Public Safety Committee - Regular Meeting

Committees to order, roll call. Johnson? Here. Jost? Here. Kim?

Here.

Naker? Here. Pravaski?

Here.

Yang? Chair Bowie? Here. Six present and one absent being council member Yang who is excused.

Wonderful. Well, good afternoon everyone. Thank you for all being here for my colleagues and also people who are here to present. This is the first convening of the public safety committee and I'm just so proud of the work that we did to bring this committee, establish this committee to ensure that public safety is continuous conversation and dialogue amongst this council. Real quickly, I just wanted to share that public safety is one of the most visible aspects of our job in our constituents and this committee really allows us to have regular transparent discussions and programs on programs and policies and across the board.

So, as we are ensuring resources are going towards to shape what the public safety committee is gonna look like, it's important that we engage our department heads, engage our community partners, engage our staff and our experts as well. So, we're going to get started. Our first item on the agenda is bringing awareness to the National Gun Violence Awareness Month which is going to be presented by the Office of Neighborhood Safety. We have Director Blakey here who had also invited a series of community partners and making sure that we have a community first public safety approach when it comes to decreasing our community violence in the neighborhoods. So, Blakey.

Good afternoon council members, council president, and board chair. I would love to introduce and have the members that work with our community and our neighborhood safety community council that do work around gun prevention and gun violence to come forward their show a little bit about their organization. So, if you guys could step forward. So, DJ and Moms Demand Action, Urban Village, Hired, all the folks state your name, come forward, Elpis. I'll let you take it away.

Good afternoon. Good to see some familiar faces. My name is DJ. I'm the CEO and executive director at World Youth Connect, which is a youth led nonprofit. We just turned four years old. Some of the work that we've been doing around public safety is just making sure young people have that sense of belonging, doing some prevention, social emotional work. We're doing coaching this summer, new summer camps, starting new initiatives to really keep them busy. There's a lot of them out there now coming straight from programming.

Yeah. I think that's

Oh, yeah. Of course. So one project around data collection with Harvard in the Office of Neighborhood Safety was training young people up to be community members and really just show what they feel is important as far as safety in community. So they got to go out and were trained to really talk about the things that they find are important and push themselves to connect with other people. Through that we found out that young people want more opportunities, they want more resources to really get out in community. Yeah.

Thank you, DJ. Thank

you everyone for having us. My name is Rachel Groskreth and I'm the director of youth programs at Hired. But I have the opportunity to actually work with these young people from World Youth Connect. We have Rayvon here who's part of our group, and Marissa who is one of our co leads of the group. So, we have a campaign called Save Street, Save Lives, and

over the last year and a half, we've had about 20 community sessions, conversations, activities in the community. Last month month, May, it's we're June. We're in June right now. In May, the young people had the opportunity to present at

the National Youth Employment Coalition, the annual forum that was held here in Minneapolis. They presented a workshop to about 35 individuals, shared their work, and their project won the Innovative Program Award. So, a national recognition for that.

I

will say, you know, the opportunity that we have with this is to provide a safe space and a safe place for young people to to gather, to talk with community about what they need. We just get to hang out with the young people and provide a space for them. Their voices are leading this work, and they are so powerful and impactful. We've had some artist vision events where they've created work on canvas to represent what a safe community looks like to them. We had an open mic night.

We did quite a few of the safe summer night events last year. We'll be at Melvin Carter Junior's house this Friday to cohost with him and present our work to that group as well. So we are just in community with young people and adults that wanna talk about what we can do to provide safe spaces for these young people. Thank you.

Now, we have Moms Demand Action.

Hello.

My name is Gretchen Damon and I'm here with my two co volunteers, Dawn Einwalter and Kathleen Anderson. We belong to the St. Paul Group of Moms Demand Action for Gun Sense. A large part of our work involves advocating for policy change such as a secure firearm storage ordinance and a state law requiring background checks on all gun sales. Our work brings us into contact with Saint Paul leaders and we spend no time begging them to put gun violence prevention on the agenda.

