Sitz is going to talk a little bit more about that later. Let's see. All right, real briefly, I just wanted to give you a little bit of a snapshot of how our resources are allocated. Some of you might know, some of you might not. We do have three divisions of the police department, and as I talk through this, I just want to give you and acknowledge that You know, we have our three different divisions, but we also do as a community. I think we do. Our community has a lot of support for our department. And along with that support, we do, there is this expectation of transparency and we work really hard to ensure we're operating at the highest level. And that means making sure that we have our resources allocated the best we can. And if you start, I guess it'd be my left on patrol. Uh, that, that might be what you think of as our uniform to police presence. Um, the folks that are on immediate emergency response, it's our highest allocated resource division. And, uh, these are the folks that are running 24, seven, three 65, four shifts overlapping for the highest, uh, highest presence during the timeframes where it's needed the most. CID criminal investigations, this is where you would find our detectives and not only our detectives kind of broke up into specialty units, but this also includes the task force that we're a part of and we leverage those task force with other investigative entities. So for example, We have units that are made up of multiple agencies that work together as an efficiency. So our Internet Crimes Against Children, for example, is made up of units from the sheriff's office, state investigators, all working together to be a force multiplier on crimes such as that. Our Drug Investigative Unit, same type of thing. And those are partnerships that are really important, partnerships that don't happen in a lot of other places, but we feel like it's important and valuable. Our school resource officers, our evidence team, they all also fit under our criminal investigations division. Support services, a lot of different things packed into this division. Kind of our, sort of a catch-all of amazing people under there. Um, our training, all of our folks being trained, our records division, our hiring, our accreditation, public information officer, safety specialists, crime reduction, a lot of different things. So, um, some of these other guys are going to pop in here and speak a little bit, but captain Christian Siegel is in charge of our patrol division. Our assistant chief Scott sits in charge of our support services and captain Andy Becker is in part in charge of our criminal investigations division. All right, just wanted to mention some of the things that are on our radar right now because they do impact our budget to some degree and some of our higher priority initiatives. Wanted to mention our downtown foot patrol. It's something that we've implemented here somewhat recently, but something we also feel it's important to keep going. Not only because of a lot of the positive feedback that we've received from this initiative, but because of the feeling of safety that it's provided. And I can tell you that it's gone well. We've had specific officers that are really taking it upon themselves to make this their mission. And, uh, it's something we've been able to manage through our traditional set staffing to some degree, our street crimes units. These are proactive units that are not necessarily tied to the radio, so they don't have a. A reactive response. They're more proactive in nature. A lot of these officers are supplemented through grants and we'll get into that a little bit more later, but the daytime street street crimes units are more focused on being visible in the daytime hours. specifically like the downtown core, bike path, et cetera. Our evening street crimes are more focused on the hot spots, high crime areas, places where violence is occurring, trying to engage in addressing where the guns, drugs, violence, et cetera, is occurring. uh... you might have heard some news about our parole task force this recent year uh... our issues with parole has been ongoing over the last few years in particular but really escalated this last year to the point where we had to do something different wasn't working it got particularly bad where we saw extreme violence occurring by people that are on parole uh... essentially people that are still designated as being in prison serving a prison sentence but out in our community, being allowed to serve their sentence out in our community. And we were noticing that they just were not being checked on after hours. So they were out committing more crime and sometimes crimes of violence, shooting people, et cetera. And it really just was not acceptable. We took some pretty drastic measures to the point of the sheriff's office and us partnering together to create our own little unit to check on people because it wasn't happening. And you know, there are parole agents who are tasked with doing that. We just felt like it wasn't happening enough. So we also partnered with parole to make sure that folks that are serving their sentence in our community knew that somebody was going to go out and check on them after hours. That was one step we took. And in addition to that, we, the sheriff, and I and the state's attorney and some of our other criminal justice partners, along with our counterparts in Sioux Falls, really, really engaged heavily on folks that are in charge of parole with the state and really asked, had some specific asks for them to adjust their policies in that moment. AND WE BELIEVE WE WERE HEARD. AND AT THIS POINT, THINGS ARE IN MUCH BETTER SHAPE THAN WHAT THEY WERE. WE CAN'T SEE THINGS ARE PERFECT, BUT WE'RE IN A MUCH BETTER SPOT BECAUSE OF THESE MEASURES WE TOOK. AND, YOU KNOW, THAT'S SOMETHING WE'RE GOING TO CONTINUE TO MONITOR AND KEEP ADDRESSING. CIT OR CRISIS INTERVENTION TRAINING, WE SORT OF HAVE A RENEWED EFFORT ON THIS TRAINING. Another word for this might be de-escalation training. And something that's near and dear to our heart, us in the sheriff's office were some of the first in the state to bring this training to law enforcement in South Dakota. Sort of putting a facelift on this and we have a CIT training class going on right now and This renewed effort, we're pretty proud of this, and it's something we're going to keep going on. Okay, I'll keep going here. I'm not going to walk through every one of these bullets because some of this will come up later on in the presentation, but I wanted to mention our accreditation. We just kind of went through an accreditation process, and I have to mention... You know, we are still the only accredited agency, law enforcement agency in the state of South Dakota. It's a big deal. It's not always comfortable to have a third party come through and go through all of your policies, practices, procedures, but it's important. It's a big deal. It keeps us on the cutting edge. It keeps us on our toes, keeps us accountable, and it keeps us professional. IT'S A LOT OF EXTRA WORK, BUT TO US IT'S WORTH IT. WE'VE BEEN ACCREDITED FOR OVER 30 YEARS AND WE'RE PROUD OF THAT. STAR VILLAGE AND OUR COMMUNITY OUTREACH, SOME OF THIS IS KIND OF LINKED TOGETHER. I THINK WHAT I JUST WANTED TO NOTE IN ADDITION IS THERE'S A LOT OF OPPORTUNITIES UPCOMING TO GET INVOLVED IF YOU WANTED TO. Jamie is here somewhere. If you were interested in getting involved in any of that, she sent me a really lengthy list of some of the upcoming events. I or she or any of us would be happy to send you some of those events if you wanted to pop your head in. I know it makes a difference to the folks living there when they see leaders like yourself pop in. And I know some of you have in the past. So thank you for that. But just holler if you have interest. or we could just send it anyways for awareness too.

