Public Safety Subcommittee - Regular Meeting

I'd like to ask the interpreter currently on the Spanish channel to commence Spanish interpretation of the meeting. For those just joining the meeting, live interpretation in Spanish is available and members of the public or staff wishing to listen in Spanish can join the Spanish channel by clicking on the interpretation icon in the Zoom toolbar. It looks like a globe. If you're on your cell phone or tablet, locate the three dots, tap them lightly, and put a check mark on your preferred language. Click Done to activate and begin the interpretation. Once you join the Spanish channel, we recommend you shut off the main audio so you only hear the Spanish interpretation. Claudia, will you please restate this in Spanish?

Yes. Buenos días a todos. Tenemos interpretación en español para esta junta. Para las personas que se acaban de unir, interpretación en vivo va a estar disponible. Y para los miembros del público o personal que deseen escuchar en español, pueden unirse al canal en español haciendo un clic. en el icono de Zoom en la barra de accesorios. Se ve como un globo terráqueo. Si se encuentran en su celular, tableta o iPad, pueden localizar los tres puntitos, los pueden tocar de una manera ligera y poner una palomita en su idioma de preferencia. Pueden hacer un click done o finalizar para activar y comenzar la interpretación. Ya que se encuentren en el canal de español, les recomendamos que cierren el audio principal Thank you very much. Back to you. All right. Good morning. It is 9 a.m. and we will bring this meeting to order. We will start with a roll call. Fair stop.

Council Member Fleming is absent. Vice Mayor Krupke? Here. Let the record reflect, all subcommittee members are present with the exception of Council Member Fleming.

All right, thank you very much. We'll move on to remote participation. I do not believe we have any. No announcements. Item four is approval of minutes. Any addition to the minutes? Neither do I, so we will show those adopted as presented. We will move on to public comment on non-agenda items. There is no public to comment on public comment, so we will close that out and move on to item 6, 6.1, the response to the Independent Police Auditor's 2025 Annual Report. So if we could please have the Chief come down. We will move into that item, thank you. When you're ready.

Morning, Chair Krepke. I'm Chief John Cregan. I'm joined today by our Professional Standards Lieutenant Kyle Philp and the Santa Rosa Police Department. We have a dedicated Professional Standards team who works very closely with our independent police auditor and takes lead of a dedicated sergeant and lieutenant in that team who are taking lead on any community complaints that we receive at the police department, any internal complaints that we or investigations that we generate ourselves. And they're having daily conversations with our independent police auditor. And Lieutenant Kyle Philp is going to go through the seven recommendations from the 2025 annual report from our independent police auditor, Steve Connolly, through OIR Group, and respond to what are actions we've taken to address each one of those. I'll turn it over to Lieutenant Philp.

