Budget Committee - Regular Meeting

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. So, Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. ¶¶ you

Roll call, please. Vice Chair Yang? Here. Council Member Bui? Here. Council Member Coleman? Here. Council Member Kim? Here. Council Member Jones? Here. Council President Naker? Here. Chair Johnson?

Here.

Six present, one absent, being Council Member Bui.

Yay, we are all accounted for. It's so funny because we often talk about that. But today we have an exciting budget presentation presented by the St. Paul Police Department, if you couldn't tell. We have very much of our leadership team and several of our commanders and chiefs here in the audience with us and wanted to take the time to welcome up Chief Henry to the St. Paul Department budget presentation with the police department. Thank you guys for taking the time to come in today. And we appreciate all the work that you guys did leading up to it and the pre-meetings and getting your slides over to us and incorporating some of the council members' feedback when we asked for that to be added. So appreciate the time that you guys put through. Welcome, Chief Henry.

Thank you so much, fellow council members, for this opportunity. Our goal is to just jump right into this. And obviously, I think some of you know that I have a tendency to talk a little fast. So if I go a little fast or I skip over something, please flag me down and let me know. There's obviously built-in time here. You've seen the PowerPoint deck for questions. But obviously, if something comes up as we go along, let's try to dive right into that right away. So... First slide here is obviously just the agenda as we look through it. I think that's fairly self-explanatory, so I think we can get right into the next slide. So these are the executive priorities. For us, the big question is going to be in 2027 is going to be managing and absorbing these budget cuts while maintaining the level of service that we've been able to provide thus far. We obviously still focus very heavily on gang group violence and firearm violence. We've made huge strides there. We don't want to have any backsliding there. The cuts are going to impact other areas, but that's really probably our chief focus for the executive team here in 2027 is to find solutions new efficiencies and ways for us to meet the current demands, stay at the levels that we're at, whether it's response times or investigative outcomes, while still being able to absorb these cuts. And then, of course, recruitment, development, and retention is still a key. That's going to come out here a little bit later in the budget. You'll see where that's not just a police department priority, but it's been made a priority of this mayor, which we're very, very grateful for. And then, again, extending on our community connections and contacts is a huge piece. I think it's important right now to just mention Something real quick because it helps me frame it. It's been it's been effective for me to frame this with Our staff as well as folks out in the community that ask questions about the budget and how it worked we had a great benefit in the fact that a lot of the folks that came in that were part of this in mayor's administration and were new so that we were getting more chance to explain our budget. And one of the things that the mayor did or asked us for, all the directors, was something that I really appreciated was she asked for three budgets. And really what those budgets were, what is the budget that you would pull off with the target reductions that I've asked for? Then there was a second budget, which was we want you to account for some of the things that have previously gone unbudgeted. We have areas of our budget that we spend money in every year that there is no budget for. So what would it look like if we funded some of those? Call those numbers out and show what they are. And then the third budget was a... what they called a dream budget. We didn't do it at numbers based on national averages, which would have been like 725 officers. We did it at 665. We didn't say every squad car would be a Bentley or a Mercedes Benz or any of that kind of crazy stuff. But it really was kind of this... you know, aspirational. If you were able to have a money wasn't an object, what would really be a conservative but open budget? So our budget, as it was accepted, we met our target, and that'll be pointed out here later in some of the slides. But then there were some of the areas from budget two where some of these unfunded areas were funded by the mayor's office. So we met our target for our cuts, and then there were some areas that were added back into. So that'll become more evident as we get through these. So I just like to point that out. Obviously, we also know that 93% of our budget is salaries. So anytime we're being asked for budget cuts for us, I think the city average is somewhere around 82%. We're kind of on the high end of that, and we're also the biggest department in the city. So ours are going to involve some, obviously, staffing cuts or cuts to salary. so this next slide here is the overtime comparison slide and this is from 2025 and 2026. these are year-to-date numbers so we're comparing last year at this time to this year at this time these are not comp this is not a complete year for 2025. as you can see one of the highlights is one of the things the council had asked us to do this year was to try to cut our overtime budget we've been working very hard on that we are down 17.41 percent in overtime compared to last year at this time. And then we just have a couple of the areas in the unreimbursed area that were there. Those are much more minor when it comes to huge funding things. And then some of the unfunded reimbursed billing things that come in there. And what I mean by that is We don't do anything where we make a sheer profit, where we spend X amount of dollars and we bring in more. But there are areas where we spend this much and we bring back a little bit of it to offset the cost of it. And so some of that is reflected there. I will pause because I think I saw a hand go up.

Yes. So we have a few hands, Chief Henry. And thank you so much for just kind of pointing out some of the intentionality that the department has operated under around overtime. I know we'll be having some additional context conversations in the future at the Public Safety Committee, too, about overtime. And so I do appreciate just seeing this here and seeing this slide. We'll start with Councilmember Kim. And then we'll go over to Councilmember Jost, Council President Naker, and circle back to me. So Councilmember Kim.

Great. I have sort of two questions. One is around the unit overtime. I remember after we sort of identified this as an area of opportunity from last year, you all came back I think maybe a quarter or so afterwards, but talked about the way that you had shifted your staffing model to reduce your overtime at the time. Can you just speak a little bit about what that is mostly to remind me and others around how you got to that reduction? And then I'm wondering around the sort of maybe five-year average around the mobile field force slash civil unrest. I know oftentimes you come here and you talk a lot about how we're the capital city, so I am sort of wondering how much of this was for Metro, like if it can be itemized in a way for this year from Metro surge to sort of then the No Kings protest, which was huge, right? The activity at the governor's mansion, And then a five-year average sort of minus metro surge, what does this sort of like normal line item look like over time? So as a follow-up, would appreciate the data. But if you can speak a little bit to how do you got to that 17% reduction? What did you use? What did you change?

So there's a number of things we've done, but probably the key to make this make more sense is we operate with something called minimums. So there's a minimum amount of officers that we have to deploy out on the street at any given time to make sure that we're safe. What we've seen across the country and we've seen across the river is that as the size of the police force shrinks and the overtime budget shrinks, what they do is they shrink from the bottom. So instead of having, for us, like on the east side, on afternoon shift, we have a minimum of 12 officers have to be working. That's the number we figured out. It means that we can obviously respond faster with more, but there's a spot where you have to land to say that's the line. We can't go below that. We'd prefer to be above it, and some nights we are. So one of the things that we looked at was we have minimum numbers for each of the three districts. And they are all 12 for the afternoon shift in Central District, Western District, and Eastern District So one of the things that used to happen was that you'd have 14 officers working in West, 10 working in Central, and 12 working in East. Well, then Central would be hiring back two officers under overtime, when really, if you looked at the minimums across the city, it needed to be 36, and we were already at that number. So now what we do is we maybe shift some resources from one district to another. Now, the officers obviously bid where they work, so they prefer to work in the districts that they're at, but we're all trying to take on more of those types of things. We've also looked at different ways to hybrid calling people in. So there are things within the contract that say, if I come in Outside of an hour of my shift, I get an automatic callback or a minimum callback amount of times, whereas we come in and I can connect your overtime shift to the rest of your regular shift. So if I start at 8 a.m. and I come in at 6 a.m., that's two hours of overtime, then my regular shift starts. So what we've done is tried to find ways to say, can we hold off on having that person start until we can bump that up against or add it on to the end of a regular shift so we're not creating... contractually required overtime minimums that we can make actually better and more cost effective. The other question is, yes, we can break those out. In fact, I think some of that information we have for you, or we have at least in our notes here in regard to that. And you will see that in the 2026 year, that's where we see a big spike in that. And that is directly related to the Metro surge. And then I think the second biggest category in 2026 year to date was the No Kings March, that kind of a thing. And our Metro surge stuff, The lion's share of that was mutual aid in and around events that took place in the city of Minneapolis and what that caused as a repercussion for our city and for the fact that we, at some points, had to help them out.

Yes. Thanks, Chief. Council Member Jost.

Thanks, Chair Johnson. Thanks, Chief Henry. I have three questions about this slide. The first question, so in the table there where it says units for 2025 and 2026, so the 17.4% is the decrease from 2025 to 2026. But my question is, are... are both of those numbers at the same point in time? Because we're not through the end of the year 2026. So is 2025 year to date and 2026 is per September? Or are they both per September of the same year? Because I think that if not, that could be misleading. My second question is, How does this compare into the budgeted overtime for 2026? My last question is, does this actually include all of the money that was spent on overtime? Because it's also my understanding that the number of sworn officers that we have that we don't actually fill, but we budget for, that that money is used to also pay for overtime. And the amount of that is like several million dollars. So I'm just trying to understand just the full picture of what our actual overtime looks like and financially where we're at.

Yeah, so both of those numbers here are year-to-date. So we have 26 pay periods in calendar year here. Some places get paid twice a month, so they have 24. We have 26. We're paid every two weeks. This is through pay period 17 for both 25 and 26. So it's an apples-to-apples comparison. The time frame is the same there. What was the next part of your question? I apologize.

I was just trying, how does this compare to budgeted overtime? And my last question was, how does this, is this the full picture of how much is actually spent on overtime? Because it's my understanding we also use the money from the sworn FDTs we budget for, but that are not filled to pay for overtime.

Yeah, that's correct. So this is overtime out of the general fund. There is overtime, so I want to make sure of that. I'm not telling you that there is another overtime. There is. There is overtime that we're reimbursed dollar for dollar for back. For example, if you've ever been to Target and you've seen an officer stand there The taxpayer is not paying for any of that. Target is paying for all that overtime, and then the officer is just receiving it. It's just being run through the city. That overtime is inclusive of the money that we are saving. The general overtime budget for 2026 was $2.4 million. So we are under that. I think we're pacing to be slightly over it. Obviously, we're hoping that isn't the case. But those are year-to-date numbers. That's how we compare them. And then we can have discussions about the other piece of it. There are some good news, bad news things that you'll also see within our budget. That happens there is, for example, When the murder rate was at 35, we see a huge cost increase the following year when those cases go to trial. We're sitting right now at 32 months in a row of 100% solvability in homicides, which is the national average is 51. For cities our size, it's about 45%. And we also see huge disparities, especially of people and women of color particularly, that those cases aren't solved. We're at 100%. Well, those things go to trial, and they incur a lot of overtime. So what we see is when we bring down the crime rate, the corresponding overtime issues that come downstream from those also go down. Just like when we have less shootings, we have less people being called back to investigate the shooting, the overtime goes down. So every time we can, any lever we can do to push down criminal activity, also there's corresponding potential overtime that would go with it. Our struggle as a hourly place for police employees is that we can't simply staff through the peak hours of stuff. If we could, we would schedule you for four hours in the beginning of the day, four hours later in the day. We would break the shifts up to get your 10 hours in a day to have you working at the hot spots. We have to obviously work one continuous shift. And so we, like for midnight officers, if they go to court, they're on overtime. So there's just some of those things, and we've explored that with both the city and the county about should they have a night court like some bigger jurisdictions do so that we're not paying overtime for that. But there are pieces in there that sometimes fall, I guess, less in our control as opposed to completely out of our control.