It is already there and instead they say, let's get to work. Gun violence prevention is not just policy change, it comes in different forms. For example, we enjoy working with Lanea Jacobson on educating parents and guardians about gun safety in the home through the Goals Not Guns campaign. We spend time at the Ramsey County Attorney's Office attaching flyers about gun safety to cable gun locks and packaging them. So Saint Paul Public Libraries can offer them to families for free.

We get our hands in the soil, weeding, transplanting and mulching garden spaces such as the memorial garden at face to face academy, promoting environmental design as a way to reduce violence. As you can see, the action part of her name is not just a slogan. We are proud to be part of this important proclamation today made possible by the Saint Paul City Council. Thank you to Brooke Blakey and the ONS team for amplifying our work. A special thank you to council president Rebecca Nacre for her partnership.

To mayor Carter, we are grateful for your collaboration and your constant appreciation. Thank you chief Henry and the Saint Paul police department for making gun violence reduction a top priority in your department. The past two weeks have been difficult for us with the shooting of representative Melissa Hartman, a true gun sense champion. In her honor, we will continue demanding action as we strive for a culture of responsible gun ownership. Thank you.

Hi, I'm Dawn Einwalter and I'm also on the NSCC. And in combination with my work through Moms Demand Action, I am deeply honored to work with all the people in this room and on something that we all care about, which is public safety. I'm constantly pushed out of my comfort zone, and I've gotten used to that. It's actually something I learned from and we're gonna be pushed out of our comfort zone again this weekend because we're going to be tabling at the Hmong International Freedom Festival for the first time, not in our red shirts, but in blue and gray, which is our Be Smart program. Hope to see you there.

Thank you. So, we are we also want to just make sure we have enough time because there's a series of organizations. So, we're going to ask for two minutes per organization if that's okay, Director Boyke. So, the next one, if you could introduce your name, the organization, and the impact that you're making in the neighborhoods.

Yeah. Hi everybody, my name is Carly Miller. I work for the Urban Village. I'm a team one team member of a team of four representing us today, but our work with ONS is supporting Karen or Gigna and Kareni youth in East St. Paul, but also Greater Minnesota.

Our goal is a lot of these young people were either really, really young when they transitioned and moved to Minnesota from refugee camps or Myanmar or Thailand, or were born here. And so we're trying to really provide cultural preservation, connection to identity, as well as just space to learn more about their background and what's happening back home in Myanmar. So our youth, we offer tutoring services as well as one to one mentorship, where youth are connected with a mentor from the community that speaks their language, is either in college or a young adult that's experienced what it's like to be Guinea and Minnesotan or Karena and Minnesotan. And the ONS department has backed us to really get involved in our schools and to remind our young people that whatever their wildest dreams are, we are just here to accompany and support them and try to make sure that they have access to what their needs, and that parents also are getting access to those that don't speak the English language, that they know what their kids are up to, how we can support them, and to just make sure that they're ready for the future, whatever that might be.

So, we're grateful for ONS, hoping to continue that partnership, and thank you all today.

Thank you. So, I believe we now have is it Ellips? Ellips, excuse me.

Yeah, hi, thank you. My name is Paul Ramser, I'm the Executive Director of Ellips Enterprises. It's a job training program in St. Paul for youth experiencing homelessness. Our work with ONS and our work with Malea Jacobson is on the Goals Not Guns program.

The focus of the program is to work in the school setting and to give every student in the school an opportunity to voice their opinion about gun violence through a creative design that would go on a t shirt. And so students created t shirt designs. The school then chose one t shirt. And then interns in our job training program in the screen printing department printed that shirt for every student in the school along with staff. And then we created a web store and the shirts are on the web store with the profits going back to the school to continue their work in anti gun violence. So far we've worked with three schools and we're hoping to work with more. Thank you very much for your support.