Good morning. Just a little brief history before we get into our responses. OIR was selected to be our independent auditor in 2021. They've reviewed many, many, but the past year, They've done 55 personnel investigations they reviewed with us. And really with each of these investigations, there's constant communication with OIR, especially from the professional standards sergeant and myself. So we talk to them about investigations that come up, our thoughts on them. So we consult with them on a kind of a real time basis. And in June, they presented their recommendations to city council, and there were seven of them. The first one was that we need to keep passing on investigations to our patrol sergeants basically was the recommendation rather than Sergeant Cogbill handling every complaint or investigation that comes in to keep pushing some down to our first line supervisors so that they can continue to grow and continue to get better with their skills, and we actually definitely concur with this. It is one of the things that we pride ourselves in is continuing to train, mentor, and develop our employees through all levels of the organization, something that the chief is very passionate about, and so we are very cognizant of that. we want to make sure that we're always giving them the tools they can to succeed and given that some of these investigations are so important and they're impactful on the community as well as our officers and the organization as a whole we want to make sure that we're doing the best job that we can on them so giving them investigations providing them with training giving them the tools they need to get better at these and to continue improving their investigative skills is something that we definitely concur with and we always want to make our supervisors better. So this recommendation we concur with and we're constantly striving to improve our ability to investigate these. Number two, again, explore additional ways to prepare new supervisors. Both of these recommendations are kind of the same, and so some of the answer will be the same, but two of the things we did recently, one is we noticed that in our training of new sergeants, we just had a couple new sergeants get promoted. Well, we have one that's promoted, one that will be promoted very soon. we realized that there was no one-on-one training time with our professional standards unit to show them, OK, here's what an investigation looks like. This is what acts on standards, which is our software that we use for all of our complaints and investigations. And then this is the process. This is how you go. everything that we'll do through the investigative process. So we recently added that block to the new training sergeants and Sergeant Cogbill has been going back and making sure that he touches all of our current supervisors. He's also available whenever they need him so they can call him, text him, email him, or just come up to his office as well as myself. And then I also added on here that within one year of being promoted, all supervisors go to internal affairs investigation school. So those are some of the ways that we're continuing to try to better our employees. Addressing investigative thoroughness. This came about because we had several complaints related to lack of follow-up officers not getting all the way through or investigations lagging. One of them was due to an officer being injured, but this is directly from our strategic plan is excellence and quality in all that we do. It's something that we have noticed ourselves that we need to continue to improve our investigative skills. And speaking with one of our captains recently, talking about holdover forms and just making sure that every supervisor is aware of what officers have at all the time. So if they have a case that they need to hold over to the next day, okay, why are you holding it over? What are we doing for follow-up and when do you expect to complete it? Just having a full checklist of everything that we do and then making sure that people know, respond to your emails, check your voicemail, do all of those regular things that it becomes harder for officers given how busy they are. Staffing levels obviously always affect that, but just making sure that we are constantly striving to get better in all of these areas. The Major Incident Review Board. This recommendation here, we created this last year. It's been very valuable to us as an organization. It's really designed for major use of force or major incidents infecting the police department and the community. what we see the most canine deployments, use of force with significant injuries, and obviously our officer involved shootings all go through this process. One of the recommendations from OIR is, well, there might be other cases that OIR would like to see us review through the Major Incident Review Board, and the policy is anything that the Chief of Police decides is something that needs to go through the Major Incident Review Board, or MIRB as we call it, the Chief can decide any case. Doesn't matter what the case is, what the circumstances are, if the Chief of Police decides we need to, or if someone decides there's a case we have, I think we should do it, they can bring it to the Chief, and the Chief can say, yes, I think that should go through there. It is a very good tool for reviewing these. It looks at every incident from top to bottom. Even if the incident is great, there could still be things we could have done better or equipment we needed or policies we need to review. So we like to put anything through the major incident review board that we can. This one here, we were just talking about this, and I will go to the next. So making sure everything gets completed. That's where Axon Standards comes in. Anything that comes through the Major Incident Review Board, we assign it to a specific person, whether it be a captain, lieutenant, sergeant, the training division, the professional standards team, whoever it is, that that would fall under, we assign it to them. And just as an example, here's what an action item looks like. So some of it's blacked out because it's information that is private, but we identified that CHP 187, what that is is a pursuit form. So every pursuit that we have, our policy states that we have to fill out a CHP 187, which is just a form that talks about where the pursuit happened how far it went different avenues and we realized i think in this one we just wanted to verify the 187 was not attached to the report at the time that this case was reviewed in the murb so we looked at it and said we need to make sure that that's happening uh james vickers is my training sergeant so he was assigned to this to make sure that we're following appropriate procedures and then looking into the policy who is supposed to fill it out Why didn't it get filled out? And do we need to change anything about filling it out? So every bullet point that we create, every recommendation out of any MRB has this exact format where it's what's the problem, who's assigned to it, how do we fix it, and when does it get completed? So we can't close any MRB until every action item is filled out. completed so it gets assigned directly to a supervisor to be completed pardon me um so the back end process for a merv in our recent we've had two officer involved shootings recently and as uh some are aware some might not be we don't When an officer-involved shooting happens with the Sonoma County protocol, major incident protocol gets enacted, the sheriff's department or another agency and the district attorney's office get the first crack at it. They're gonna do the criminal investigation. From the Santa Rosa PD side, we're only gonna do the administrative investigation involving this. So we kinda take a backseat while they do the interviews, they do the initial review of the evidence, they do the crime scene, all of that. So we kinda take a backseat. But we don't wanna miss opportunities where we could have been better as an organization. So we put these cases close in time into a major incident review board. And Steve Connelly from OIR Group was present for the first one that we did. And this is what came out of it. He would just want to say, OK, but what are we doing with this information afterwards? When it's all said and done, what is the process going to look like when you get the criminal report from the district attorney's office, from the sheriff's office? And so that's where this recommendation came from. And I was just speaking with my training sergeant, professional standards sergeant today. We're working on the first one, and it's basically gonna go through a review for administrative policy, anything we could have done better administratively. Do we need to re-interview witnesses? What do we need to do now that the criminal case is over? Is there anything? administrative lead that we need to do. So that'll go through that review. Once that review is done, it then goes to the training team. They're going to look at it from equipment, tactics, training. Are there things we could have done better or things that we need to change based on what we're seeing? And then when those two things are done, it will then come to me who will write a final summary report. And then obviously, if there's any action items that come out of that, we will continue to move forward and address those as needed. So we have not gotten all the way through this process yet, but I'm hoping that OIR will like the process once we are finished with the first one, which we're doing right now. look for ways to replicate the success of PFAP. So what PFAP is is pointing a firearm at a person, which we, when initially some of the laws changed and we have use of force reviews, not every time that a firearm was getting pointed at someone were we capturing that data. We realized that it's something we probably need to capture, so we introduced the process that any time an officer points a firearm at a person, we consider it a use of force and we have them take a report on that. It's in Axon standards and then we also have the MIRBs through Axon standards. Axon standard has kind of, we switched from another process that was called Blue Team into Axon standard. Now everything is in one place and so it's, It standardizes how we review all use of forces. It creates action items, there is a section for officer feedback, so good or bad, we provide feedback to the officers on how they did, what it was like, what we thought about their tactics, and then it has to go through the chain of command, so a sergeant will go out, take the initial, lieutenant will then look at that, review it, make a policy finding, and then provide feedback to the officer and the sergeant on what we could have done better, what we did right, and then close the loop so that we make sure that all of our use of forces are investigated in the same manner and up to the standard that we expect at the Santa Rosa Police Department. That is all of the recommendations. Questions?