I'll talk about traffic enforcement later. Excuse me, Chief. Yes. Chair recognizes Councillor Armstrong. Yes, ma'am.

Well, you mentioned you're going to talk about traffic enforcement later, so I'll just pipe in at that time.

Perfect. Yes, I do have a little bit more I was going to add on that, and I'll circle back around to you for sure. I wanted to just touch on, I'm sure the fire chief mentioned this, but our historic new collaboration with the fire department and fire station nine, uh, you know, I, I suppose in theory the fire department could have a building and the police department could have their own separate building, but we all know buildings are expensive. Um, and for us it just only makes sense for us to work together. We have a great working relationship. And for us, having some office space with them only seems to make sense. And this is like history in the making. It's pretty cool. For us, we've partnered with the Sheriff's Office for many, many years. And for all of us here at the table to be a part of this historic collaboration, I think it's awesome. OK, our quality of life unit. Another opportunity for us to collaborate with the fire department. We've recently been presented with an opportunity to have some training provided by the fire department potentially here in the future. And I don't know, did you go into this at all, fire chief? A little bit? OK, so sounding like the fire department is looking to receive the ability to obtain some community health worker training Also, then they'd have the ability to train our quality of life unit to have some of this training. We're working through some of the details here in the future. Might give us the opportunity to then have that understanding as to what community health workers do, an understanding of all that, give our quality of life unit some additional tools in their tool belt. and thereby could also provide the city with some opportunities to have some Medicaid support there as well on the back end. So we're looking hard into all of that and um, you know, only strengthens our ability to collaborate further with the fire department like we already do with our co response. Um, we do have a little bit of restructuring that we're looking at here with uh,