Thank you, Mr. Paul. And we have boots on the ground, Community Patrol.

Good afternoon.

Good afternoon to this body. My name is Larry McPherson, and my organization is Boots on the Ground Community Patrol. And these are my two chief on the side of me here. And all I'm saying is for this organization is to be crime interrupters as well as slash deescalators. And what I mean by that is that we intervene before a crime happen and if not possible in some instances, it's already started, so we have to try to deescalate it.

If we cannot, then we call 911. We are not the police. But, I wanna say thank you to this body. I wanna say thank you to ONS and, my boss over there, miss Liana Jacobson. And I wanna say thank you to Mayor Carter and to all the city officials that is here at present and those that is not present. And that is it. Thank you. Thank you.

Thank you so much Director Blakey. If you have any closing remarks at all.

I do not.

Sounds good. Sounds like a plan. So, I just want to share with my colleagues that this is a resolution that we're reviewing today as we're honoring all of the community partners but during the city council meeting is when we'll officially adopt that resolution. Is there any questions at all? Questions or discussions before we move forward?

Chair Blumey. First of all, really excited to be sitting at this table in this formation as the Public Safety Committee and I want to thank you for your leadership in getting us to this point and creating this committee. And mostly just to the partners who are here today, I want to say a huge thank you. It's so inspiring to see you, to see how many of you there are, to see your different levels of expertise and to see your commitment to community safety and we could not do it without you. So, you so, so much.

Wonderful. And also just want to share, I really appreciate you seeing the range of partnerships and the range of populations that's served when it comes to our community for its public safety. And also, thank you Director Blakey. I know what's been a continuous thread, what I've heard today is that everyone has said they have been teaching city and like the education and the learning across the spectrum has been really important when we talk about how we're actually setting programs and policies and recommendations on how to make our city safer. And to also hear that we are nationally awarded programs is a really great highlight to that as well.

So, appreciate you for your time. So, we're gonna get going to the next agenda item. Think it's set.

Yep. Second item, the second item for discussion is staff report twenty five dash one one four safe summer nights event.

So, have commander McCabe. I'm here from the Saint Paul Police Department on Safe Summer Nights events. We'll just have a chance to talk about the events that's happening in our

Have a good one. Thank you.

Thank you. Sorry, I'm trying to just make sure because we have our HRA meeting coming up, so. So, Commander McCabe is going to talk about the safe summer nights. So, there's actually been quite a few events happening in our ward. But the reason why I have this on the agenda because I know we've had this in our emails is really just hearing the background around how safe summer nights have came about.

I had a good conversation with Chief Axel around this being really truly a community volunteer driven initiative that our city just has a chance to highlight. So, Commander McKay, you could just take it away from here.

Absolutely. Council members, committee chair, and council president, thank you for this opportunity. I come with regrets of assistant chief Paul Fordy at a family issue that he needed to address last minute. So he reached out. I'm commander Dave McCabe.

I'm in charge of the community partnerships and outreach unit. Several months ago, I transferred from the Western District Patrol Operations. And I bring that up because Safe Summer Nights isn't just a community partnership and outreach unit opportunity. It's really a citywide effort with all our police officers and every unit that we have in the city. So if you've been out there before, you've seen, you know, we have every specialty unit represented from the bomb squad where they can see the little robot driving around to our big command post to the SWAT team, but also our police explorers, our police cadets, our explorers are our high school age group, and then we have our cadets who are more of our college age group as well.

So it's really a big partnership amongst the department to make this happen. But it was established twelve years ago. There was a breakfast meeting between private citizen Tom Campion and then chief Todd Axtel. Tom Campion approached the chief at the time and suggested this idea of having barbecues in areas that are high crime and a way to go in there and have something positive, have a community event where the police and the citizens could come together, not so much in a formal role, but more of an informal role. Then Chief Axel agreed to that and Safe Summer Nights was born.