I think just one important thing to note in there is that all 70 of these recommendations are very administrative kind of fine-tuning things and I think it speaks for the quality of the work that the men and women of the Santa Rosa Police Department are doing and really of our also our great working relationship that we've had with our police auditor and What really, we've talked before with Council, what sets us apart from any other law enforcement agency in the region is that our auditor is in real time auditing our steps. So within 24 hours of us receiving the complaint, is aware of the complaint, has the same access to our body-worn camera system as me, but most importantly is consulting with our professional standards team and ultimately with me before any discipline decisions are made. So therefore there still is time to make changes as opposed to what you see across the state with many auditors is once the investigation is completed, once the discipline is already imposed and can no longer be changed, then the auditor is providing some input which is more performative than it really is substantive at that rate. So really excited for the work that we're doing. I think some of the steps that we've talked about in this last year of the creation of the major incident review board and also the creation of our dedicated training team. And our training team is really focused on looking at all complaints we receive, any legal actions against the city of Santa Rosa, especially from the police department. And we're dissecting each one of those going, all right, maybe there wasn't a policy violation or maybe there wasn't a violation of law. But man, there were training areas that we could improve to make sure that we don't see some of the future liability, we don't see these complaints. And those are two things that I think that really moved us forward as an organization tremendously. But we're still looking for ways that we can incorporate all seven of these recommendations as we continue our work into 2026. I'll turn it back over to Chair Krupke for any questions. All right, thank you. Any questions?

Thank you both for the presentation. And it's been interesting on council to watch this develop over the past few years. And Chief Cregan, to your point, I mean, the fact that we're fine tuning to this level, it's really impressive and does provide a lot of confidence at the council level. My question is, especially for the rank and file, to what extent has this process over the last four years come to be perceived as something that's organic and internal as opposed to something that's imposed from the outside? What is the response to this multi-year OIR effort within the force?

I think our officers have come to embrace it, and our model is different of having our auditor have the ability to be present during the interviews, to ask the officers questions directly, and that's something we've worked very closely with our police officers association, with the rank and file of the membership, to be able to see this as our goal is to not get people in a got you moment, but to be able to make sure that we're shining light for our community on what are the things that we're doing, are there improvements, our biggest style that we've talked about is like let's lean into constructive criticism because we all get better as human beings no matter what position you work uh here in the world by being able to reflect upon could we have done anything better and so our officers have embraced that and i think that we're seeing the fruits of that in the day-to-day operations all right thank you um

With OIR recommendation four, the major incident review board, one thing you said was policy allows the chief of police to send anything through the MERB outside of the officer-involved shootings and K-9 deployments and use of force. Could you give me an example, either real or conceptual, about what something like that would be, where, Chief, you would take your executive privilege to send something through the MERB?