Criminal Investigations Division and Captain and you Becker here is going to give a little brief on that Thank you, yes, so as you can tell see you net supervision that's the unified narcotic enforcement team that is one of the Groups that is a multi-agency Task force that we have here in Rapid City in western, South Dakota and serve other counties typically that That group has always been supervised by either a Pennington County Sergeant or Rapid City Police Department Sergeant. Pennington County has supervised that division now since 2018. In 2022, I know the Chief talked about when we were several officers down, it was our turn in 2022 to take over supervision of UNET. However, we were really not in a position to be able to do that by taking another Person out of patrol promoting a sergeant and moving them over to UNET. So at that time, Penny County Sheriff's Office agreed to continue to supervise UNET. Thad Mason has done that, done a nice job of doing that. So good that he's now been promoted to lieutenant for the Penny County Sheriff's Office. So he will be coming out of UNET again. Now it is our turn to take over that supervision. So we're working on a process right now to get that sergeant identified to go over and lead that division. There's been a few changes to the sexual assault and child abuse investigations. Currently, the way that is structured is we have two detectives. That is, their primary work is to handle those investigations, and they work under the Penton County Sheriff's Office. They're in-house. They're all on the third floor. However, a supervisor from the Penton County Sheriff's Office oversees the sexual assault child abuse investigations. They're also going through some sort of restructuring of that. And we're going to kind of treat those cases like we do our property and our major cases, our people crimes and our property crimes, where the Penta County Sheriff's Office will handle the cases in their county, and the Rapid City Police Department will handle all of the Rapid City cases that occur for those. So with that addition, because of the type of cases they are, they need that oversight. They need direct supervision. So we will be looking at adding a sergeant who will be the sexual assault child abuse sergeant the Rapsody Police Department and then adding also a couple extra detectives because obviously We want to make sure that these crimes do get the attention that they deserve and are investigated properly So it'll be basically a team of five in the Rapsody Police Department criminal investigations division for those cases Chief would like to recognize counselor Stroman for a question

And this would be either for Chief or Captain Becker, I don't know who would be appropriate, but with the move of the county administration office out to concourse, will you be assuming some of that building area for police operations? And if so, how will that affect your budget, if at all?

So we're not moving anybody out to concourse. However, um, some of our, some of our public facing offices are moving to the current County or moving over to the building that was their spot over there. So our records division and compliance would be moving over to that spot. Then freeing up some of our, Some of the space that was used for records, for example, would be used for some of our investigative purposes. And there was some remodel costs that we are able to pay for through our general fund built in.

Thank you.

Yep. So we do have some crime data here, and Captain Siegel's going to touch on this.

Thank you. Mr. President, Council, as Chief said, my name's Christian Siegel. I'm the commander of our patrol division. And we have some very basic stats for you to review here. Kind of illustrates how much work that our people are doing over a five-year period. The top left there, you can see that our calls for service have slowly increased from 114 to 157,000 calls for service. Now, a call for service is anything that a police officer does. We're not necessarily a police officer, but our employees do. Everything gets a call for service. That would be anything that's proactive, anything that's reactive, important for you, any time that a constituent calls and asks for police services. So 157,000 times throughout the year, we are sending people to go and respond and resolve people's crisis. A 37% increase from year to year. Well, not year to year, but every five years. Moving over to cases, now the difference between a call for service and a case, sometimes those calls for service don't require an investigation or further documentation. It may be a simple, I would say a minor crime that doesn't have any solvability to it, may result in just a call for service. Maybe it's a phone call asking for advice, just a call for service. A case is something that requires further documentation. It could be an accident. It could be anywhere up to a homicide or anything that might require investigative work. Or there are other requirements that require cases. And you can see that that line is kind of strange. If you look at all of the lines, they gradually increase consistently throughout each year. This one dipped in 2022, and we don't really have a reason why that occurred. However, in the five-year period, you can see that we increased about 700 cases over the five-year period. So a lot of investigations, a lot of different things that are occurring that require extra work. I shouldn't say extra, but more work than a regular calls for service. That has increased only a few hundred. And I say only, I mean, that is pretty significant. knowing the kind of manpower workforce that is required to manage each case. It is somewhat significant, but not a huge amount, I guess. As far as warnings and citations, and Ms. Armstrong, you had mentioned some questions about traffic. This may answer that. You can see our proactive enforcement. This is our efforts going out there to influence our motoring public to slow down, stop at stop signs, whatever it might be that is traffic related. In 2023, Captain Becker at the time, he added four traffic officers, two in the morning and then two in the evening. The evening ones are more focused on DUI enforcement. So in 2023, we increased our efforts dramatically. Um, we really put a lot of effort into, uh, slowing our, our motor Republic down and making the streets safe, managing those accidents. Um, and again, importantly, I imagine that a lot of your constituents are complaining about traffic and, um, the people that are running through the gap or what have you. And so we felt that it was necessary to bring back our traffic division and really put a lot of effort into that. And you can see we have increased our enforcement dramatically in the five years and very much so from 2023. The orange line is our citations. Warnings are nice and feel good. However, our citations are problem correcting. Nobody wants a citation. And then arrests, very similar to the calls for service as far as the increase. You can see from the five-year period, there's about 1,600 extra arrests. be from an increase in crime. But really, when we put two police officers out there looking for DUIs and another two just strictly out there looking for trafficking violations, that in turn turns to arrests. We find people with warrants just based on a traffic stop. We find people that are intoxicated. The proactive work out there increase arrests. And so that would explain the increase. That's about all I have.