The first event had five volunteers, police staff, and a shocking thousand people showed up to have some hot dogs and burgers and kinda see what what everything was there to be provided. Over the years, it has evolved to provide community services as well. So we have a number. We have forty forty resource tables. We're at our last safe summer nights.

So many of the community partners that you just listened to have resource tables at that event. In addition, we have St. Paul, Ramsey County Public Health is doing prescription drop offs there as well. They're doing a number of public health outreach. Saint Paul Public Schools and Nutrition Services are there to ensure that our food security is stable for our young population.

The city county credit union has started to come to provide financial security and financial advice to some of our citizens that need those resources as well. And then I'd be remiss with the firefighters in the audience not to mention their partnership in this as well with their kitchen fire demonstrations that they do twice throughout the event. It's quite the attraction, but also very educational. And I can tell you with Safe Summer Nights being hosted at Hillcrest Rec last year, my children participated, and they still talk about the grease fire. So thank

you, guys.

It's wonderful. They constantly correct us in

the kitchen.

Our partnership is also with St. Paul Parks and Rec. It's important to note that we host these activities at the rec centers and at various rec centers throughout the city. We do our best to ensure that different areas of the city are seen, addressed and we have the opportunity to really kind of get out there. And the neighborhood comes out, the kids come out, the schools come participate and really kind of bring everything together. And it's a great opportunity to showcase all the many resources that we have throughout the city and the department and through our other city partners.

Thank you. Any questions or discussions from any council members?

Council Member Naker? Thanks, Chair Bui. I love the story of how this got started. I actually didn't know that story and it's such a St. Paul story. Know someone has a great idea they have breakfast with the chief. Next thing you know we have an ongoing community event. I think it's a good lesson learned that you can just you can always start something with an idea. I'm curious I think I know the answer to this, but are Safe Summer Nights completely privately funded?

So it's a combination of private funds through the St. Paul Police Foundation.

And

then a lot of our department operations funds come through the J Grant. So our community outreach is

Do you happen to know and if that's okay, I'm curious what level of how much money we're talking about from the foundation? I mean, assume it's a significant investment.

I would say significant. I don't have that exact number.

It's I just think really admirable that that's something that our community is essentially coming together to provide for one another. Absolutely. So, looking forward to the events this summer.

Yeah, I am going to just hold my follow-up questions particularly to the point of around the public and private funding. I think brings up some ideas particularly around here and from like the St. Paul Police Foundation and just all their initiatives and their partnerships particularly with our police department. But thank you so much Commander McCabe for your time. I encourage my colleagues to go out to their events and their awards.

I know I have quite a few coming up this month and next month. So, it's a really great opportunity as we heard not only to engage but also highlight the many resources that we have in a great recruitment tool. So we can be able to hire more staff and then build our team here in St. Paul. So, thank you so much for your time.

You're welcome.

Wonderful. So, our next item on the agenda is recruitment and retention. Okay. So, we have Assistant Fire Chief Jeremiah Melquist here and this is a give us some background on this agenda item. I had a chance to go to the Graduation Academy a few weeks ago at the Minnesota History Center and it was a phenomenal class of new firefighters and we also had the really exciting brothers for the first time in history.

Two brothers were able to graduate and become firefighters and just continue the legacy of our family members who are firefighters here in St. Paul. So, Assistant Chief Melquist has a presentation particularly around recruitment and retention and we also have many we have a Captain Baker here as well as Deputy Chief Smith here in the audience as well. So, if you have any questions of the fire assistant chief, you can ask your questions now particularly, but we are trying to be done around that 01:45 time to give us some wiggle room for our next meeting. So, let's keep that in mind as well. But thank you so much, fire or excuse me, assistant chief Melquist.