I think an example could be the most obvious ones as Lieutenant Philp talked about are those significant uses of force even as a use of force that results in injury of any significant kind but one that may be of maybe it was a smaller use of force but results in some type of a viral video or our community concerns so that's one that where we may be you know what let's take a deeper look at this and For every complaint, we're able to evaluate it, but the MIRB is really looking at like piece by piece, analyzing, and we talked about some of the training implications. Are there any policy changes? We look at the supervision and say like, all right, maybe the officer did a good job, but there were areas that we could have improved the supervision of this incident. The communication, we have one in there, one of the elements we talk about is also community. Are there any like community healing needs to be done in this that we need to maybe set a community meeting over this? And one that we've really seen is like, are there any equipment needs? And we've seen like, man, maybe if we would have had this equipment available to us, we could defuse this in a safer manner. So those are each one of those. But the perfect example would be Maybe it wasn't a truly significant use of force, but there were strong community concerns, and that was one that we would enact the major incident review board and make sure that we're holistically looking at it and making sure that we learn from it. Our city attorney is also a part of that process, so I think that's another element for her to have another lens of another eye from another city department, but looking holistically at some of the legal challenges that we see in some of these incidents.

I appreciate that, thank you. I recall when OIR was here, I don't know if it was an official recommendation or maybe it was just not put in here because it was a continue to pursue recommendation, which was the regional training center. Can you, I know we've touched on the need before to have one closer to our city so that our officers can train on a regular basis, but can you sort of touch on that just very briefly and then go into like why that needs to be continued on because of what that process looks like to get to having one? Obviously there's financial constraints as always, but like what are the major hurdles in getting to that and why that needs to be continued on?

The need is very clear as we work toward our dedicated training team of the firearms training and de-escalation. And the biggest obstacle that we have with so many issues across city and across government is just the overwhelming cost. And the biggest thing that we're looking for is like, would there be existing city property that we were able to build upon our purchase property from the water department? So the biggest thing is identifying a site and then being able to do that site assessment. And then the ultimate goal to overcome some of our financial challenges is to apply for federal funding, whether it be a federal earmark or other grants that are available, especially if you regionalize it because now it's opening it up to other agencies across our region and the need is equal at our other allied law enforcement agencies. So really our obstacles right now is looking toward identifying some possible property, identifying some funds for a site assessment, and then really working through the competitive landscape of a federal grant to be able to pay for what would hopefully be the majority of that project.

Great, thanks so much. That's all for my questions. We'll move to public comment on this item. This is the opportunity for any of the public to speak on the Office of Independent Review's recommendations and the response from the police department. Seeing nobody wanting to speak, we will close public comment and come back to the final comments from the committee.

Just continued thanks. This really is an excellent process the city has created and that you have put in place. Again, from the council perspective, this provides a lot of confidence and a lot of information that's valuable. So thank you.

Yeah, I agree on all fronts with that, and thank you so much for the presentation. It is always reassuring to hear the openness of our department, to have someone outside of the organization be critical, whether positive or negative, but take a second look at how things should operate and be open and willing to adapt to those. And it's also really nice on a regular basis to hear OIR say that we are one of the top organizations that they work with in terms of availability, accessibility, and interaction. So appreciate the culture you're creating here with accountability and reviewing these recommendations. With that, we will close this item and move on to the next one. We have no matters held in committee, so we will move on to item eight, which is the police department update.