Chair recognizes Councilor Meyer.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Would you say these trends are comparable to municipalities across the nation?

Yeah, with a city like ours that continues to grow, more people coming in, a centralized hub, we have not only growth inside the city, but growth within the region. And we service all those people. We service... We have a large population that come for tourism. And we service all of them. They all have calls for service, a need for police response. And so, yes.

Thank you.

Thank you. Mr. Armstrong, did we get your question answered? OK. And I would say also that there through the use of grants. That's how we've been able to obtain these traffic focused officers. And I have a slide on grants too. That'll touch on it in a little more detail as we move along. So just dialing into a little bit of our specifics and I know Mr Lehman had mentioned how he went through this in a little more detail, but you know, I just wanted to mention, um, you know, we go through, um, we're provided some numbers for our budget and some of them are just pretty clear cut given to us right out the gates. And many of our line items are like that. They're just, you know, there's either, um, they're, they're, they're set for us by, you know, union contracts or provided by something that's figured already predetermined. Um, for example, um, You know, there's formulas to calculate or, you know, our union contract already has our wages already set up and predetermined. Items like retirement, workers' comp, insurance, interdepartmental charges, they're already locked in for us right out the gates. There are some line items that we do have a little bit of authority over. However, some of them are also fairly fixed as well. Some of our software contracts, for example, like our body cameras, they're locked into multi-year contracts, which is a good thing. We brought those forth through council. They're approved. The good part about that is those contracts can't go up year to year because they're locked in. We know that we also have to set aside funding for vehicle repairs and fuel and building maintenance, and they're pretty consistent year to year. So we kind of just know what we have to lock in. And overall for this 2027, we feel like we're in pretty good shape. And if you went through it line by line, you'll see that this 2027 budget is pretty similar to the 26 budget as well. Did want to touch on some of the grants that we have continuing. And just in case you had questions on them, or whatever that might be, our JAG grant, our justice assistance grant, this is a grant we typically leverage for equipment. We go into this every single year with the county jointly. We've used this to purchase equipment that we know we're going to have to buy anyway. And it's been very helpful over the years, awarded typically every year. We've used it for cyber equipment for our internet crimes against children software for, for that unit as well. Digital evidence for storage for our evidence lab. Um, just typically public safety equipment that we know we're going to have to buy. So why not utilize grant assistance? Uh, project safe neighborhood. This is a grant specifically for wages, and this is a grant that we partner with the ATF on, focused on addressing violent gun crimes. People that are out committing acts of violence in our community, focused on offenders to hold them accountable. VOCA, Victims of Crime Act. This is wages for our high risk youth coordinator and helps provide services for victims of crime. This is something we've applied for annually and we've had good success with. Our 2024 COPS grant. This is again how I'd mentioned our street crimes unit. This helps cover our street crimes daytime unit. And this goes into February, 2028. This is our, and we also have a 2025 cops grant. This is for three years. This helps cover the 10 officers that I had mentioned that we're working on filling this year. Those 10 openings, the highway safety grant. This helps cover those traffic enforcement officers that I was talking about covers those wages. That's how we're able to obtain different, different officers specifically focused on traffic enforcement through the state. It's been very helpful to us. And again, you know, if your constituents are talking about traffic, we hear it all the time as well. Weekly, sometimes daily, we're hearing about, hey, my neighborhood, we want this, we want enforcement in our area. And it's something we track and very heavy focus for us at this time. Couple different grant opportunities the fire chief had mentioned this first grant the public safety and mental health initiative This isn't just a police grant. This is something we put in together as a city You know, we're a piece of that but it's primarily focused on the fire department and We're a partner in it The Community Violence Intervention and Prevention Grant, this is a grant that we have reapplied for and we've had it since, help me out Dave, 2022? Yep. And we feel pretty confident we're gonna be able to seek, we're gonna be able to get this grant again. Dave told me it's money in the bank, so if you know Dave, And it supported a lot of our outreach initiatives. There's no direct city match to it. I put down the Homeland Security Grant. We applied for this, and it took a little bit of a backlog, but we eventually received it. And it's over $100,000 specifically for safety barriers that we received. And you might have noticed all the big, heavy concrete blocks that we utilized during some of our recent 4th of July events. This isn't going to cover all of those heavy blocks, but it's a lighter, easier to move grant, or I mean barrier type of material that can stop heavy vehicles, but it's a good starting point. It'll cover a smaller space for now, but it'd be easier for our partners at Public Works to move, and it's something that we're gonna keep continuing to put in grants for, so we eventually have enough to utilize this instead of the big concrete barriers. So it's a good opportunity for us to keep looking at. Okay, so next up, Assistant Chief Sitz. We're pretty lucky, we have a leadership expert in our house, teaches leadership classes, and he's gonna dive in here for a little bit.