Good afternoon, council members, council president Aker, and committee chair Bowie. I'm here today in place of chief Inks. He says his regrets. He had a personal appointment he had to attend to. Again, my name is Jeremiah Melquist. I'm the assistant chief operations for the Saint Paul Fire Department. Our mission is simple but powerful, protect and serve with skill and compassion. We're here today to highlight how recruitment and training are critical to continuing that mission. A well trained, diverse team ensures Saint Paul gets the very best emergency response.

Excuse me one second, assistant chief. I just realized that I'm not on the intercom, the presentation. Is there supposed to be some visuals?

Yep, I got it right here. Is it on?

There we I just want to

make sure

the slides are.

Doesn't catch that you're doing a presentation now.

Yes, I did. Yep. Yeah. We just we have voice activated. Put the queue in there. Okay. Carrying on. Thank you. I just wanna make sure it was

Our department is aligned with our city's goals. Community first public safety, lifelong learning, and economic justice. Our mission is to protect the people of Saint Paul with public education, fire suppression, rescue, and emergency medical services. We partner with the community to mitigate risks and respond to all calls for service with skill, dedication, and compassion. Each and every day, our firefighters on the streets make decisions based on our core values.

The acronyms pride, professionalism, respect, integrity, duty, and equity. Our role though as a fire department for the city is to be proactive, to be proactive in public safety, public education, and risk reduction. To do that, recruitment and retention are foundational to our ability to serve effectively and equitably. What you see now is map of our city and the wards. So you can see what we have.

We have 16 stations across the seven wards. We have a total of 524 FTEs. That but that includes firefighters, administration, accounting, building maintenance, and public safety garage. Of that 524, we have 457 total firefighters. We also have 34 basic life support division and Cares Response employees.

We are we are responding to more calls with the same staffing we had over a decade ago. Recruitment and retention are our frontline strategies to meet community needs and reduce expensive overtime. It's about public safety readiness and smart workforce planning. We face increasing service demands and retirements and long term leads, unfortunately. We find it vital that we mirror the communities we serve and investing in recruitment is investing in St.

Paul's safety and equity. As you can see from the slide that's up there now, in ten years, our EMS runs alone increased by over 20,000 incidents. That's 65% over ten years, and generally, we see 5% to 7% increase annually. If you forecast that outlook at the 2034, we can expect 72,000 to 75,000 EMS runs to go along with our 12,000 to 15,000 fire runs. Jumping into our academy.

Our academy balances physical, technical, and academic demands. Candidates must already be an EMT, emergency medical technician, or paramedic before day one. We are asking a lot of them and providing the tools for them to succeed. Our academy is very intensive and well rounded. As you can see, a normal standard academy is fourteen weeks.

We do have a lateral transfer academy that we utilize every few years. That's a shorter version. The standard academy gets certifications of firefighter one and two and hazard hazard hazardous materials operations. During chief Ng's term as chief, we have graduated 209 new firefighters from 11 academies in just over six years. Our graduation rate is no accident.

We proactively prepare candidates even before they start. This approach strengthens success and retention, especially for underrepresented groups. Our high graduation rate reflects strong prep work. These support systems start well before day one. We aim to further readiness we aim to further improve readiness by extending lead time and academy duration. One example of that is Twin Cities Female Firefighter Fitness. They work with females to prepare them to take the test, be successful in passing the test, and then prepare them for the academy so they can be successful through our fourteen week academy. Without this, I don't believe we'd have the increase in numbers that we do have in female firefighters. Me. Sorry. Yes, sir.

I have a question. Can you give the acronyms of the affinity groups? There's a T TCF III, Firefighters United, Los Bamperos, if you can give a little background on those organizations. Are those groups?

Yep. So TCF III is the Twin Cities Female Firefighter Fitness Group. It's an all female group that meets monthly. It does workouts, has q and a, sessions, and travels around the metro. It's not just specifically for Saint Paul fire department. It's for females in firefighting departments all around the metro to try to, improve and encourage, females to apply and jump into this career. Firefighters United, that's our our African American advocacy group. We have a they're very strong here in St. Paul, led by Captain Baker. Los Bamberos, that is our Latino group.