All right, thank you very much. So this, we're gonna provide a brief update. If we go to the next slide, and we're gonna talk about a couple significant community events that the police department have. The first one is upcoming. We're part of the, it's a nationwide movement called National Night Out. And this is gonna be hosted on Tuesday, August 4th. So coming up just in a few weeks from 5 p.m. to 8 p.m. in the front parking lot of Dick's Sporting Good on Cleveland Avenue at Cottingtown Mall. This is a fun event where we have 25 to 30 booths involving local law enforcement, but we're also, we really partner to bring in our schools, our local nonprofits and others, our violence prevention partnership, our city's communication team, our community engagement team, of all coming together to provide like a night of resources to our community. We're gonna have some fun games. We're gonna have pizza and some drinks out there. So really just wanna get the word out there for our community to come join us for this special night and be able to meet with some of our police officers. We'll have our SWAT officers, our canine team, our motorcycle officers and others that our community be able to connect with. And we wanna spread the word on that. Our next slide. This was another equally important one. We were having a lot of community feedback regarding our flock ALPR cameras. We have, through two separate grants, the City of Santa Rosa, we have 133 flock ALPR cameras that are spread geographically across the 42 square miles. of the City of Santa Rosa. Nationally, there's certainly been questions. There's been feedback on how we can make improvements with our program. What I've really seen as Chief of Police, it really just comes down to education of sitting down and having open conversations with our community about, what is our flock program that we have here in the city of santa rosa what are the robust policies that we have between our dedicated alpr policy our public surveillance camera policy our real-time crime center policy and what are some of the training that we're doing to make sure that our officers aren't making some of the mistakes that perhaps you've seen across the country Last week I spoke at the City's Community Advisory Board. We had quite a few people who came out and voiced their public opinion on the matter. But because this is such a huge community issue, we're going to hold a dedicated community meeting. And we've talked a little bit before, Council, but it's going to be on September 17th from 6 p.m. till 7.30. at the Utilities Field Operations Office, which is located at 35 Stony Point Road here in Santa Rosa. And I'm gonna provide an overview and provide, I'll talk about the exact cameras that we have and the models and go over our policies and go over the training. And ultimately what I wanna do is I wanna make this an opportunity for me as chief to hear more specific feedback from our community. And we're working potentially breaking out into some small groups and being able to hear that feedback. But my promise to the community is I'm gonna hear the feedback. I'm gonna be able to look at our policies, look at our programs, look at our training, see if there are things that we could be doing to improving our operations. to make sure ultimately that we meet the needs of our community. So we're gonna be putting out a lot more information on this through Civic Ready, through our social media platforms, both at the police department and through the city platforms as well. So just wanted tonight to make sure this was on everyone's radar as an upcoming really important community conversation. Next slide. Another one, we've talked a lot before, Council, of that we've seen such a significant increase in illegal firearms seized off the streets of Santa Rosa and with gun violence in our community. Last year, we had 12 homicides in the city of Santa Rosa. Nine of those involved a firearm. Those are troubling to me and looking for different creative ways I've known for many years as working as a gang detective and throughout my career at the police department that we're not just going to arrest our way out of these issues and it needs to be more than just making firearms arrests and so we really are focused with a partnership with our violence venture partnership getting to some of the root causes of the violence but also this is another creative way that we can be able to do one more thing that we can do in our pillar of being able to reduce gun violence in the streets of Santa Rosa We're partnering with Santa Rosa Police Foundation, which is an independent 501 and Santa Rosa, and we're going to be hosting our second annual gun buyback program on Saturday, October 3rd from 9 a.m. till 1 p.m. This year we're going to do it at the Veterans Memorial Building out in the parking lot, and we're going to be able to come in there. No city funds are going to be used. All the funds are going to be raised independently through the Santa Rosa Police Foundation. And it's going to be a day. We did one in October of 2022. It was the first one, my first year when I stepped into the role of chief. And we had actually, I believe it was 436 firearms that we were able to take off the streets, including six ghost guns and a host of assault weapons that we were able to take off our streets. So we're going to be putting out this information and this is important to understand that there's no questions asked. You can just bring the gun in there and then we're able to take these guns off the streets. And ultimately what this is doing is reducing guns that maybe someone inherited or maybe someone secured over time and they're just leaving them under a bed or in a closet and they're able to get these firearms off the streets and make less firearms available that could be able to use in some type of violent assault across our community. Next slide. Here's some of the pictures from our one in October of 2022. As you see, this is some of the firearms, the piles of rifles and shotguns and handguns there. The next slide has hundreds of them. Like I said, 436 firearms that were seized, including you see some assault weapons right in the very top of those. And those are ones that it is important for me to be able to work creatively to get some of these off the streets of Santa Rosa and help our streets be safer. Here are some of, you see just the huge increase and you see, and this is specifically talking about ghost guns or more technically known as a privately manufactured firearm. And these are non-serialized firearms. And you see in just 10 years ago with zero cease in the city of Santa Rosa, and you just see, and this is marked across the state of California, but you see such a significant increase going all the way up to 124 uh in 2024 and 107 this year some of it was from one large seizure we have over 200 already that we see is just so far in 2026 so we're we're on record pace to be able to triple if not more the number of ghost guns that were seized off the streets of santa rosa next slide just talks about total firearms so these are all firearms including ghost guns and others so you saw the high of 390 in 2024 and this year like i said we're we're hovering almost a 400 already this year of total firearms seized off the streets of santa rosa Next slide. The last thing to kind of end on some positive news, we're really actively recruiting at the police department. We actually have 14 officers in training right now. So we have two different academies that are in progress. We have one academy that graduates in August, the end of August with four new police officers, new academy that just started in July and they graduate in December. So 10 actively in the academy. and four have already graduated from the academy and are part of our field training program right now. For us, it's 21 weeks at a state-run academy and then another 23 weeks internal of our field training program before, after 44 weeks, they're ready to be a solo patrol officer out serving the City of Santa Rosa. One of the four who are in the program now is a lateral officer. After our budget cuts over the last couple of years, we have not seen many lateral officers. So this is encouraging to have a lateral officer coming back. We actually have some other lateral officers who are in the process with us right now. So I think we're at a turning point with some of the recruitment. So I'm excited to be able to see that. But equally important for our community to see that we're actually recruiting for multiple civilian positions as well. Our field and evidence technicians, which respond to all significant crime scenes and process the crime scenes, process DNA, fingerprints, and other evidence and testify as experts in court. on the collection of that evidence is open dispatcher is a continued recruitment we actually are going to be having three dispatch positions open our senior admin assistant and also police technician which works in our records team all those are active recruitments right now so we really encourage anyone who's interested to be able to apply and then we're ramping up our hiring right now for the january of 2027 police academy where we hope to send as many as 10 police officers to that so now's the time if you want to be hired by the santa rosa police department to apply and be able to get you through these processes and that's it for just a quick update of some of the community events that are coming at the police department turn it back over to chair krupke thank you so much any questions