using the term expert loosely. Just really talking about our staffing and our workload comparison. As Captain Siegel said, and you can see the 157,000 calls for service up there, just to let you know, you do have an extremely busy police department. I recognize that we... We made categories. Our calls for service are a little bit different than everybody else. We might include some proactive stuff, but Sioux Falls may not. But at the end of the day, if we were to take our proactive stuff out, we'd still be very comparable to Sioux Falls, and we'd still be having right around that 2,000 calls per officer. So we have an extremely busy police department. Our ultimate goal would be that 1,000 calls per officer per year. That's kind of the gold standard and the benchmark that is set. We have a lot of catching up to do with officers on that. Again, as you can see, we're right around that 2,200 mark. There's also another out there, the national average for police officers per 1,000 population is at 2.2. We're sitting right about 196, so not too bad. About another 20 officers would get us to that location. So again, out of all those police departments up there, we consider ourselves the busiest police department in the Midwest, and that's the reason why. One thing we did budget for again this year is our wellness package or the continuation of our wellness package. We've had that in our budget since 2023 with the approval of council. And while we recognize that there is a cost to this package, to this benefit, we can't talk about that cost if we don't talk about also the cost savings. So what you see up there right now, We hire a new employee for a year starting in 2027. It's gonna cost just shy of $100,000. Once we pay them their salary, once we do the roll up, the health insurance, the retirement, the workers comp, all the benefits, and we equip them, it's gonna cost us roughly $100,000 for that employee for a year. A lot of studies out there, because of the training that goes into law enforcement, in order to, you don't get hired, you do a week, and you're out on your own. It's nine to 12 months on average for a police officer to start working independently. Based on that, what they say for public safety is attrition rates can easily double if not triple because of the cost goes into it. That $100,000 doesn't include the interview boards that we're paying to conduct the interviews. It doesn't, the 80-hour background investigation, we're paying the background investigators. the medical examinations, the hearing, the vision tests. It doesn't include the overtime that that officer is earning throughout that year as they learn to become a police officer, nor does it include the overtime that we're paying a police training officer to train that officer. When I talk about loss of productivity and efficiency, we're basically paying two police officers to do the work of one at a much, much slower rate. And I'm using 10 officers here. You'll see on the next slide. But the base cost to replace 10 officers they come out of training and can work independently is roughly about $880,000. And to pay the training officers to train them for these months is about $800,000 and $900,000 for a total of about $1.7 million. That's how much it costs to train, equip police officers until they get out and can work effectively on their own. And here's why I'm using 10. So the three years prior to our wellness package, uh, that's been approved, uh, we are averaging an attrition rate of 20 officers per year. We had an attrition rate of 14%, and since that time, since the wellness package has been in effect, we're at 6%, 5%, and 6% for attrition rates. That is unheard of in law enforcement. Law enforcement is still very routinely and averages that 14% on the low end and 20% to 25% on the high end. And we're a big believer. We could have taken a route that a lot of agencies have taken. And I've seen signing bonuses up to $50,000 for signing bonuses. No one get any ideas out there? Paying for moving expenses. They're going to pay to rent your apartment for a year. I was a firm believer in not rewarding people that we don't know. If we're going to do anything, let's take care of these guys. So after you would train all your officers, we pay for the wellness package, the city is still saving $1.1 million after the cost of the wellness package. That's the savings to the city. And you're getting highly qualified, highly trained officers that know our community and just become more efficient and more productive. A couple of interesting things we've seen. Since implementing this wellness package, we've seen a drop in use of force. We've seen a drop in complaints. We have a firm, we have a saying out there that in order to take care of other people, you have to be able to take care of yourself first. And we know this is a very difficult job. You get... Expected to solve problems that have taken years to fester. You gotta do that in seconds. You get hit, punched, kicked. Some people try to take your lives and you gotta carry on and you gotta go forward. And some interesting studies here from the FOP National Study survey that 70% of officers are considering leaving law enforcement. 50% experience high burnout. 80% are experiencing exhaustion. The life expectancy in law enforcement is 22 years less than that of the general population. 25% of officers have high blood pressure. 40% are obese. Depression is twice as high for police officers as it is in the general population. And almost 50% have post-traumatic stress disorder. Officer suicide is also 45% higher than the general population. So since we've implemented our wellness package, again, you saw the return just on attrition alone. But look at what our officers are saying. 94% report that the package is effective to extremely effective in addressing burnout and stress. 80% reported the wellness and retention package has positively impacted their decision to stay with the RCPD. And 81% reported improved morale. So I think as leaders, we have an ethical obligation to take care of our staff, not just financially, but also physically and mentally. And this package is a big part of doing that. What we have here is our organization chart. You might be looking at it and thinking that's upside down. Well, we flipped it on purpose. We flipped it because it shows as a daily reminder as leaders that we are here to support our staff and not our staff supporting us. So we had that flipped. This rests outside the chief in my office, and it serves as that daily reminder that we have to invest in our officers, in our public safety professionals, and we need to support them in their growth and development and success.