So I guess, Chair, if I could just, I want to make sure my one question was answered about the sworn FTEs. So, and I don't have in front of me how many we budgeted for for 2026 and how many were actually filled, but the money for the sworn FTEs that were not filled, but we're budgeted for. Is that the cost for that in this overtime number?

No. Okay. That's correct.

The staff shortage that we call back is the biggest percentage of our overtime. So our staff shortage callback of the 1.5 in the unit budget in 26 was $680,000. So it's the biggest portion of our budget is because we are short-staffed, we have to then use our overtime money for a staff shortage. And that's the biggest percentage of our overtime.

And for folks that are watching from home, this is Ms. Bunch from the fiscal administrator. Right, I understand that you have... Could you also step towards the mic? I want to be able to make sure that we're capturing the answers to your questions there. I think one of the things that I hear, just to be clear, so with the number that's presented here on the screen, so the 1.5 million that is projected here, is that inclusive of is it inclusive of the allocation that would be used for on-field positions that we budgeted for? So is this all of the overtime, including the overtime that was paid for by the money that would be allocated towards the total count of sworn officers we had for this year?

And I guess if not, then what was that money used for is my...

It was used to pay off. So we had a general personnel budget that paid for 616 officers, those salaries and those positions. And then we had a $2.4 million overtime budget to pay for any overages that were associated with that. So we eat up the empty spots. with paying for officers. We don't have a shortage of work. We have probably 2,080 hours worth of work for about 665 sworn employees here. We've never been close to that number. So to staff those numbers, we use the money we didn't spend for the empty spots and the overtime budget to make sure we meet that. So an example of that also will be what we have to do in 2027, which is We got one-time public safety funding, which will appear later on in here, for the non-fatal shooting unit. That was for a three-year period. That has been so successful that any person in my position would be crazy to turn it off. But we didn't hire new people to do that. We basically took people from other units and made a new unit and then backfilled them with when the work shortage. That's another area where we saved some money because we didn't necessarily need to get you 2,080 hours out of the backfill spot. Sometimes it was 1,800 or 1,500 hours. So we didn't actually need that full-time position in that unit. We found ways to be more efficient. And to be frank, this workforce has just taken on more work and done more things. But no, so that gap between the unfunded salaries that are open and then the overtime is how we pay for those shifts.

So I guess, so we had 616 officers in the budget for 2024. How many did we actually have? Because if we had like 550, for example, that would be 60 officers that were unfilled. If it's $100,000 per officer, that's $6 million. So the actual overtime would be $7.5 million. So I'm just, that's what I'm trying to get at, what I'm trying to get a clear picture of, is how much money did we actually get? spend. So can you confirm that?

The numbers that we spent on overtime for salaries, for paying people overtime to come in, we can. We can break it down by category. And this year so far, it's been $680,000 in staff shortages. So that's what we spent so far. Another 11% or $170,000 was in late calls, those types of things. So the other thing is, is that it isn't just every dollar that gets spent. So what we used to do, and one of the problems with not having academies funded is, we would have to run short staff people for a number of years to come up with a big enough number to justify an academy. And that has also created an issue that we're also trying to solve. So I'm not sure if I'm answering your question.

I don't think so, because I... You're using the money from the sworn officers that we don't actually have to also pay for overtime, so it doesn't feel like an accurate representation of how much money is actually being spent. And so that's what I'm trying to understand because I think it is, like I said, closer to six or seven million potentially. I don't know how many, I guess how many officers did we actually have in the budget for this year versus how many we budgeted for?

So that's not a fixed number. Any day that you do this, I just signed retirement paperwork before I came here for one person. So that number fluctuates, goes up and down. We've been sitting around the 565 mark, fairly close to it, for this calendar year. But it's been at times a little lower than that. It's been times actually higher than that. And then we also have people that we're not counting the people that are actually in the academy until they're realized as an actual working patrol officer. So those numbers can fluctuate a little bit, but it's not a fixed number of what we're down below. I mean, 616 is the budgeted number, but we've never actually even been close to that number. We've never even been above 600 since I was the chief.

And so, I guess, Chair, that's 50, a difference of 50, and I don't know how much each one of these costs in the budget, but I'm just throwing $100,000 because it's an easy number, and that's $5 million. So I just am trying to understand, and I don't know if I'm the only one that's confused here, if anyone else is wanting the same question, but I'm just trying to understand then, you know, what is that? is that money is used for overtime. And I just want to make sure we're understanding that. Because in other budgets, when we look at positions that are unfilled and we choose to cut them because they're not filled, they're not going to be filled, and we've done that, we're looking at a $5 million gap than if we were to do something like that. And I'm not saying that's what we should do. But I just want to make sure we have the full picture of the actual cost and what this looks like to operate the police department. And it doesn't feel like I'm, at least I'm not getting that

Well, I think that's what part of the target was for the dream budget, which was the third budget we were asked for, was if you could do this in a way that was much closer to where you weren't having to backfill spots for overtime all the time, what would that number be and how would that play out? And that's part of the reason why that was presented in that way. Now, we knew we weren't going to get that, but again, I have to go back to the fact that we aren't short work. We're short people to do the work. And so the question becomes is how many employees' worth of work do we have and how low are we willing to go? So I'll give you an example. There are districts in Minneapolis that would roughly have, if we were in charge there, a minimum of 12. But they have three officers working. at any given time. And there are other departments all over the country that have done the same approach. They have just basically said, as we cut the number, we are going to shrink and shrink down the response times. And so they have entire categories of calls. And we're going to have to look at this here as well, about are there going to be things that we don't go to next year that maybe we We did go through this year. Maybe that's going to be an automated report or an online issue. And one of our biggest challenges is going to be looking at response times because we've already seen as the number of officers has gone down, the response times have a tendency to want to creep up because they sit waiting for a dispatcher to give them to an officer because the officers are tied up. They can't be at two calls at once. And so that, I mean, I'm not sure I'm answering your question in the right way, but...

Yeah, so you're not. But Chief Henry, the biggest thing that I would say is that what we're looking at for Chief Ms. Bunch and Director Harney, if we didn't have vacancy savings and we had to budget a line item to cover the totality of the St. Paul police departments over time, How much would we, in theory, let's just say we didn't have the vacancy savings that you would actually pull from. How much is the St. Paul Police Department spending annually on overtime period, inclusive of all of the money that's coming out of the general fund that's in front of us, inclusive of the money that we do pull from vacancy savings? What is the total overtime that we spend on an annual basis? And that's the question.

And I think, Chair, I'll just add, that's important because I hear what you're saying. I fully agree that it does not make financial sense to continue to spend money in overtime when we can't fill positions. And that's another conversation to have. But it's better to fill those positions and then be able to pay for services that way rather than relying on overtime, relying on... unfilled positions, it just ends up costing more money in the end. And it doesn't give us a clear picture of how much we're actually spending, all of which are very challenging for us, because the police budget is the largest budget we have. It's the largest budget out of the general fund and the largest amount of money that our taxpayers pay for services. So that's why this is just such an important question, because we're talking about a significant amount of money. And if you don't have the answer to the question today, that's OK, but it's just going to be

very important for us to understand that to be able to move forward with the budget just no and i appreciate your comments and i couldn't agree with you more i'm very happy to hear that you have that position because that's exactly what our position has been dating back to every previous chief is that the shortages are what they're way more expensive than actually getting the full positions you know the issue that the city of st paul is dealing with is not unique to st paul every department in the country is short and every one of these officers in this room this gallery could go out right now and go to another state or another city and he'd get hired in a second It's a seller's market if you want to work right now. I've said this to this group before, but when I applied for the St. Paul Police Department in 1995, there were 2,500 applicants for 30 positions. We have not had 2,500 applicants in the three and a half years that I've been the chief of police, not even close. People just aren't going into it. That trend is thankfully starting to come back, and our onboarding programs with our PEOs and our CLOs and our cadet programs are helping with that, but you've got to spend the money to get them.

Okay, so as a follow-up and in anticipation for the upcoming conversation, overtime specifically, can we get the annual amount of overtime spent? It's already budgeted, so it's not necessarily the dream budget category, because what we're talking about is actuals. So whatever data we have from 2025, 2024, and the unedited data that we have this year to talk about the holistic overtime, inclusive of any overtime that was covered on back-filled vacancy savings as well for this budget. I think that would be really helpful, Director Harney and Kamud, because that's the question. And I don't expect the chief to have those numbers right now offhand, but I think it would be really helpful to get those numbers because I do agree that in multiple departments, we have very unique situations per department. Within the St. Paul Police Department, I think, and also just in general, but in relation to this department, we budget every year a number that we know we are not going to have in total because we anticipate the overall cost of overtime. And we give that sworn number so that way, if we ever are able to hire that amount, that we have that amount. But we also primarily know that it's going to be going towards overtime. And so being able to track that number, I think, is why we keep asking for that. And so that would be really helpful to have. And I think also to Chair Joseph's perspective, it's also very pertinent to the budget conversations as a whole. Because it's several million dollars. So just wanted to make sure that we have that information transparently. So going over to Council President Naker. And I also want to keep us moving along. This is the first slide.

Thanks, Chair. And I appreciate that conversation. And I think the other question that is underneath all of this is what would be our overtime spending if we were fully staffed? Because I think all of us agree, and the chief agrees, that what we want to do is be fully staffed. And then the question would be, what would we be looking at? I am curious about the unfunded reimbursed billings. I'm confused by the unfunded and reimbursed. Are we getting reimbursed for the full cost in 2025 and 2026 of these expenses?