They also are strong. It's a little bit newer, but they're strong and very passionate about recruiting and retaining their members. Recruitment and academy cost. Recruitment and training are significant but strategic investments. We save far more by hiring the right person the first time.

And we reduce overtime and burnout when staffing stays stable. Recruiting a firefighter is not just about exams. It's gear, it's testing, it's onboarding, and it all adds up. Every dollar ensures a well prepared, mission aligned hire. A lot of the advertising outreach money you see up there now goes for newspapers, radio stations, ads with EMS and firefighter groups to attend community events, open houses and and hold or offer informational sessions.

We're using more on duty personnel to try to minimize the cost it takes to put on an open exam. But again, we have to balance out the need to have members, you know, employees in the seats to respond to the runs and also tackle all these initiatives. Training is not an expense, but rather an investment in human capital. Payroll is a major driver. Candidates are paid from day one.

We bring instructors off shift, off the twenty four hour shift, and put them on a forty hour shift, and they work as the instructor to student five to one ratio. Right now, we have three members full time out at training. That's not enough when we have a twenty, twenty five, 30 recruit class. So we bring them off the street, and with that comes backfill for those positions. It would be more beneficial if if, you know, in the future and, you know, visioning out if we had a a larger, stronger contingent as a permanent training staff, and we won't have to bring firefighters off the street for academies.

We do rely heavily on overtime to backfill, and we rely on volunteers to go out and companies to go during the day. This is neither sustainable nor scalable.

Council Member Jolson and Council President Knicker. Thank you, Chair Buoy.

I just have a question about what you just mentioned regarding the so needing more permanent training staff and you rely on overtime to backfill the instructors from operations. I think I understand that, but then you mentioned that there are volunteers. Are those firefighters that are or staff that are volunteering their time or are these volunteers that are

not That's firefighters volunteering their time on their day offs. So if they're on a twenty four hour shift, they'll go out and assist at the academy on their day off.

Okay, thank you. Thank Councilor Jochas. Thanks,

Chair Bui. It sounds like there's not only no cost to the cadets, but they're actually getting paid for their time. Is that right?

That's correct.

And then is there what is the expectation in terms of their eventual application to and being hired by St. Paul's Fire Department and length of stay in the department?

What's the expectation? That's a great question, Council President Aker. Our expectation is that we see twenty to twenty five year career after our completion of the fire academy. That's not always the case.

And just as a follow-up Mhmm. My expectation as well. Yeah. But I guess what I'm wondering about, wondering if we've looked into is there is there any chance that we're training folks for other fire departments?

That's always the case dealing with what's going on and I'm going get to that in a little bit in here. But the issue we have is the pool is limited for paramedics and EMTs and that's not just here in Minnesota, that's across the nation and we're all fishing in the same pool. So it you know, our department provides a lot of benefits, a lot of opportunity that other departments don't, but each individual, for whatever reason, has their certain goals in mind personally. But I like to think that Saint Paul is the best option. We have the most promotional opportunities.

We have the best EMS division in the entire Midwest in my mind. And you work for the capital city, the best fire department in the state of Minnesota.

Thank you. And then we have one question from, council member Kim.

Yeah. A follow-up question is what amount of overtime hours on average is being committed to firefighters using overtime to conduct the trainings?

Well, so the the overtime for the training, that's not where the overtime comes in. The overtime comes in when we pull when I pull five captains off the street to go to the academy. So they'll go on the forty hour work week for fourteen weeks, and so they're not getting any overtime out there. But when I pull them off the streets, I create an open spot. So I would have to check with finance director, Jill,

to get But those

I can follow-up with those and get you those numbers.

Yes, appreciate that clarification and that is a number we're interested in. Thank you.

Excellent.

Thank you, Councillor Miller Kim. And then we can keep going. We have about 10 more slides left. But please, if you have questions, I'll make sure to look for you.