All right.

So while all of us are here for questions or things we didn't touch on and stuff you want to dive into further?

Thank you. First, Chair will recognize Councillor Armstrong.

Great. I have two questions. Coming from a law enforcement family, I know how serious this is. And again, we appreciate everything that you do on every level. What's the morale?

Yeah, I would say morale is good. I would say morale is high. But I think this is a good sign right here. We put out an email saying, hey, if you're interested in this process, come on over. And this is our turnout.

Is there anybody that wants to come up and speak to that? I mean, I have a view of it, but if there's anybody that wants to talk about it.

Yeah, absolutely.

And this is Sean. Sean's our wellness coordinator.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, you bet, buddy.

Hello, thank you. Appreciate the opportunity. Always speak in front of people. But absolutely, the wellness package has been a night and day difference with the police department and morale, just how things feel when you enter a room. Before this, a little more bleak, it's a little harder, especially when those days are really difficult. When you have those calls that you're not going to be able to forget easily, it's hard to continue to come back to work every single day. One of the things I love so much about the police department, my, my experience, I was a military police in the air force and the major difference between us. I mean, the work is way different. Number one, but number two, the major differences, I made a decision one time. to work for the Air Force. And I had to live that decision for four years. If I had a choice, I probably wouldn't have made that decision every single day. These guys make a decision every single day to come in to work. And they do it because they know they're being supported by their team, by their people, by their council members, by the community. And that makes a huge difference when we're talking about morale. So love everything that we're doing. Thank you for your support.

And thank you for sharing your personal story. And it actually leads to my second and last question, I promise. Where do we find potential candidates?

Is Lexia here?

No, she's not. Go ahead. We'll let Assistant Chief Sitz handle that. He's over our recruiting.

Well, before we started, we hired Alexia Call. She's a talent recruiter. She's amazing. She does a great job branding. So we have a lot of stuff out on social media. We've done ads. We had ads on Monday Night Football. I don't know if anyone caught any of those or not. But, you know, I think for most importantly, the biggest connection for us is right here, how word gets out from – from our staff is huge. Our staff knows who's gonna make good police officers in this community and who's not. So word of mouth, community support, leadership support, and that's how we get the message out. And I think of our last several hiring cycles, the majority have been local from our area, which is outstanding.

Hey, just out of curiosity, how many people have military experience in the room? It's another good measure also for us.

And I met with several of your officers last Thursday and should be commended that it was 30 years, 22 years, 19 years on the job. So thank you.

Next, we will move to Greg Stroman.

Thank you, Chair. I just have a comment. I think you bumped yourself out there. Oh. I just have a comment that fortunately my encounters with the police have been limited but the times that I have been down to the public safety building I've been super extremely impressed with the way that Chief and anyone else that's in the area whether it's the person at the window or it's the chief all the way throughout the hierarchy everyone treats the people that just drop in there with respect and try to be helpful to them and answer their questions and they're very patient and professional with them and I just really appreciate that. And the other question I have, it regards budgeting and funding. I wondered if you have had a chance to have time with Dr. Tamang to find out when the rest of the opioid settlement funds would be ends that you can use for. Yeah. Is there any progress on that? I mean, I know that DSS is just really slow about

Yeah.