I just have a couple quick questions. On the flock community meeting, you said you were going to discuss the surveillance policy, the AOPR policy, as well as the real-time crime center policy. Are those aggregated anywhere for the public to access fairly easily online?

Yeah, so for us, if you just go to the Santa Rosa Police Department website, right on the key page has all of our policies. So all of our policies, including all three of those policies are there. And you can read them online, be able to see them. And then we'll certainly, I'll have some handouts of the policy that night for the community meeting. And we'll be going through some of the other concerns. And there's questions that talk about, is this a violation of the Fourth Amendment? And we'll go through some of the actual law on these things. And my hope is to make it an educational night where I'm able to shine some light from our community, but also make it an equally educational night for me and for our city council members who will be listening to be able to see, are there changes that we need to make? And for me, as chief, I'm trying to balance the two. Make sure that we have a safe community. As last year, we talked about the 12 homicides. We had a 184 shootings, but at the same time, making sure that we're able to police and use technology that meets the trust and the needs of our community here in the city of Santa Rosa.

Great, thank you. And then on the gun buyback program, I think it's worth repeating, no questions asked, correct? No info collected?

Absolutely. So you don't need an ID, you don't need anything, and the process is going to be similar to we had last time, that the gun should be unloaded in the trunk of the car so it's safely, you simply pull up to a line, you never have to get out of your car, you pop the trunk, the police officer will grab the gun, be able to write out a receipt, the The police foundation handles all the funds and then they'll pay cash directly with no questions asked, no ID. And our ultimate goal is just to be able to get guns off the streets of Santa Rosa. Last time we had several stolen firearms that were turned into us, that was great. We were able to recover those firearms and get them off the streets of Santa Rosa. And then all firearms, unless it's a stolen firearm that has a rightful owner, then that will go through the process return. All other firearms are destroyed. So the police department does not retain those firearms, certainly doesn't resell those firearms. We have a process actually where we bring them to a facility in the East Bay. They're transported by our team and they're actually melted down in front of us while we view and the metal is made into manhole covers. So that's what happens with all of our firearms. So that's another pledge of completely confidential and the promises every single one of those will be destroyed thank you one more question on that is there an opportunity for ammunition disposal at that as well we're not going to do ammunition disposal that because we're trying to like bifurcate ammo from the firearms but at any time that we have a process that you can turn in ammo to the santa rosa police department and if you pull up into the front lobby and just let us know that you have ammo and an officer will come out and meet you and we have a process for free and confidential to be able to dispose of that ammunition

great thank you very much that's the end of my questions we'll move on to public comment on this item if you would like to speak on the police department's report this is your opportunity seeing none we will close public comment on this item and move on to item 8.2 thank you chief thank you uh 8.2 is the fire department update chief westrope when you are ready