I wouldn't describe it as the full cost. So one of the things we have that's highlighted there is that we have a regional ordinance disposal unit or bomb squad. It's a regional asset. So it costs us money to run that. The city of St. Paul benefits from it. But occasionally we get asked to go out of our jurisdiction to solve a problem for them and they pay us for that. So we don't. make a profit on it, but we certainly cut down the cost of us operating our own ordinance disposing unit by having that service available to other jurisdictions who simply are just too small or have no way to absorb that.

So just to be clear, is the number here, the $51,000 for the bomb unit and the million for special events, is that the amount that we are taking in from people paying for that cost?

That's correct.

Okay.

And does that fully, but that does not fully cover the cost of, say, I guess I'm trying to figure out what the unfunded means here.

So historically, if you look back to pre-COVID, our overtime was very small. And as time has gone on, all of our permitted events have increased exponentially. We have not gotten that exponential budget in our budget for overtime because it is overtime that we have to go to overtime. do the 5K runs, do the parades. And you can see that I did ask, the mayor did give us $600,000 in revenue and expense in our 2027 budget to account for this. But it's money that we go to these places that historically have not been funded, but we get reimbursed from the 5K runs. So that's what it's meant by unfunded reimbursed buildings.

So just to clarify, we don't put anything in our budget for that overtime expense, but we do bring in the full cost of that overtime from the events that we are staffing.

Yeah, but just to make sure, Council President, that you understand this, that all the effort that goes into planning the event organizing it, getting it all set up, scheduling it, we don't bill to them. So we lose money on that part of it. We do it as a part of just, the more events we have in the city, the better the city is. And actually crime is positively influenced by having events in the city. The amount that we get reimbursed for is the actual people who worked that day labor of. So that's what gets billed. And actually there are times when they don't even get billed that because the actual amount that we incur to staff that event is more than what we estimated it would be and they always get the cheaper of the version. They get the lowest estimate, or if we end up below their estimate, they get that new below the estimate number.

Thank you. And I guess along that theme, Chief, is the billing for the bomb squad and others, is that an anomaly that it's double, like it's gone up almost double? Is that an anomaly year to year? Or just, I'm wondering what's accounting for the $22,000 increase?

It just depends on how many bomb runs go out. We obviously had more in the first two quarters than we did in the first two quarters last year. Okay. The other is Sergeant, how do you say his last name, that's over in ONS. Part of that billing is the sergeant that went over to ONS that goes out for overtime that we get to bill back.

Okay, thank you. You're welcome. Council Member Coleman.

Thank you, Chair. Just going back to the Council President's question, so for the lead-up costs that we don't get reimbursed for, do we track the costs that are spent on that prep work that we are not reimbursed for?

We do. We track the hours that they spend. We have an entire unit called the Special Operations Unit that deals with all kinds of things, from mobile field force to protests to all the events that happen in the city. Some of their leadership is actually here today. We track that, and we... We have it, and we actually started, I think, in the beginning of last year, we actually show it on the bill, and then we show it as a credit so that they realize that they're not paying for the whole thing. Because obviously this has been a big area of contention for folks on how much money these events cost. If we could do this with straight-time employees, we would love it, but we don't have the numbers of people to pull that off. And the good news is that the number of events that are happening in the city has gone up. So it's increasing every year, which is very positive.

Strongly agree. As a follow-up, it would be, I think, really helpful to understand what that total amount is and then what fraction of it we are being reimbursed for when we're only being reimbursed for the day of staffing costs so we can kind of understand what is the net impact to the department budget.

We can do that. Awesome.

Thank you.

Chair Bowie.

Thank you, Chair Johnson. And I have a question similar to Council President and also Council Member Coleman related to the Special Operations Unit for special events. I know you weren't chief before the prohibition on the off-duty officer work, but can you speak to, from your knowledge, was this considered overtime when officers were able to work off-duty? And when that switch happened, was there any budgeting or accommodations particularly to even staff this? Because it sounds like these streams of questions is that this is like an operations in its own self with planning for events, staffing events, assessing for events. even the billing for the events that sounds like it's within the department and not handled directly by OFS. So I just wanted to know what are some of the comparisons between from like the switch that was made from going from off duty to now the security permitting and your own discretion.

Thank you for the question, Council Member Bowie, and it's actually a very important one. I've tried to speak to this a number of times, but you're absolutely right. So previous to 2019, I believe, is when we did the switch. The previous chief, the city got sued for officers being in the off-duty capacity. What the city used to do, many departments still do it, Ramsey County still does it, says that I can wear this uniform and go stand at the hospital and work as a police officer there, and I'm covered under the city, but I'm basically, it's a private contract as an independent contractor between me and the hospital, or me and Target, or me and Whole Foods, those types of things. And so That rate was negotiated by the individual officer, and they would figure out who would want to work this and who's willing to stand at Target for $65 an hour, may not be willing to stand at Cub Foods for the same amount, maybe it's more, maybe it's less, those types of things. There were a number of events in our city, including a lot of our 5K races and smaller things, that were run as an off-duty job. And so what in essence happened was, the the schedulers for these things were paying less because they weren't paying our overtime rate and they weren't playing fringe so we can't have is we can't just pay the officer the overtime rate and build a target for that because the city's paying the money into the pension the city's paying all the extra money in there it has to be of a net zero to the city for that to happen so after they switched from and they switched it's very important to realize during covet So most of these races and runs and these community events and things like that didn't happen for a two-year period, some for a three- or four-year period. So when they left, they were contracting independently with individual officers at an off-duty kind of independent contractor rate. When they came back, that program didn't exist, and they were being saddled with the overtime rate. That was something that the city instructed in partnership with the police department, said we have to get out of that situation. off-duty business. That's not a safe way to do it. It's not the appropriate way to do it. I 100% agree with that. I was not in charge when that decision was made, but I supported it. I thought it was the exact right thing to do. I thought it was very brave and smart of Todd Axtell to take on that challenge. He didn't make a lot of friends within the department because there was a lot of people making a lot of money running off-duty jobs, Target and places like that. And they offset the planning and the scheduling for those things by billing the vendor for their administrative time, or they build it however they did. So we don't do any of that anymore. Some departments still do. If you've ever been to the city of Chicago and gone into a Whole Foods, you'll see an officer standing there with a t-shirt on and a tactical vest. They let their officers work off duty, but they don't let them do it in uniform. So they're never in actual uniform, but there's no question they're a police officer. We don't allow that here. I think that's the right answer. It does come with the fact that events are more expensive if we have to pay overtime to staff them, but I do think it's the smarter position for the city to be in.

All right. We're going to keep going, Chief.

All right. So next is just a little bit of the budget recap with some of the sworn and professional staff reductions in 26. Some of them we had and we're keeping into the next year. Then we're just going to get a review of some of the public safety aid money for the non-fatal shooting. Again, as a reminder, that money was run through 2026. We've been very frugal in spending it, so we may stretch those dollars quite a bit. That has worked very, very well for us. Our next challenge is going to be for 2027 is how do we keep that unit up and running while not having the ability to backfill the spots that we took those positions from. And then the Real-Time Crime Information Center, I'm very, very proud of, and the very new stories you probably saw this morning with some of the work with the stationary drone and the small autistic child that was found in danger of drowning. But that is a... That is a response to patrol calls. That system also, probably you don't hear much about it, but they have people sitting up there that are running information and informing officers before they get to calls about the history of that address. Maybe a photograph of the person that they're looking for. Information you certainly can't pull up while you're driving a car. The real-time information center is producing it all the time. One of the areas that we really want to maximize is our ability to hire people from our community to work in public safety in our community. Not everyone wants to wear a badge and a gun and go out in a police car. Some folks, for the quite honest, are capable of that. Maybe they're in a wheelchair or maybe they have another issue that prevents them from actually doing this job but would love to work in a real-time crime information center. and be able to help respond to this. There's all kinds of opportunities there. We are in the infant stages of these. Our officers are already saying they wish it was 24 hours a day. It is not. But we are continuing to push that, and we are very, very excited about what its potential is going to be. Literally, I will tell you just an anecdotal example of this. Kurt Hallstrom, Deputy Chief Hallstrom, is the person who is bringing this along, and I said to him, I'd like to just start to hear, if you get any wins, you get a good story, I'd love to know what it is. And he brought me a list of about 12 things, and I said, oh, I thought you weren't starting this until yesterday. And he said, this is from yesterday. And so it really is, and it's much more efficient. We aren't sending them in substitute of an officer, but they are getting there earlier on. We had just, again, yesterday, we had another fire call that we assisted on where we were able to help out the fire department. The first day that we did a demo for them, we went out to the fire department. We actually went and flew over a building that was on a home that was on fire and were able to spot hotspots for them in the building that they couldn't see from their perspective and make them safer and more efficient. So it literally is paying dividends all across the board. So we will go on to the next slide. Recent updates. Obviously, I think most of you are aware of our Aspire unit. That's the unit that works within our group gang and gun violence group. That work is still going on. There is an update to one of the figures in your slide. We had one rearrest as of producing this. Unfortunately, last week, one of the people we've been working with was involved in a shooting. And they were the perpetrator of that shooting. So I guess for full transparency, our numbers are still fantastic. Our recidivism rates are still off the charts, impressive. But we actually had another one of our failures. And I think the most telling part about that is the officers that work with that young person are devastated because they're building real connections, real investments. And I'm very, very proud of that. You can see that the charging rates for those in 2022, it was 28%. That wasn't because of a lack of talent. It was just for a lack of applying things. The 66% number now includes shootings that happened in the last month and a half to two months. So you can imagine most cases don't come to resolution that quick. So I expect that number to go north of 70% by the end of the year for sure. As a matter of fact, and as a reminder, The number for 2025 cases at the end of 2025 and in January of 2026 was 68.5%. It's now sitting at 71 because cases, as they go on, we don't forget about them. They get cleared and they get pulled over. Denver was one of the places we visited. Their top number, I think, so far in any year they've had it, and they've been doing this for five years longer than we have, are 64 or 65%. So, I mean, those numbers have really, really turned out well, and they're driving down. The non fatal shooting numbers. Just to remind you in 2022 we had 193 people here shot with non fatal rounds that was down to 71 or 72 last year. We're on pace. We're up a little bit this year, so we're on pace for about 8182 this year, but still way way lower than what they were when before we started this program. We can flip to the next slide.