Dolan that out, but it seems like. Well, I have an update.

I think the doc is probably more knowledge on it than I am, but I believe we're working through sort of a pilot program with the county, but doc, you probably have more info on it than I do, frankly.

Aggressive work in progress, sir. Yeah. That's, that's probably a better way to put it. Next we will move to councilor Meyer.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. My first, this is more of a request. You had said that there's currently no city match for a community outreach grant that we receive. I guess I'd be curious if there was at some point some match, what sort of outreach you could do. I think community outreach is incredibly important. So if someone wanted to prepare something for us to take a look at, I'd be interested in seeing that.

Yeah, no, that's good. And what they're getting that is we don't have to match any funding towards it. So it would be funding that we would just receive without having to pony up to it. Kind of a... win-win for us if we do receive that grant.

My question is it looks like we did or we will have about a million dollars difference in grants that we're receiving next year. A million dollars less. And this is just for my high like high level overview is that grants that we had just planned to off ramp or are we in progress of receiving someone so we just can't put it in the budget because they're not confirmed.

And the finance director would like to weigh in. He might have something to say.

Thank you, Mr. Chair. Yeah, the majority of that is because we have several grants that we have used to help onboard the new police officers. However, similar to the safer grants that we have discussed for the fire department, most of those grants, including the COPS grants, they're heavy on the first year or second year, and then they start tailing off. And so as they start falling down, then the general fund has to provide that additional support. And so that's what's happening with the police department. It's not that they're getting a lot of additional officers or anything else. It's just that the amount of support that they receive from the federal government is going to be reduced, which is part of the plan that we had going into that last year, I think, when we started looking at that. That's the exact same thing that we're going to see. next year, and especially the year after in the fire department. So just to make sure everyone's on the same page with that, we're going to see the exact same thing happening. And in fact, the grants for PD likely will decrease again in 2028 because of the same factor.

Thank you.

We can get more and keep it high, though.

Next, we'd like to go to Councillor Maher. Maher, pardon me.

Chief, I know you've increased the usage of cameras. We've all seen in the media there's going to be a lot of pushback by residents because of too much surveillance and they're so accurate now with our license plate numbers.

Yeah.

Can you just comment a little bit on that and what your plan is for this year? Are we adding cameras in certain areas?

Yeah. So, you know, I think the huge pushback is, is related to these flock cameras that have had data breaches and such. Um, you know, we in particular have stayed away from flock. We don't own any flock cameras. Um, you know, there's these apps out there or there's a lot of social media out there that is very misleading and we've tried really hard to debunk that. You know, we do have license plate reader technology and we've had that for years, but Not in particular to the flock cameras. Now, we do have a couple of license plate reader technology type cameras that are up in our high gun violence and high violence type of areas. And we're trying that out on a year type of basis to see how that goes. The one thing I'll tell you about our cameras is that Our technology is very guarded, and it's not being monitored 24-7. It's very specific to the crime in particular. And this is technology that we've used to help us solve big cases. You might remember we talked about this publicly when people were raining down bullets from Skyline Drive a while back. This is technology we've used to help us solve cases like that and people that are having their vehicles stolen and such. So I don't know. To me, there's a big difference, and it's something that we're trying. And ultimately, we serve the people. We'll see how this all pans out. We're guarding our technology very closely, though. And I do have folks that are experts in it. I know some of you have asked some questions. And the assistant chief and who's our other camera expert? Probably you, you're one of them. Do you have more detail on our R&P on it?

Yeah, so our camera systems, you know, there's a lot of rumors out there. They're monitored. We use them to monitor people. Essentially how our camera system works is if you're a victim of crime, let's say your car gets stolen, we will enter your license plate into the database. And if your database passes an LPR, a license plate reader, we'll get an alert and we can send officers that way. If you're missing or endangered in person, and you're associated to a vehicle, we'll enter that license plate in, you drive by one, it'll alert, we'll get an alert, we'll send officers that way to find you. There's no one sitting behind a camera or looking. In case of, say, a shooting, where we've had before, we can go back and we can say the shooting happened at this time. Let's look and see if any license plates were logged during this time, and that could give us potential places to start looking for suspects. It doesn't tell us who's driving the car. I can't identify anyone that is driving the car. It's really capturing the license plate and the vehicle, but that's really about it. Other than that, we only have them in our high crime areas. There's a misconception out there that using these, you could follow people around. That's simply not the case. We have four in our high crime areas. We can't follow people around with four in our high crime areas. However, there are a lot of flock cameras out and about. And I see them. For example, I drove into the Lowe's parking lot this weekend. Flock cameras at both entrances. Some WDT, flock cameras at all the entrances. So flock cameras being... are very popular amongst private businesses to to monitor who's coming and going from the parking lots but flock has nothing to do with the the city of rapid city again our Our technology is Axon. Axon is a very secure digital platform. That's where we hold all of our thousands of hours of body camera footage. They're CJIS compliant. Axon stores all of our digital evidence. So we have a very secure platform with no known data breaches. And on top of that, we have a very strict policy on when and who can access the information from these systems.