I can't find the cursor. Lieutenant Phillip was obviously messing with the fire department. Good morning, Vice Mayor and Mayor. Scott Westrope, Fire Chief, City of Santa Rosa. Today I just have a very brief department update for you to let you know what we're working on currently and kind of focusing on the three key areas that we view as the strategic positions we need to be in to run the fire department. So starting with staffing. There's actually also, you know, just like Chief Cregan mentioned, there's a lot of good news in here. We do have some deficiencies, but our current position control list as of this fiscal year is 160 FTE. And then I'd like to highlight that 21 of those employees reside in Measure H, which is the countywide fire service sales tax measure, and 10.25 employees reside within our own PSAP. In operations in the Suppression Division, we currently only have two firefighter vacancies. As you recall, and I'll talk about a little bit later, is after coming into this budget year, we shifted positions around with SAFER and Measure H and the General Fund, and we were able to fill six vacancies with the elimination of the SAFER squads. which brought us to full staffing and then we had an employee leave to go to a department closer to his home in Southern California and then released an employee off probation. So we currently have those two vacancies and we're intentionally holding them for the in response employees that may have interest in coming over to the suppression division out of in response. There is an internal process going on right now for in response employees who want to come to the fire side where they essentially going through what HR is calling a promotional process to come over suppression. So we're working with them on that, but they could be filled very soon with internal candidates. In fire prevention, we recently just, in fact it was last Thursday, was Krista Butts last day. She's our community outreach specialist. She went back to her passion of dispatching with the City of Rohnert Park. So we have one FTE vacant community outreach specialist that is vegetation management program funded, so it's not a general fund position per se. And so we're currently evaluating if that is the best fit for that funding. Reason being is, in the next line, talking about administration. With Sarah Roberts' departure and having the vacancy in the admin analyst role, we currently only have three admin staff that are running the entire business of the organization. So there's a lot of help that's needed, and we're trying to figure out where the best fit is with the limited funding that we have. We're expediting with HR the recruitment for an admin analyst. They just closed that list, and last I heard, there was upwards of 80 applicants for the admin analyst throughout the city. It's a citywide position. So we should get somebody on board soon, but we're just trying to figure out how to fit the round peg into the square hole and figure out the best funding for what we need to get our admin team some much-needed support. As far as fire stations go, I don't know if you've been by recently. I intended on getting some pictures for this presentation and didn't make it down there. But framing is well underway on Fire Station 8 in Roseland. So if you drive down Hearn Avenue, you will see the skeletal stand up of Fire Station 8 and the library. We're still slated to complete that project next summer. But it's moving along, and it's pretty impressive to see it actually happening. after waiting a very, very long time. So I'm excited about that project. Fire Station 9, which will be the new fire station in the southeast. As you know, we bought the Mancini Sleep World building on Santa Rosa Avenue and Court Street. And while this may not seem terribly impressive, that actually creating a capital improvement project fund for it is really the first step. So that's been created. And then we are starting the process of the design build phase of that and what it's going to take to retrofit that building into an operating fire station. So our team and the TPW team, CIP team, is working really hard on that and excited about the progress on Fire Station 9. And just to keep it on your radar, I know I've talked about it before, but Fire Station 11, which is the junior college district fire station on Lewis Road, we opened a CIP account for that station and we're funding it via two paths. both out of CFF and measure or PSAP funds. So it's getting double fed. So once we show a year worth of revenue going to that account, then we can go into debt service on building a permanent fire station 11 here in the future. The good news about that one, as I've said before, is we own the property. It's flat, graded, sequed. There's a lot of front-end work that's already done and having a temporary facility there, temporary being it was built in 2007. So there's a lot of front-end work there that we can really expand on and hopefully save some costs and get a full-time fire station there. On our fleet, we just received the five engines that we ordered in fiscal year 22. Three of them are in service. Two are going through their post-delivery inspection and retrofitting, so we have to do some minor tweaking on the cabinets to fit our ensemble. But all five will be in service here very quick, so we finally do have those. That will fall off the list. The other orders we have in place right now is we still have a ladder truck on order that Council approved April of 2024, but we won't see that until at least 2028. And we have four additional Type 1 fire engines on order with a three-year build time, and those were ordered just this year. So moving along well with fleet, our team and the TPW team are doing a great job of keeping our resources in service, even though they are more fragile and brittle than they have been in the past, and really working through the Capital Fleet Replacement Program even in its new form, to keep our apparatus in tip-top shape. And lastly, I just want to highlight, I always try to end this with something positive, and I think this is good news, and you're well aware of where we're at, but just to highlight that we have operationalized the plan that we put together in the fiscal year with the change of removing the safer squads from service, but then augmenting our service on the other side of the coin with Measure H resources. As you recall, that entailed taking the squads out of service from the standpoint of where they're funded and safer. So we took those 12 positions, six went to the general fund to fill vacancies, which has given us the only two vacancies now, and six were moved into Measure H. With that, we were able to stand up Rescue 1 by moving the Engine 9 personnel over to Rescue 1, and then putting the squad back in service as a Measure H resource. So both units are in service. They're fully staffed as to where they need to be staffed, part of our minimum daily staffing. And as you recall, one of the things that our team did a really, really good job of building is this rescue task force concept, where it's a moderate to large scale event. The squad and the rescue respond together. It's a force multiplier, and having five people arrive with the full complement of rescue tools. And so that's been implemented. It actually got pushed into service on its first structure fire on the first night that it was in service with the commercial structure fire. So it's already been utilized. The crews are very, very happy with it and will continue to expand that process. And one of the things with now Santa Rosa having a rescue task force and a staff-heavy rescue is We're working with our operational area to expand that and make it a regional approach to heavy rescue. So we have a regional rescue task force throughout the region that we would be the leaders of. I say hazmat because we're doing the same thing on the hazmat side of the house. um anyway very exciting stuff and really happy that we got this across the finish line i thank council the city manager and labor group and all of all of command staff for getting this done it was a huge lift and the the results have been very impressive so far and it's something that we've never seen in the city of santa rosa and we have the only staffed heavy rescue from san francisco to probably the seattle area so pretty impressive stuff that we were able to accomplish And with that, I will turn it over to you for any questions or comments.