Before you do, Chief, I just want to acknowledge the photo and the return of the Sunni Lee statue. That's a really big deal on the east side of St. Paul. I saw the picture and thought I'd see if you'd mention it, but I just wanted to share how huge of a deal that is. That was truly detrimental to our community in many ways because it was... just kind of really sickening to see that something that was so celebrated in community, but also amongst the family, was taken. So just want to acknowledge the photo that is there before you move forward.

Councilmember, I appreciate that. I will tell you, the anomaly in there, and the people in the crowd will know this, is it's a wonder that they even posed for it, let alone allowed it to be published somewhere, because the police officers typically don't like to kind of in-zone dance on stuff, but that was pretty cool for them, too. And that is a reflection of the fact that um all of these gun violence cases so it isn't just the investigative units they have now invested in the street patrol officers those are midnight officers from the eastern district and some from the central district who now are very comfortable in gathering information to write a warrant going in and doing things and they're following up on on a shots fired case and there that thing is sitting in there and but for that approach we never find that so i'm happy that folks have been charged in that case as well so thanks for the call and i appreciate it All right, 2027 changes, proposed changes. Again, this is to the general fund, so the 100 fund. When I spoke earlier about these three budgets, this is where you will really see part of this play out. So you could look at the target number we were asked to drop our budget by was $4.9 million. That number we met it but if you look at the itemized list and you go through the parents which means minus as we all know the first area you get to is the 155 and that is the Credit that the council has earmarked for special events in the city so that 155 is representative of that money and that will go to offset so in essence if A person organizing an event here in the city, we're going to spend $100, and your credit was $7. They now pay us $93. That fund pays us the $7. We don't make more money off of it. We just get offset, and they reap the rewards of that discount, and it isn't buried on them. When you get down below the 155 to the 2 million number, the 308, the 184, and the 248, that is those areas in budget number two where they went in and the mayor looked at all these unfunded items. And there are more than that, and we are not the only department in the city that has unfunded items. But those were the ones that were in there. And to the point that was made earlier about the importance of being able to hire folks, that's one of the areas that I think the mayor strongly agrees with you on. So that funding was pulled out to, say, we're going to make a priority to keep hiring police officers and get more officers in here. Then you also see some of the other ones are fairly straightforward. Vehicle costs, repairs and parts, fuel, those kinds of things. Those numbers typically either were not budgeted at all or had not had any advancements to them at all, so they added some money in there for... that area. And then earlier, Michelle spoke about that $600,000 special events money. You see that there, and then you see it reduced right back out because it's not really an addition. It's just it gets zeroed out there. So that is really probably the best example, I think, and this is where I really, when I go out and explain it to line officers and sergeants and folks that maybe aren't in command meetings all the time, that's why I always focus on the three budgets because that was the first time since I've been the chief that anybody actually got to look at it that way. And you can imagine if you have a bunch of unfunded items, especially very expensive unfunded items, you're really happy when someone says, can you do me a favor and take out a highlighter and show me what those are? And that's exactly what this budget process did. The other thing that I will give credit to this process was historically we did a lot of independent homework and small work groups, and then came back together. We spent dedicated two full days where we listened to everyone else's budget presentations as well as our own. So we got a much better understanding of the landscape for everyone else. And what you found was people were saying, well, geez, now I don't really, I'm not going to complain about not having this funded when you don't even have that basic thing funded. You know, Joe will laugh, but I didn't know anything about the library audio book problem until I heard Maureen Hartman's presentation and I was, Like, what council person or what state rep do I call to remedy that problem? So that's where you see that really play out there. And then down at the bottom, another thing that we were asked for, and I want to be crystal clear here, police departments can't, shouldn't, and don't operate for profit. But we were asked, are there areas where you have revenue that comes in to offset something. None of it ever eclipses it, but other than the contractual overtime that Target pays us, that salary gets paid for. Two of the areas that we had proposed numerous times before were in and around the impound lot. They were the administrative fee and the storage fee. The administrative fee had not been changed in 25 years. The storage fee had not been No, vice versa. The administrative fee had not been changed in 15 years. The storage fee had not been changed in 25 years. So the storage fee has now been increased from $15 to $25, and the administrative fee has gone from $80 to $120. That will not create some surplus, but it will shrink the offset that's there. Again, we didn't raise those at all. You will probably realize that most places that have impound lots Don't have their own impound lot They contract with a private tour and if you ever had your car towed by a private tour Our fees are still way lower than anywhere else Sorry. All right.

Yes. I saw a few hands that don't have one up.

So chair jose Um, thanks chair johnson chief henry. I have some questions about the first three items on this uh this table so My first question is with the elimination of the commander and the sergeant positions, which I think are $250,000 and $200,000 each, it's my understanding that no one's being laid off. So that's for them to... be assigned to another position, but they are still being paid for, their salaries are still being paid for. So I guess I don't understand how that could be $200,000 to $250,000 savings each, when we're not laying anyone off. And then that kind of goes along with the increased attrition. So cutting the $2 million, which is 11 sworn FTEs, which is like $180,000 per FTE, I'm assuming with those cuts that because no one's being laid off, that money is coming out of the 50 or so sworn FTEs that we typically budget for that we use overtime for. So I guess what I'm getting at is, is my understanding correct, and then because those sworn FTEs that we budget for are used to pay for overtime, are we going to end up, even though these are cuts in the budget, are we going to end up paying for them anyways because we're not laying off any staff, I'm assuming we're not majorly decreasing police services. So what does this, I guess if you could just walk me through or say more about what those items, those cuts actually mean.

Well, thank you for the question. So the reduction in the positions is a true reduction in the positions. We will have four less command spots than we will last year, and that is the dollar amount that is associated with that. A number of those are currently empty, and we just have not filled them. The other ones will go away as we go through attrition. We just won't backfill them, so we imagine they're going to be there. I've got to correct one thing you said. We don't expect to lay off an employee at an officer rank, and they will be out of work. We are going to lay off If we don't get there through attrition already, we are in the biggest retirement boom the department has seen since the mid-'90s. So we're already losing people. But anybody that's been promoted to sergeant now knows that there's a likelihood they will get laid off. And so that doesn't mean they're out of a job. That means they go back to being an officer. And so the numbers you see there are reflective of what the cost of those positions are, and then the other numbers are where you see where the position itself is completely eliminated. And you're right. When we do that, we haven't eliminated any work. So that is the real challenge that we're going to be looking at is what commander now with four or less command positions is going to be doing more of a hybrid job? Are they going to be working... two-thirds of their time in this unit, and then devoting another third over here. We already do quite a bit of that. This isn't the first time. We haven't not experienced pluses. We've only experienced cuts year after year. So this is going to happen again. But yes, that... Those numbers, that's our big challenge. That's why at the front slide I said our number one challenge for 2027 is how are we going to meet the needs of this city, not backslide, at least severely, in some of the most important categories, and do so while maintaining and staying on budget for this. But we will, I mean, anybody of our cops watching at home, I don't want someone to think they're not going to have a job. There are some civilian spots that are also going to go unfilled and one that's going to be gone. So that person will be out of a job. But those are going to be spots that happen and they will get laid off. And they, under the civil service rules, they have two years right to return to that rank. So if we, two years from now, we certainly will for the sergeant spots, have new sergeant openings, they won't have to take that exam again. They would just be next up on the list to be reinstated as a sergeant.

And Chief Henry, can you just touch on the second piece of that, which was around with the $2 million deduction or reduction in the attrition, are we going to end up paying for that anyway with overtime usage? for those 11 FTAs.

Well, that's the potential, and that historically is what typically happens. If we're going to actually make the cuts and then try to meet it, what we're going to end up having to do, and our group is actually coming together with a huge work group, I guess next week, to try to come up with more ways. We're exploring, do we need to lower minimums? Now, I will tell you, if we lower minimums and... response to the community or officer safety or any of those other things go down, we're going to have to push them right back up to where they went. But literally everything is on the table. We're looking at are there going to be things that we send an officer to now that they are going to have to insist is online. There are a number of things that we would never make an online report for a victim that other police departments do so just for these very reasons. This is going to be likely one of the biggest challenges that this department's ever faced. We believe we have the team to do it, but it's going to be hard. Our position is not that, well, whatever they don't give us in a budget, we'll just spend our way back to it in overtime. That's not our goal. That's not our aim. But it's going to be a massive, massive challenge.

I think, Chair, I'd I mean, I guess I would expect, based on what I've seen from the pattern in the police budget in the past, that the $2 million in attrition, that's the actual cost of those FTEs, but overtime is more expensive than the cost to actually pay people, that we would see a larger overtime and overspending next year than as a result. And it seems like to me, and this is a bigger conversation, but until we figure out how to fill these 50 positions of sworn FTEs, we're going to keep having this problem every single year. And I know this isn't specific to the SPPD. It's a nationwide problem. But I guess what I'm looking for, not today, but just in general, is what we can do to solve that problem because we see this problem every single year. It's a multimillion-dollar problem, and it makes the rest of the entire budget for the city really challenging. So I hope that this year and the coming years that we can partner together to figure out what that solution looks like.

I don't disagree. Just to be very clear, if we were able to snap our fingers and be at 616 right now, we'd be spending overtime next year. 616. The city has outgrown the size of this police department. That doesn't mean that we can't do things cheaper and more efficiently, and that's part of what our challenge is to come out. Because what's going to come out of this... Difficulty is also going to be some efficiencies that we would never have probably discovered had we not been forced to do it in such a manner. And that's good, because it forces you to grow and get better. And we might realize we don't need to send an officer to that call, or we can lower our minimums on these shifts, those types of things. But that's the challenge that lies before us. We have to get to a point where we can hire folks and keep the numbers high up, and then really ask ourselves, what size police department does this city need for what it's asking the police department to do? My hope is that as we simultaneously drive the crime rate down, that the need for police responses also, correspondingly, goes down a little bit. But we shall see. Thanks.

All right. So just a quick time check. It is 1054. I do want to be able to go through the duration of the slides. And I have two additional council members with questions that I'm adding to the docket. I'm going to take their questions, and then afterwards, Chief Henry will go through the full slide presentation, and then we'll take more questions at the end of that. So I'll go to Chair Bui, and Council Member Coleman.

I'll make it quick because I think that this can just be an item for follow-up. But I think I heard and want to make sure I heard correctly that the unbudgeted items that have been added into the budget for 27 don't reflect all of the unbudgeted items that were included in that proposal number two to the mayor. Is that accurate?

That is correct.