Normally, I'm a fast talker, so I'll try to

get through them a bit if you are.

Community and outreach recruitment. We have we built a row built a robust partnership to reach youth, BIPOC communities, and women. Our model is nationally respected and deeply local. This outreach is working, and we can scale it even further. We meet people where they are, high schools, gyms, churches, parks.

As as the police department head of me said, the safe summer nights. We attend all the safe summer nights, and we use that as a recruiting tool also. Social and community trust building is our best long term recruitment tool. You can see we have partnerships with Saint Paul Public Schools, the current organization of Minnesota, HAP, Urban Village, local colleges, social media campaigns, and then the TC3, TCF3, Firefighters United and many more. We're working with HR to make the hiring process faster and more inclusive.

Previously, in my twenty five years, we had a test or almost a five year gap between hiring lists and tests. I took a test in 1998. I was hired in the first class in 2000. I don't think the next test was until 2005, 2000 We're only talking seven years between tests. It's hard to keep people who are interested in the job when you got to wait that long for an opportunity to get on the fire department. Lateral hires can address paramedic shortages without diluting standards. It's a tool that we have used in the past and we're presently using right now. Recruitment wins.

Excuse me, Assistant Chief. We have one question from Councilmember Yes, sure.

Thanks so much, Chair Bui. So, how long is the hiring process now? And how often are the tests conducted? And can you kind of give us a sense of where that falls with relation to the academy? Is that that's after they complete the academy or that's to get into the academy sort of?

Councilmember Nacre, Chair Bowie, that's a great question. So we do not have an open list right now. So we are presently, at this time, preparing and planning for the test that will be given in the spring to create an open list. And then that first academy will not happen until after the list is created, and we hire, and that will be until 2026. So we talked about the lateral transfer when the list is expired and where we need to fill our FTEs, that we use the lateral transfer to try to recruit paramedics try to have an academy that can get us through the time that's going on.

We have plenty of our divisions, personnel, PIO out working right now, trying to set it up and recruit and get the demographics that we're looking for. It's a long term.

So it's a test then the academy then hired?

It's a test, you get hired into the academy. On day one in the academy, they're our employee, then they go through the academy for fourteen weeks they graduate the academy, they hit the streets.

And how often are we doing the tests these days?

Our goal is every one to two years. Right now this would be year two, so two years as opposed to five.

I just want to just flag we just have a few minutes left. If we if you do have questions, you can write them down. We can try to, you know, may not get your questions answered, but follow-up with Assistant Chief Melquist or my office and we can make sure we can have follow-up. So, I do want to flag the overtime question as well too, that's something that's important for us

to So, get all those questions answered. You, Chair Bui. Recruitment wins, BLS. BLS has been such a win for our department. The expansion of BLS to support operational needs, respond to alpha and bravo runs has now gone to 20 fourseven response. We use it for our power rigs, inter facility transports, CARES incidents. It's a huge success, and I see the future. My vision is that the BLS division will expand with your assistance, of course. Recruitment wins, pathways. Our EMS Academy, it's our greatest recruitment tool and pathways program.

It's in its twenty fifth class right now. The twenty sixth class starts in September. The sixteenth year of the program, we've had 370 graduates. 31 have been hired straight from EMS Academy to Saint Paul Fire. But more important than that, 68 other members have been hired to other departments, police department, hospitals, ERs, law school.

Some have gone on to be doctors, PAs, nurses, flight attendants, organ donation coordinators. It's it's just a huge success, and it's a pathway for our youth and our community to not only come on the fire department, but to find a career, to find a life that's worth, you know, that has a meaning to that individual. Currently, we have 1,648 people on the interest list for the EMS academy. Huge success. Quickly, I'll jump into the strategic over hiring model.