Thank you very much for that presentation. Any questions?

No questions. Just a quick thanks for all of the creativity on the operational side with all the fun challenges, and on the construction side, too, with two fire stations that are being put into service faster and cheaper than they might otherwise be, thanks to the creativity on your side. So thank you very much.

Thank you, and I'll give... All the credit to my team. They're the ones that are working with leaders intent and they get it done. So appreciate that and I'll pass it along.

Great. I just have one question. In regards to fleet, I know we've talked about it before, but can you speak a little bit to why there is such a bottleneck and then some of the recent changes that are going on to try to impact that bottleneck?

Yeah, absolutely. So the bottleneck with fleet isn't a Santa Rosa centric problem. It's not even really a statewide problem. It's throughout the country. And so what happened was all the fire engine manufacturers throughout the United States started getting bought up by private equity firms. And those private equity firms then in turn went to try to consolidate and find efficiencies in their operations by closing plants. So while the supply was still very high and growing, or the demand was, the supply wasn't there. And what we've seen on the apparatus side is fire apparatus just don't hold up like they used to. When I started, there was really no electronics, and it was Detroit diesels, and they ran forever, and it was American steel that um lasted and survived the the beatings that we put these things through but now that the supply chain has changed and really we saw a major change in covid and the technology is advanced and everything's much more electronic and the materials that we're building with are cheaper and we're not seeing the lifespan that we used to out of fire engines across the united states so the the demand is actually higher while the supply kept diminishing One of the examples I've used, and I believe I've shared it with you, is we had a Type 6 engine, which is our wildland engine being built in Waco, Texas. And midway through the build, they shut that plant and trucked everything and all the parts up to Wisconsin to finish the build in Wisconsin. So it put a six to eight month delay on our delivery time. So what we're seeing is a major increase in delivery time, but we're also seeing a major increase in cost. The engines that we purchased in 2022 were around $850,000. The ones we just purchased this year were $1.2 million. So that is a major increase of almost reaching 100% in the matter of four years. So we started, as a city, we started rattling the cages of our lobbyists, both at the state and federal level, and they really hadn't heard about it. I was working with my Cal Chiefs counterparts doing the same thing of like, hey, this is becoming a major issue. Well, we, to some degree, have the ability to absorb those costs. You look at smaller agencies that surround us, you know, 100% increase or an 80% increase on a fire apparatus in a four or five year build time is just, it's not something they can absorb. And then you look at bigger agencies like LA that are ordering 50 or 100 engines at a time, you know, it's a compounded problem. So the lobbyists really took it to the legislature. The New York Times did a highlighted article coming out of the Palisades fire on LA City, and so now it's being taken up by the federal government with congressional oversight. There is litigation occurring towards the private equity firms, and so that's something that we as a city are exploring, but we're trying everything we can as a fire service to hold the private equity firms accountable and bring the cost within reason and the delivery times within reason. There's a lot happening behind the scenes, but we're fighting an uphill battle, but we're gonna continue to fight the fight.

I appreciate that detail. And yeah, I think it's important to understand that we have a lot of funds obligated and no control over the delivery time. So I appreciate that. No more questions from me. So we go to public comment. There is no public. We will come back. Any final thoughts? Thank you so much for the presentation. Really, really appreciate it. Also really do appreciate that you're holding those positions for the in response paramedics being, you know, true to those that we've already employed and not just sending them on their way in this world. So appreciate that.

No problem. We've really, and with City Manager Nutt's support, we've really been deliberate in how we handle these employees and making sure that they have a safe landing spot and that we're able to help them in any way that we possibly can. And human resources and City Manager Nutt have certainly been pivotal in that and not just... handing them a pink slip and watching them walk out the door. We're trying to make sure we support them in any way that we can, and we're being very successful. Unfortunately, it's only three, so it's a manageable number, but really appreciate the support on that.

All right, thank you. With that, our agenda is finished, so we will adjourn at 9.53 a.m. Thank you.