Would it be possible as a follow-up to have some sense of the scale of what we're talking about, about what remains unbudgeted for 2027 that we expect we will be spending?

Absolutely. And to be clear, and I don't mean this to sound disingenuous or disrespectful to the process, the mayor or even the Office of Finance, the biggest driving concern that clearly has come out of this conversation is the idea of overtime and how do we staff a city and have officers to respond to the calls when we need them to respond. So the biggest unbudgeted item that you won't see in a list from us is what the actual number would be. Now, I will acknowledge to you that as the chief of police, I'm likely going to be on the higher end of that spectrum than maybe some other folks would. But that will illuminate a lot of stuff for you. But the biggest piece would be really, and we could include it if you wanted to say, is what it would look like if we were actually at a number that was, there are numbers out there nationally that say how many officers per 1,000 residents or 1,000 folks that operate in your city. And we are way, way below that. And we could probably get not even close to what the national average is and be at a much higher number. So I just I feel it's important that I add that piece in.

Yeah, I think that would be very helpful to be included if that's possible.

We would welcome that. We appreciate the question.

Thank you.

All right, again, general fund issues here. We're looking at the budget revised. That's the revenue versus the total expense. This came up in the pre-budget conversation last Friday. That is not the number of the expense category of 107 there when you see for 2022 is not what the budget was for that category where a revenue was increased. That just shows you that clearly we are not in the placing for profit business, and all we're really doing is, with any revenue that's created by something that we do, is a tiny, tiny offset to the amount of budget that we actually have. We just, I mean... The police department is just not something that makes money, nor should it be. But that's there. But it's fairly straightforward there. Revenue versus expense. There was the budget, then there was the actual, and then the actual variances. Obviously, those don't exist yet for 2026 because we're not done with the year. Any questions on that?

We'll proceed to the end of this presentation and then we'll take questions towards the end.

Budget summary spending. This is the one area in our budget presentation which kind of goes off of just the general fund and starts to include some other areas. And so again, you've got the adopted budgets here and then the proposed for 2027. It's just an ability for you as a snapshot to look at those and see all the different things that have gone GONE INTO THOSE. AND AGAIN, I THINK IT'S FAIRLY STRAIGHTFORWARD AS FAR AS WHAT THE CATEGORIES ARE AND THEN WHAT THE TOTALS ARE FOR EACH OF THOSE AREAS. SOME OF THIS YOU MAY RECOGNIZE AS SEEING ON PREVIOUS SLIDES WHEN THEY WERE CALLED OUT AS INDIVIDUAL LINE ITEMS.

QUESTIONS HERE? All of a sudden, we're on a fast pace here.

Full-time employee summary. A reminder that some employees are not full-time employees. So they maybe are a 0.6 employee. So you see that from time to time when you see a decimal point there. There's a number of those employees that aren't full-time. Really here, again, a reminder, this is another place where we see things other than the general fund. You can see since 2023, the number of employees on the city grants fund has gone down. Some people that gets very confusing for, particularly our officers. To be clear, A sergeant, and that's another area that I think is important to recognize. Our rank structure isn't just a supervisory role. By contract, we use St. Paul Police Department used to have two tests when you were an officer. One was to be a detective. The other was to be a patrol sergeant. Now we have one test and it's both do the same thing. So anybody that has stripes on their shirt can go be a street supervisor or they can go into an investigative unit and be an investigator. You can't carry a caseload as an investigator unless you are a sergeant rank. So one of the first questions the mayor asked us was, why do you have so many street supervisors? And we said, well, there are only 30 of them do that. The other 120 of them are investigators because it's one title. So as you see this, what happens to us in the past is we find a grant. And I work auto thefts. And the grant says, we'll pay for one of those auto theft positions to investigate it. We apply for it. We get it. My salary comes out of the general fund and goes into the grant fund. So for the three years that grant exists, the city is now not having to pay my salary. The grant is paying for it or a part of it. When we lose the grant or the grant expires, and they typically don't give us the same grant over again, I come off of the special fund and go back into the general fund. I wasn't a new person brought in to do the work. We just basically offset my salary. It's a salary savings to the city by going out and finding and identifying these grants. So as you can see, that's a big area that in the last three years those numbers are going down. The other thing that people will look at and say, well, it looks like the general fund hasn't lost employees. That's, of course, all of our employees here. That's both sworn and professional staff. But as the number has shrunk from the general fund, people have come off another fund and gone on back onto the general. So it looks like it's not dropping as much, but you have to do all the categories to look at where the FTEs are being lost from. I know I must be doing a halfway good job explaining that when you nod your head to it, so that makes me feel at least partially good. Any questions there? All right. FTEs, these are the unfilled positions. I don't have that slide in that order on my deck, so I'll just... The unfilled positions here, so again, the fund there is 100. That's the general fund. The unfilled positions. Now, for pure clarification here, at any moment, including next week, if you ask us to run these numbers, they would likely be different. People will transition out of a community engagement cadet and become a an officer, or maybe they're now in the academy. People will resign, so that number would go to 35, those types of things. So that's when you see the vacancy or start date, or it's rolling. They're constantly rolling on and on and on. We also see this where people come in and say, I'm going to retire effective December 1st. They sign all the stuff, get ready, and then they come in in the middle of November and say, actually, I'm pushing that retirement date out until February 1st because something, there's some rule when I retire that if I wait until after the first of the year, I... get a benefit of some sort from para or something like that. That number can roll and change at every given point. And it is one that we see impacted quite heavily because we don't typically see the class of 2026 all retire together at one given time. It really is dependent. And the more we fill officers' positions, particularly from sworn positions from other places in the state, so I'm an example of that. There are a number of people in the crowd that are as well. I was a police officer in Roseville before I came here. my end date might change because i've already got three years in the pension and our pension doesn't care where you work so it just figures we just you just paid in for it questions there all right So this is the American Rescue Plan Act. This was one of the slides that you all requested from us about the numbers of stuff. This is all granted in 2022. You'll see that on a chart later on where we had a big infusion and it was supposed to be used by the end of 2025. The request was, can you tell us where you spent it and did you spend it all? I think you can see here very clearly that these are the categories that we spent it on and we indeed did spend it all. Questions on that? all right so here's the general fund revenue trend so again we do not please for profit that's a uh not a thing that we do but these are all offsets again that 2022 you see the big green line there the one that's taller than it is any other year that is that American Rescue Plan money that was infused in there. The other thing that you see there is the public safety charges. That's money that we're bringing in to offset to pay the salaries for the people that work those special events. As you can see, the chart is just going up. You'd expect to see a little bit of a raise because the cost of employees with COLA raises and things like that would bump it up a little bit, but we are actually seeing more and more events. Our event Status here in Saint Paul is I would say thriving. It is done really well and it's gotten better and I think a lot of things like the Yacht Festival and different things there have shown that. But even a lot of our smaller, more neighborhood community events have come back robustly and thankfully have stayed back. The big challenge was post COVID was when they came back. We were very worried about there being violence in and around some of these events which would kill them as they were trying to get back off the ground. That has not happened. Thankfully we've had some violent events at some of the events, Nothing at the serious level and the confidence in the community and by the event organizers is very, very high and we're super excited about that. Questions here?

We are at the questions and discussion slide. So I believe that we will have actually questions throughout the presentation. I did ask for council members to hold. So now we are in the space where I actually know that we have about 26 minutes for questions. So I'm going to go over to Council Vice President Yang as this is her first question and then Council President I'll return to you. And just to be clear, we have about 26 minutes for questions. If we could hold the overall ad lib and just go to the questions, we can get through more people. Council Vice President.

Thank you, Chair Johnson. That sounds great. Well, thank you for your presentation today, Chief Henry. I just wanted to make a really quick comment that I really commend you and your entire staff department for all the work that you do. It's very life-saving and important work, and what I really appreciate is that moments where I have shared, hey, agreements and then disagreements, and then, hey, here's where we can do better. There's always been an open door for that, and so I really appreciate that. I just wanted to share a couple of things. First off, I'm really supportive of those of the impound, just like that section around the fees and increasing them basically to meet the pace of inflation, I'd say. I'm supportive of it and wanted to just name that for SPD and really all of our other departments, if we don't have to necessarily wait for a budget cycle to be able to propose those changes, I personally would be very supportive of having that happen throughout the year. And so I'm wondering, are there additional fees that can be looked at and re-evaluated and brought forward for a proposal before the end of this year, too, within our police department for that?

Yeah, I thank you for the question. There are additional fees. We have looked at things across the board. The other thing we're looking at, I think what's probably got a little bit stronger of a financial engine to it is, is some of the building occupation spaces that we're in and some of the land that historically has been used by other things. I might think primarily about Southwest Team and Highland Park and other things like that. We pulled all those out. I'm sorry, I don't have the whole list in front of me. for the mayor's office to look at. Again, I think very clearly we also want to be intentional about not stamping on fees that maybe some people could really easily absorb and others could not because we don't want to get to the point where someone says, hey, I'm living check to check. My car got towed. Now I can't afford to get it out of the impound lot. And then you surrender the vehicle. None of us want to be in that kind of environment either. So we were very intentional about that. This was one of the ones that over time, we are so far behind even any private tow company. If you got your car towed in Woodbury or Roseville or something like that, you're paying way, way, way more for this. And this one we thought was very, very fair. And thankfully, I think the mayor agreed with us.

Thank you. That's helpful to know. I appreciate you all being really intentional and really coming at it from an angle of equity. That's exactly what I would want and ask for, too. I just want to name that for me. What's challenging is that as a council, we really only see that polished budget that is already reviewed by the mayor. And so when it comes to just even more options available for us, I mean, I don't know what that is. And so what I would ask of you and, again, of our other departments is to really go back and reevaluate those fees and see what we can adjust. It's not about making a profit. I mean, frankly, we're in the red here. when we don't make these sort of changes. And so at the end of the day, the people who pay for that are taxpayers. And so I believe that's a win for everybody. So that's why I wanted to uplift this. And then I just wanted to ask, I see the slide seven around academy costs. Can you remind me, usually for our academies, has it always been one-time money that has funded that? I see it's under the general section fund, but I always remember basically there being proposed reductions to our academies. It's rarely ever that there's an increase for it and wanted to just get clarity on that because I know we talk a lot about overtime and I want to really highlight how important it is, like the hiring and recruitment piece, how that plays a huge factor to us, problem solving this, and then making strides towards not having to keep having the same conversation about overtime, which I recognize you all have made major progress in that, and so I do want to say thank you for that. So has it always been special time, special funding for the academies, or is it in the general fund?