Our goal is to hire 12 to 20 above our FTE cap. We found that it reduces overtime by $1,000,000 a year. It fills gaps from attrition, military leave, rental leave and long term leaves. So instead of backfilling with expensive overtime, we're asking to overhire slightly to maintain daily staffing and meet call demands. This change makes financial and operational sense.

On the next slide here, I'm going to show you, in 2019, Chief Inks, before my time, had the idea and went to OFS, and they approved it. OFS and the mayor's office approved it in 2019 to hire 12 to 20 extra. And as you can see on this slide, that in 2020, we had the lowest amount of overtime spent, and our daily staffing has never been higher. That's an average daily staffing based on sick, long term leave, or overtime that can or cannot be filled. But what this proves is that we can save at least a million dollars by over by overhiring.

Our next plan is a d shift. It was just implemented this year. We hired two captains above and one district chief above. It started 03/08/2025. And in three months, we've saved $114,000 in overtime, and this also helps balance the shifts. Our firefighters are able to bid to different shifts. We have A, and C. Having the D shift lets them fill in the spots for long term leave, vacation, whatever it may be, so it helps balance our average daily staffing, and it saves on overtime. Our future goal and vision is to expand the d shift also. Interest is strong for our academy.

We just need to make the process faster and smoother. Every delay risks losing good candidates to other departments. We're actively recruiting now and fine tuning our prep pipeline. We're making the process clearer and more inviting. Positives, no longer an application fee to apply. Expedited process with a qualifications rating as part of the application process, and that allows for immediate practice sessions with all qualified candidates. Preparation time between sessions for females has increased, and with that, the success rate has increased. Our key challenges, EMT shortage statewide, paramedic shortage statewide, competition for talent. Like many departments nationwide, we face retention headwinds. Talent is limited.

Every department is fishing in the same pool. We need more modern facilities and equipment to remain competitive. To give you an example, just this last week, Assistant Chief Sampson and his EMS division interviewed 21 of our firefighters, and 15 were selected that will start medics school this fall. So we're moving in the right direction, but that is through funds that we have secured through grants. Opportunities ahead.

Our internal support systems and feeder programs give us a real edge. We must invest to keep it working. There's more opportunities for promotion, more opportunities for specialties such as hazmat, squads, MART, Minnesota task force one, SWAT medic. Our chief has been very supportive of the executive development institute for firefighters united, training our leaders of the future. We also are very our senior command and our fire department is very, or or supports the health and wellness, both mentally and physically of our firefighters, and, that includes sending them out when you need to to the IFF Center of Excellence and the Health and Wellness Center in Utah.

The path to retention is by valuing our most important asset, our firefighters, and creating a work atmosphere where they feel safe and secure and with the tools to be successful always. In conclusion you like that picture? Thank you. We're asking for your support to invest smartly in people. More staff now equals fewer staffing issues, less overtime in a department that reflects the community it serves. In twenty minutes, you've seen twenty, twenty five minutes, you've seen how we recruit, train, and retain. We're asking for smart investments in people, planning, and places. Thank you.

Wonderful. Any questions, discussions, highlights? Okay. I see everyone's on thin ice right now. Well, thank you so much, Assistant Chief.

You definitely have lot that you had covered and a lot that I see for us to include on our future agendas, especially as when I just highlight removing the barriers and removing the application fee. Also want to learn more about the D shift to hear better ways that we can have cost savings especially when it comes to that over time. So, thank you so much for your time. So, our next meeting for the Public Safety Committee is going be held Wednesday, July 23, same time, same location. And the topic on that will be reinviting the firefighter Department to talk about the chemical dependency.

Also County Attorney John Choi's office will talk about the chemical dependency court and how that the partnerships across the board. So, any information that you want to have in those slides or hear from the firefighters or the county attorney's office, please reach out to us in advance and you have any questions you already know. Assistant Chief is a friendly face, very approachable and has been very responsive. So, thank you again for officializing our first public safety committee. And if we don't have any questions or anything, this meeting is adjourned.

Thank you.