it would be helpful to you we can send you some information that details all of this out and get it to you so you could read it and take a look at it and even some of our policy that really secures and locks down this information for you if that'd be helpful

Those guys were arrested and caught.

It's a public safety tool and a force multiplier that helps us when we are short of resources at times.

And I would add on there that stolen vehicles, missing endangered individuals, and serious violent crimes is what these cameras are used for. They're not there to monitor traffic, investigate misdemeanor crimes, issue people citations uh for running a stop sign it doesn't do that anyway but it's stolen vehicles missing endangered individuals serious crime investigations thank you miss seacrest

Thank you Mr. Chair thank you also to those of you that have worked with me over the past couple years few years the police department contacts that I have just are so willing to be helpful and send additional information and follow up with residents and that's greatly appreciated it makes us all feel good and look good and we really appreciate what you guys do I know it's a tough job and My question was two things that I think have been especially meaningful in my short time on the council has just been the increased traffic control or traffic enforcement in the downtown foot patrol I think has meant a great deal to people. Once those positions, you mentioned that in 23 they were grant funded and we were able to add an extra seven to eight positions on the traffic enforcement. Once we dwindle down those funds, are we able to retain that in that specific use or do you then absorb that back into your standard operations?

Yeah, our plan is to keep those in place. I don't think we can go backwards with our traffic enforcement at this point. The expectation has been set, and we're either going to keep it going as is or find new ways to fund it through grants.

Think the impact is huge. It has a large ripple effect as a driver who I tend to drive fast everywhere I go to because I'm in a hurry it reminds me to slow down and To it just keeps us all in check everyone that's around and I just think it's so important for safety And then On the downtown enforcement, the same thing. It just is a tremendous impact on the residents and the perception of safety. Super grateful for that effort. I see people downtown all the time and I just think it's a great positive interaction too, opportunity for the police to interact with our residents. I guess my last question would just be, do you feel like you're supported in this budget from the chief's view here, since I have you both up here, that this is what you need for this upcoming year and you feel good about that?

I feel good about it, and I also feel like I have support for unforeseen things that might come up. An example would be a while back, we had a drunk driver run into one of our buildings. It was an unforeseen expense that came out of nowhere, and we had to ask for some help from you to get things going, to get an emergency fix going. You know, when things like that come up, it just seems like, you know, not only the city, but you guys are there to help us out. So I think we're in good shape.

I guess the other question that as we went through this is just, I can't wrap my brain around how we have so many calls for service comparable to the other communities that you had. Maybe it was just Sioux Falls comparison, but what drives that in Rapid City specifically? Is it just our unique geography or? It's just crazy.

I think we just have, you know, we have a lot of issues with alcohol. We have a lot of issues with drugs. And it's something that we continue to deal with every single day. You know, we're trying to use very unique, I mean, we're trying to use very cutting edge methods for this type of stuff. the joint outreach that we're doing with the fire department, um, we're getting recognized at national levels for some of that type of thing. And you know, if, if anyone has, you know, the, the answers and can write a book on it, I would buy it. We're doing everything that we can and we, much like the fire department, um, we are very, we have a very incredible, professional staff and we run very effectively and, you know, we're going to continue to monitor our staffing cause we all know we could use more, um, It's hard to come to you and say, hey, we want to hire 20 more people when we're still trying to hire 12 or 14 right in this moment. We have to get these folks hired before we can add more. And we're going to need to do that in the future. The numbers show it. Our folks know it.

It's hard to prevent burnout when you're that labor intensive every day of your life. Well, thank you all for your service. I appreciate you being here.

Thank you. Well, I know it sounds like a platitude, but we're all deeply grateful for the work you do. And with that, I'll be looking for a motion to adjourn. All in favor? Aye. We are adjourned.