No, so typically the academy is not budgeted at all, and the approach of the city was, and this is prior to this mayor, even prior to Mayor Carter, was that you'd have to show enough savings in the unfilled positions, which if you all realized, we don't really get savings from unfilled positions. They actually cost us more, but we have to show enough of it to then show that we want to have an academy class, and then we go into the couch countries to pay for it, and what you get, and former council president Amy Brennmoen, once said very accurately, you're on this huge seesaw or roller coaster that goes up and down. And one of the things that the fire department did to alleviate that was, A, they created a budget for their academies, but also, B, they were allowed to hire slightly over their authorized strength so that that roller coaster became more of a small little mogul hills, whatever. That would be our goal here. The problem is that, A, most cities don't have full-time paid fire departments. So when they hire, they got tons of Atkins. We can't even hire enough people to get to that number right now with the market. Now, thankfully, that is improving. But it's typically been not funded at all. In fact, the last time that we got insertion money for this to offset it, it came from another fund and didn't go into the general fund. It went into another fund where they got money for the Mayor Carter, squirreled away, and then gave it to us there. She put this into the general fund, which... it's the same dollars whatever fun it goes into but it's also a statement on her part to say this is a priority this is something that we we know we have to invest in now to make sure that we can save massive amounts in the future and so we were greatly appreciative of it to be clear no one to my knowledge who's a director position uh when we were asked for these three budgets was given any guarantees that anything in the unfunded list on that budget too was it going to be a reality no one was told that i mean i think we all kind of knew budget three the dream one was never gonna be reality but uh none of us were told that so we were very very happy when we we saw this and chief henry just to get some clarity um how many how many academies are you budgeting for for fiscal year 2027 our hope is to have two to have we're not budgeted for full two but we're hoping to have two

And last year, we did not have any money in the budget for academies at all for the police department? No. So not just one or none of them?

Correct. There wasn't a budgeted item. Again, all the monies that we don't, I think that's probably the hardest part of this is I kind of look at it like, You go out and you want to buy French fries, but you don't have any budget for French fries, but you still find a way to buy French fries. You're just not spending money somewhere else. The money that we save or don't spend in one category doesn't get automatically spent, let's say, in the overtime money. It gets spent in all kinds of different places because at the end of the day, it's one big pot of money. And then historically, what has happened has been It can happen at this time of year, maybe even later in the year, that the mayor might come in and say, hey, we found this opportunity or this group. We didn't use this for that. Can you use it for something? That type of thing. And it's not a good way to run things long term. And it's been, I would say, probably one of the greatest benefits for having a new mayor come in with a new team is one of the first things they said to us was, Your budget's crazy. You have a bunch of stuff in here that it's not paying. We're like, we didn't pick it this way. This is the way it's been forever, and we'd love to see a change. We're all on board with it.

Yeah, and Chief, I don't think that quite is for people. And not to cut you off, I do want to make sure we get to questions. And I also... I just want to clarify. I think we might need to check that just from previous budget conversations. Not that I doubt what you're sharing, but I know the academy has come up in other budget cycles since I've been here. And I would be actually surprised if we didn't have any sort of funding allocated towards academies last year, being that that was a conversation. So I actually would like to have a follow up on that, just because I don't quite think that's accurate.

But it wasn't in our general fund. So we got money for Academy and our public safety aid, and then there was money for the Academy and the American Rescue Plan Act, too, but never directly in our general fund.

Okay, so there was budgeted amounts coming from a special fund in both years. It just wasn't coming from the general fund, and now this is a general fund expense.

Correct. I think one of those areas, and I think you were going to potentially speak to this, was money that came out of the one-time $13 million public safety money. We weren't told where it came from. The mayor's office had it, gave it to us for academies. Right.

But just to clarify for folks that are looking through, it doesn't mean that the academies were unbudgeted. They were unbudgeted through the general fund. They were budgeted through special funds.

Well, paid for and budgeted are two different things. Telling someone at the beginning of the year that you have a budget for something means that we are giving you the money to earmark for that. That didn't happen. What happened was that the mayor found money somewhere and said, hey, you have this hole. I'll give you some of it. That's a little bit different.

OK. Yeah, I think clarity around that will be really helpful. And just because I want to make sure that we have an understanding of where that's not my understanding of where all the funding for the academies, at least for fire and police, have come because some of the academies were added back in as amendments. So I'm just curious as to what the funding looked like for that. And just the distinction of when we share that certain things are unbudgeted, does that just mean that it's not in the general fund? So when we're adding back in the $2 million that's here, it's not unbudgeted. It's just transitioning over to the general fund because the special fund is expiring.

Chair Johnson and members of the committee, I think some clarity might help. As a base budget activity in the general fund for the police department, there is no assumption in any given year that there is money budgeted for a police academy. Now, what the police department has described is that when there is public safety aid money that this is an eligible use for, and 24 this is, that a portion of a police academy that the police department determines has to happen can be paid for by the public safety aid money. Now, as an operational need for the police department to have a police academy on a basis that they determined, They simply have to either, if there's no other special fund money, find savings in their general fund budget because there is no explicit line in the budget for Police Academy in the general fund.

OK, so for the next, and then this is ongoing as well. So it goes from? Correct. OK. All right. And then have you experienced, and just a follow up question about the academies. One of the things that I am excited about the academies, I feel strongly about the academies that they continue. I also feel strongly that the folks that are graduating from the academy could potentially come and actually fix and resolve some of our issues within our number that we carry here at the St. Paul Police Department. Why don't we have some sort of requirement that folks work within the department or come to St. Paul? I am curious about the fact when we transition over to general fund and it being a priority and taxpayers now starting to pay for it on a regular basis, us not seeing that return when it comes to folks going to the police force as a workforce area, but actually coming back to St. Paul's police department to fix our budget issues, but also our shortfall in our public safety, making sure that we're having our officers here in St. Paul. So I'm just curious what the academy and the folks that finish the academy, and then we ask this question every year, but how many people, when we have these academies, how many officers are coming back to St. Paul's Police Department when they're done?

Oh, thank you for the question. That number has slightly gone up. We Our feeder programs, there's two things that are happening here. One, we've stemmed a little bit. So if you want to be a CLO in Woodbury, they make $34 an hour. Some of these folks are the first kids in their families to go to college. We pay $10 an hour less. So they leave us very sad, saying, I just can't, whatever. We lose some little during the on-track process for just a competitive wage thing. Thankfully, most of the folks here, when they take a feeder job here, they want to stay in here. Those numbers in 2021 were 67%. Now, that includes people that just don't make it through either. So let's say they go through the academy. We don't have like a boot camp washout program here where by the time we invest and hire you, We're invested in you being successful and staying here. We're not going to add layers of difficulty onto your onboarding process to see if we can wash you out. That number has now gone from 67% and went to 79% in 22, 85 in 23. It dipped a little in 24 to 82. Back at 25, up to 86%, and currently sitting at 88%. Not as high as we'd like to be, but part of that also is the fact that we have a lot of folks that are taking on this job now at a different stage of their lives. Some of these IC poet programs where people maybe have a history degree, they've decided they want to explore law enforcement. And what we've seen, which we typically didn't see when I started in this career, was people get done with the academy, they get out on the street, they successfully complete FTO, and then they're out here for a while and they say, that's just not for me. And they leave. So the numbers are very good. They're B plus if you were to give them a letter grade. We'd like to see them get better. They are helping immensely. More of the state funding that we could get for any of those programs where people can say, I have a degree in this, but I know I want to get the degree in that so I can go do that. That transition stuff would be welcome. And we would love if the state would start throwing in money for that. Because we've gotten more of those opportunities than our city was allotted because we have a strong enough program that people applied here. So the numbers are, they're trending back up. I'd like to see them in the low 90s percent, but.

All right. Yeah, thank you for that clarification. That's helpful as we're thinking through that. Council President Maker, and then I'll go over to Council Member Kim.

Thanks, Madam Chair. A couple of questions. First, I just want to reiterate what the Chair just said. I think it's really important that we recoup the cost of these academies. And I would like to see the department propose this is true for fire as well. We provide great training. We need to make sure that the folks we're training are actually staying with us. And there needs to be some sort of incentive to do that. So I really want to make sure the department creates that. I also appreciate that we're moving costs to the general fund and calling them actually budgeted costs now. I'm not sure why we would do that for 1.5 academies and say we're going to have two academies. I think we should either move, we should budget for two academies, or we should budget for one academy. But if we're really doing this with fidelity, and I absolutely think we need to have two academies a year, I'm not sure why we would have 1.5 here. My questions are? Um, we're losing the public safety funding for the non-fatal shooting unit, which has shown absolutely amazing results. As you pointed out, chief, um, I can't tell from here what is happening with those positions and whether or not we are retaining that unit. And secondly, I'm curious how the parking enforcement officer additional funding that we put in has been going, how those officers have been doing, and whether there are going to be additional investments in, I would say, parking enforcement officers who also end up being more eyes on the street, kind of the beat cop sort of thing that we are always hearing we need more of, whether there's going to be additional investments there.

Thank you for the question, Council President. So the current plan is not to disband the non-fatal shooting unit. It's been way too successful. How we built that unit was we took bodies from other teams and made a new team, and then we basically used some of the money that we got to offset the holes created by the spaces that were gone. That's part of what this group is going to be challenged to take on and fix. We may have to shrink it. So we may see some of the production go down. We may have to put limits on what kind of calls they would come into. None of those decisions have been made yet. None of them we take likely. But that's what the executive team is going to be working on in regards to how do we pull this off with less money. The other piece around the PEOs is that that is going great. Again, there's a common misnomer that when police write tickets and people come pay those tickets, all that money comes back to the police department. It clearly does not. That is not how that works. But the Community engagement division and commander David cable or senior commander David who happens to be here right now Has taken now a hybrid of those jobs So your CLO positions your cadet positions your POS and what we're trying to do is make one position What we found is that that driving around piece and doing the parking tickets and everything else helps develop a radio ear It helps them to get to know their geography. It has all kinds of benefits So he's worked very hard to reimagine what that would look like and so that the new onboarding piece would be more effective for them for successful transition, have a more immediate product for the residents and for you folks to experience when they're out there. But it's also become, and no surprise here, much more attractive to an aspiring police officer to say, if I get to go to St. Paul and get a part of that program, it's going to be a way more educational experience to me than if I go and just do thing X in the old police department. So a lot of things we're looking for on the forefront there. Also some really tight partnerships in and around Parks and Rec and their park security. They have a couple of folks. We would have probably all but absorbed those positions had there not been lifelong people that don't want to be transition folks. We're not looking to bounce people out of those jobs. But I think 10 years from now, you're probably looking at a program like that that the same program that's checking the parks is also the one that does that also Public Works as a direct relationship with us and they get funding for that and so their goal was I know under Sean Kershaw and hopefully that's gonna say the same now is that we use that funding as a feeder program so that they have access to those peos whenever they need them so if they need a street line with stuff or tickets written because they're you know doing mill overlay or whatever those are in there and so we think those are some of the efficiencies that we can create with that and get better products out of the end of it so spend less and get more

Just as a quick follow-up, Chair, I just want to say I'm concerned about the fact that we're not really seeing that non-fatal shooting information in the budget presentation. I hear you saying it needs to be worked on, but it does seem like if, once again, we're talking about unbudgeted expenses and if those positions were being backfilled previously by Public Safety Aid and now won't be, then I'm left wondering, again, how much are we talking about in potential over time or other costs that we're not seeing here. So I think the general theme is as much as we can see reflected in the numbers now, the better informed we are as we're making these decisions.

No, I appreciate the question. That's the biggest frustration from where I stand here in total is that when I became the chief of police, the sworn authorized strength of the police department was 619. People would say, that seems like a weird number. Where'd you come up with that? Because it was 620, and they got rid of a civilianized position on the police department. So they took out the pen, and they got minus one. So we're at 619. Last year, they got three more positions, so it went to 616. Every time we add something, we don't add positions. So we keep adding. We're doing more and more assignments, but the number of actual people to do those assignments is going down. Our challenge, and that's why it's such a big challenge, is going to be, how do you keep doing those things that you've just added without any money to do them? And we're going to have to figure out what that looks like. Something is going to have to not be done anymore, because there isn't less work. There's actually more work.

And we've got to make sure we're focusing on. And just to go through, because I really appreciate the answers to it. I think the one thing I will just make note for the record, let's just get the follow-ups on the non-fatal shooting unit numbers. We've asked for sometimes the program breakdowns of certain things. And I think that it would be really interesting to me as well just to see when you share, we're going to have to do more with less. I'd like to know what the actual cost of the non-fatal shooting unit

That is very easy to produce.

And I think that kind of goes into the previous request, just for the list of unbudgeted things, which I would assume includes the non-fatal shooting unit in it. Okay, so we do have a couple more questions that I want to make sure we get to. And so I'm just going to ask for... It was a yes. Council Member Kim and then Council Member Jost. I want to make sure that we get to those two. So I'll ask Council Member Kim to ask your question.

Yep, thank you. And mine will be a follow-up because I have a 11.30 scheduling today. So I just had questions around the academies. So my understanding from the last time We talked about academies. Academies is mostly around the staffing required to run them, not necessarily so much the supplies. It would be interesting to kind of see the breakdown of costs so that 1.5 can maybe make more sense or less sense than why we would budget for 1.5. I also would like to know kind of the numbers of the cadets going through the programs. I heard you say percentages, but it would be interesting to know the numbers of cadets that are moving through our program. And the last thing is much more of a statement, but also a question around what we fund. You talked about incentives and programs and feeder systems that the city offers. And truthfully, that is, to my understanding, the incentives on why people would come to St. Paul and work for our police force. Correct me if I'm wrong, but a while ago we attempted to create some sort of incentive for St. Paul kids to go through the program and then to be hired, but I believe that that hiring practice was challenged and struck down. So I think the reasoning was around something around geographic discrimination. So I think that's like... a question around SANS, maybe monetary incentives. What are the other things that we are doing writ large to ensure that we are attracting talent from across St. Paul and across the state to come work for us in lieu of the fact that we are not offering competitive wages? And the very last question, which is not related, and then I will run, is around attrition. I know the conversation at this table has largely been about both how are we hiring new police officers and also the attrition of the department. Both we lose folks to higher-paying jobs and also the natural attrition of retirements. It would be interesting to see. I know you had 11, I think, budgeted in here for attrition this next year, but are you projecting a higher number of retirees coming up? How does that number of actual police officers paid on payroll fluctuate for us given sort of the trends of the Department for Retirements and natural attrition?

Appreciate all those questions. We'll get you all those answers. I will speak to, I could give you the actual numbers, not those percentages for those individuals. But the thing to be aware of with the attrition numbers is when you get those from us, just to be clear, what you'll get is they're eligible to retire at that point. I could retire without penalty at 55. I'm 57. So, and I obviously haven't chose to retire. It's illegal for us to ask an employee when they attempt to leave, although some come and volunteer that information. So when we give you that, these folks are all eligible to retire without penalty. That's what it will be. It'll be when they're eligible. Some go before then, some go after, but that's where those numbers, and we can pull those together for you.

That sounds good. And I think just to clarify, I meant to say that I believe the challenge was upheld at the courts, meaning that we cannot provide incentives specifically for St. Paul kids to be hired in St. Paul for the police department. Correct me if I'm wrong. Please look into it. But I heard that recently, and I'd either like it debunked or validated.

So appreciate it. Thank you Thank You councilmember Kim I took notes of the questions that you asked that we can add them as well to the follow-up to make sure that it gets to it And commute can do the same. So councilmember Joe's I saw two other hands, too We may not get to everybody's question. So we're gonna probably have to offer it as a follow-up.

So I'll go to councilmember Joe's Okay, I'll do my best to keep this quick mixture Johnson chief so I think one thing I noticed when you were flipping through the slides the Slide 11 that has the unfilled position sort of answers a question that I had. It looks like we budgeted in 2026 for 33 FTEs that cost $4.7 million. And if all of that money was used for overtime, I think the important thing to recognize is the number around reductions in overtime in the first slide. maybe wouldn't be inaccurate if we spent that money. It would be instead of 17%, maybe like 5% or 6%. And that's important, I think, for a couple of reasons, just because first having accurate quantitative information about the amount of money saved and if we are actually reducing overtime. And that money means time. That means overtime. That means work that officers did. And the concern would be around them being overworked and that not fully being represented there. My question is, I saw that the slide seven, where we have $2 million in attrition for 11 FTEs, that would be about $180,000 per FTE, whereas for 2026, the 33 FTEs at $4.7 million would be $142,000. And I'm assuming those both include salary infringes, but that's like a 30% increase. So I'm just trying to understand if that's really how much more those FTEs cost. Is that an average increase? for our sworn FTEs, or are we talking about different FTEs? Because that's just a big difference, and I don't understand.

Okay.

Okay, thank you.

Wonderful, and then, so we are at about 11.29. I'm going to look around to see if folks are wanting to stay for additional questions or want to do a follow-up, because I usually try to end at 11.30. I can stay for a few minutes.

I passed because I was waiting.

Yeah, I'm going to either end the meeting or we're going to stay for a couple more minutes. So I see you guys get a sense that people want to stay. So I'm going to ask that question out now. So I just want to make sure we're going in order. So yeah, council member.

Council Member Yang, Coleman, and then Bui. Thanks, Chair Johnson. I just wanted to go back to my comments earlier about the police academy and name my support for us having our academies. I believe you said earlier there's going to be two for next year. That's being proposed for next year, too. Is that right? Okay. So, yeah, I do agree with you, Council President. It says 1.5 here. So, I'm glad to get that clarification. I know it seems we've been averaging between one to two. And so I, again, would like to see the two happen. I'm just wanting to mention that, for me, it really doesn't matter whether it's general fund or maybe we found grants, special funding, or whatnot to fund it. However, I think that the question that remains for me is really, for years where we don't have any sort of one-time funding available, how do we ensure that there continues to be funding for the academies. And so I think long term, my interest would be actually having this be a part of our general fund. I wanted to share that to you all. I think we're going to have to be really strategic about that. But overall, thank you for your presentation.

Thank you so much. Thank you, Council Member Yang. Council Member Cohen.

Thanks. Just another question for follow-up. You mentioned also on slide seven that there's an internal working group that's starting to have a conversation about exploring options for how to manage some of the reductions. And I think you said that that starts meeting next week. I'd just be curious to know what timeline you all are working on in terms of when policy changes, staffing changes, et cetera, might be announced, and what the process for sharing that information with the council and the public writ large will be.

Thank you for the question. So a lot of this is going to be happening just in real time. We're going to start to figure out what we're going to literally do is start to reduce the numbers in some group and then kind of watch and see how that plays out in order to be able to pull that off again. We've done such a good job in cutting down the caseload. in non-fatals, that it would make sense that we might be able to pull some people out of that unit at this point. And again, I don't want any of them watching this to think that someone's going to get transferred. But we literally have to just look at all of it and figure out where it is. And it's kind of been one of those, you play with the levers a little bit and you figure out We're not getting that much. The other issue is, of course, we're constantly trying to make sure that our patrol levels are still up because the people need to see police cars driving down the street. The people need to come to their calls. But we also want to gauge with our community, are there things that we do today that maybe there's an efficiency to be made? Maybe that is an online report versus a squad coming so that we can do those things. We're all very sensitive to it because this isn't a first year of cuts for us. And so we've made a number of cuts in the past to get to this point. And we recognize this is one that's going to be super tough. And so that's why we're creating a big workshop to talk about this. And literally, the instructions are, every idea is on the table. We'll look at everything. And again, that doesn't mean any of those things will come to fruition. But I would imagine we're going to start to see the first iteration of these probably at the beginning of December when we have a... A sergeant retire, and we just don't promote their replacement because we know that we're still three over or four over or something like that. You're going to start to see those. But then as the year goes on, we're going to slowly start probably pulling or moving things around. But the conversations we have here in the coming weeks could change that. Someone could come up with something that we said we would say. We might want to start that right now just to see how that plays out. So you don't want to throw too many plans at once because then you're not sure if there's a bad outcome. Was it caused by this idea or that idea? So we will try to make sure that we're doing that in a way that is the least harmful, but still being experimentally aggressive, I guess is the way I would put it, but least harmful to our community.

Thank you, Chief. Council Member Bowie.

Thank you, Chair Johnson. Thank you so much, Chief, for just really digging into many of our questions. I have two questions, but I'll be really, really quick with this first one, which may require a follow-up. I appreciate you talking about the drone and technology program. I also appreciate your staff's presentation for the Public Safety Committee. ask you if there's any cost savings that's attached to our technology. Because I know you mentioned how the drones have been life-saving, been able to support the fire and other departments. And if there's any cost savings. And the other side of my question, particularly for drones and technology, I don't see it budgeted in this proposal. And I'm just curious to know if there's any unfunded data management costs, fleet costs, licensing costs. We obviously had the conversation around contracting. If there's any costs, where is that represented? Is that something that's funded through the general fund, or are we using solely grant funds to actually cover not only our drones, but all of our technology?

Thank you for the question, Councilmember. So, yeah, the ARCHIC program is, technology is really worthless to us unless it doesn't create some kind of efficiency. And that could be efficiency of just safety. That the actual act of making something safer for someone like, you know, or the time it was spent to find that child that was, you know, drowning or those types of things, that in and of itself, it might not be financially cheaper, but it actually the safety of something makes it have value. This also has a financial savings to it because we're able to deploy, respond to a radio call. Keep in mind, if someone gets sent for a theft from us, someone's stolen out of your car, the drone's not going to that. But if it's a missing child or a suspect who was just involved in a shooting or something, the drone can deploy. That officer, if you want to think of the drone as an officer, has an eyesight that is way better than mine. And it's a whole lot cheaper than what it cost me to be there. So yeah, there are savings tied into that. We don't even have a full year of the data left. I will tell you the number of touchdowns that program has scored already. makes it very, very hard not to love it. We are going to see, but we do believe it's cheaper. The other thing is I think it's an entryway job for folks later on who maybe, again, like I've said before, don't want to carry a gun for a living. Or maybe they did, they used to, and they suffered an injury that prevents them from continuing that career, but they still have the brain and the desire, and they want to sit up there and operate a drone or run stuff for us, and we really think that's a great opportunity for that. And then the next part of your question was in and around... Just to refresh my memory about what part of the budget?

Unbudgeted costs around management, data management, fleet costs, licensing costs, any attachments to actually managing and operating the drones.

Okay. We can pull that together for you. I don't think that's a huge, huge number. But the other thing just to keep in mind with drones is we have very, very strict and robust rules in and around how we operate. State statute has very, very clear rules as well. Ours are tighter than that. One of the reasons is that we actually have an airstrip in our city. So home and field being present here makes it that there are a whole set of rules that other jurisdictions don't have to contend with that we have no choice but to contend with. And we're glad to have to. They're great partners over there. But those things exist. And I know our community has concerns about our surveillance technology. I'll be very clear. It is not surveillance. This is responding dispatch calls and assisting the officers during those calls. They're not coasting up and down the streets looking at stuff.

Thank you. I didn't want to cut you off. I just want to make sure I have enough time. So my next question, I understand that you mentioned that the police doesn't have a revenue-generating aspect to it. But as a council member, my three years being here, I know there's been several adoptions of private donations, philanthropy, grants, in understanding we are already ascribed for our grants. There's a budget item for it. But I'm just curious. I don't see how some of those philanthropy or even private donors or even, I know the St. Paul Police Foundation donates art to a memorial. How is that represented in this budget proposal? Are those understanding we aren't able to expect or project you know, what those donations may look like. But I would like to see how that is actually, like, how it actually goes into the budget and how it's actually spent.

Yeah, so thank you for the question. So the St. Paul Police Foundation is a 5013C. That's a charitable organization. They do not, they won't appear in the general fund anywhere there. They're also part of their guidelines are is they do not want to and they do not think they should pay for things that the city should be paying for. So typically what they are producing money for is for small one-off individual asks that they realize the city could probably never pay for, but you can do something with that to turn it into something. So an example of this is a recent proposal that we submitted to them was for $10,000, and that's to hire a very prominent keynote speaker to come to speak at our women's conference. Our belief is that if we can get that conference launched in such a way that it becomes kind of the regional women's police conference, We'll get more people here, and we can turn it into a revenue maker for us at the Rowan Center, which is beautiful, but also to get more women professional law enforcement people to come through our training center and say, we don't have this in my town. I should come work here. We could turn it into a financial maker in that. So they're willing to kickstart those types of things for us. There are also much of the money that these philanthropic groups give us is earmarked. So they will come to us and say, I'll give you $25,000, but I want it for barbecues and safe summer nights and things like that. I don't want you to buy equipment with it. I don't want you to, you know, whatever, that kind of a thing. So it does not appear in the general fund, but I thought it was a good opportunity just to point out how some of that works.

And I guess just as a follow-up, just so as we get ready to close us out, I'd like to, in the appendix slide, the last slide actually in the appendix talks about the equipment parts. And the proposed budget for the equipment parts is about $710,000 more than what we budgeted for in 2026. I'd love to know why and just what that is, what equipment parts that is. Yeah, and the other piece, just for some of the pieces, while I'm supportive of being able to capture the revenue that we have, I must say that I'm curious to know what the actual increase fee and storage fee pieces actually become. So we're increasing the admin fee by $40 and the others by $10. Like, what does that actually end up costing the person who's trying to get their car out of the impound lot? I know that these are intentional. These are trying to get caught up to the rest of the tow companies. But in my ward, I hear a lot about people getting their cars towed in the other capacity and not being able to get their cars out. And I am wondering, even in this sake, I know that there are many conditions as to what leads to have someone's car impounded and would hate for families who have to absorb that cost to not be able to get the car out because we're continuing to raise the fees for it. So I was just here from my end. I know that that was a brief conversation, but I was curious to know just what that actually is ending up being while being supportive and understanding that we want to cut up to the market. But just with that in mind, that's

Indirectly, I apologize Yeah, I spoke pretty fast through that so the the admin fees increased from $80 to 120 that's the that's a previous time that had been lifted was 15 years ago the Storage fee went from 15 to 25 dollars So that's a ten dollar increase last time that was increased was 25 years ago And that was the part where I kind of I think I jumped to the end which was Most cities don't have their own inbound lots. We contract with private contractors to tow there, but if you go and your car was towed in Woodbury or Roseville or something, you'd be paying a whole lot more in administrative fees and storage fees than this. Again, these were very, very old. So that's how those numbers jumped up. the other piece the 700 000 increase you talk about i'm super glad that you spotted that so the uh of that two million dollars uh that goes into academy cost a bunch of that is equipment we would not be buying but four so you have to new uniforms one of the things that we is different now that it was uh 31 years ago when i started was when i came here to st paul 31 years ago or 30 years ago you bought all your own stuff and if you got washed out of the academy You hoped you could find some St. Paul cop to buy it, because you couldn't hold onto it. That's been a real barrier to entry for a lot of folks. It's a big expenditure. A pair of our pants, and they're cheaper now that we have this different uniform, but the old gray mailman pants they used to call them, those were $120 a pair. And you needed a couple pairs of them when you came on. I mean, so it was very, very expensive. We now incur that cost when they come on. So a bunch of the money that's put in under the general title of funding an academy is going to what it actually cost equipment-wise to outfit them, but also we're going to be running folks through. So you can imagine if you have 30 people, how many people are going to be shooting on the range versus 10 people, those types of things. So everything exponentially grows out from there. But a big part of that money to run an academy, when you break it down into the subcategories, falls under equipment and supplies.

OK, and then really quickly, just like the two that I'm going to end after this so we don't have to necessarily respond here, I do think it's really helpful for folks to understand how much money we're actually getting from philanthropic external partners. And so just to kind of reiterate that, it would be great, even on a separate conversation because it's not related to the general fund, but because we have to vote on the overall budget, we don't just vote on the general fund. We vote on all of it. Can we also understand how much money the St. Paul Police Department is bringing in through philanthropic endeavors and for, like, just, like, a listing of, like, the, you know, I know we approve the grants, the applications, and the receipts, but it's always great to reflect on just how much you are able to secure additional funding from federal, state grant partners and philanthropic partners overall. So I think just being able to get that list would be really helpful. Lastly, the cost of events was always a continued conversation. And today I heard you share that there are budgeted expenses and unbudgeted expenses related to how much we incur doing external community events. It's really great to continue to welcome events to our city. And I want to just make sure that we also know the actual cost to the police department for carrying that out, both from the general fund and not So what are the overall budgeted and unbudgeted expenses as it relates to events that we have? Are those costs also increasing significantly with that change that you alluded to today? And just getting that follow-up on just here's the amount we spend for events.

We welcome that opportunity. I would just take this moment if I could to share that one of the things that I proposed prior to this mayor coming in, and she has really embraced this concept, is that as the capital city, the tax burden for all these events are being rested on our residents. When a... Important event happens in our state where people are protesting or doing something. They go to their local jurisdiction and they do so, but they all come down here to Summit Avenue and they all come down here to the Capitol to protest. Or they come down to 121 East 7th Place at the Public Utilities Commission to protest. And it gets rested on us. And we have an entire unit that has to deal with that. And so one of my requests to Governor Walz when he and I had some one-on-ones was that I thought that the state should be carving out money to say, but for you being the Capitol, these things are never happening here. And maybe a tenth of a penny of whatever else's money should all be gathered up every year so that we could submit receipts to that saying, these are directly related to the fact that we're the Capitol. Because as the chief of the police department here in St. Paul, if they chose to move the Capitol to Duluth, I wouldn't really have a problem with it because it would take a whole bunch of problems with us. I obviously love St. Paul. I want it to stay the Capitol. But I think that there's a burden there that needs to be shared more with the general state as a whole. Because I think our residents are paying for it twice. They're paying for it in every dollar we spend. But they're also paying for it in that maybe they would have had an investigator follow up with them a day sooner if we didn't have a whole unit devoted to this. And so I want to make sure that they're getting the best service for them. And I think that's a fair ask from our state.

Absolutely, and one way that we can help is when we have the information in front of us to be able to regurgitate that to our colleagues who do talk to us on a regular basis. And so being able to be a part of that discussion and an ally in that work requires us to have that information in front of us. So I do appreciate the follow-up. Thank you guys for staying a little bit longer to get the questions answered, and thank you guys for staying to... as well to answer our colleagues' questions. With every budget cycle, we have them, and I knew it would be a robust conversation, and I'm always surprised with the amount of questions that we can gather right in real time. So thanks, Chief. We appreciate it. And thanks to the St. Paul Police Department for their work and for coming out today.

Thank you all.

We are adjourned.