Public Safety & Criminal Justice Reform Committee - Regular Meeting

Gonna call to order the Toledo City Council Public Safety and Criminal Justice Reform Committee meeting Tuesday, 07/29/2025. Clerk call the roll, please.

Hobbs.

Here. Williams. Here. Hartman. McPherson. Morris. Here. Sorrento. Three present. Also present, council members Gaddis and Melding. I

want to start by, first of all, thanking everyone for being here and the concern of our constituents as always, foremost, and I wanna make sure everyone understands. I believe everyone does, but we did not, on last week, have or take a vote to close the Sylvania station. We only voted to make sure the station at Saint Vie's was to be open. So there has been no vote to close the station, and I just wanna make sure that's clear because there's been a lot of emails and a lot of misinformation that we voted to close that station. We did not vote to close that station.

Also, I want to read a statement from councilman Sorrento who had a previous engagement. He wanted the community to know. This is from councilman Sorantu. I am at an economic development conference today, which I agreed to attend two weeks ago. I am unable to attend today's meeting on TPD substations.

However, I will listen to the complete audio recording of this meeting. Sincerely, George Soranto, councilman at large. And so before we open this up to chief being here today, thank you. I'm going to ask for my fellow colleague, councilman Melden over District 5 and also my vice chair, councilwoman Denise Williams for their statements, and then we will go to our chief of police, councilman Melden.

Thank you so much, councilman Hobbs. I appreciate that. And I appreciate you holding this committee hearing. You know, I think when when I first heard that that this was being discussed a couple of weeks ago, Councilman Hobbs was one of my first calls as the chair of this committee. And so to have this conversation today is a byproduct of that conversation.

I just really appreciate him hosting this committee hearing. You know, think that my take on this conversation from the very beginning was was really pretty simple. Getting an offer from a community partner like Mercy to open a substation on Cherry Street sounded like a really, really good idea. And in my opinion, it was simply merged with what I would think is a really, really bad idea. And I wanna be really clear about this piece.

The really, really bad idea is closing a substation in a neighborhood without talking to the neighborhood. That's I'm be I wanna be very precise. I am not suggesting that come hell or high water, the Northwest Station has to stay open. That exact building. But last week, right, time flies, we passed a resolution 12 o that said this council, the will of this council is to maintain a presence in that neighborhood.

What that looks like where it is, I think that's the nature of government. That's the nature of community involvement and making decisions that are best for the community. So that's where I was on this particular topic. That is what we did last week. We hopefully separate those two things.

Today, again, just in my personal opinion, the goal of this conversation is to, I hope, zoom out a little bit, and it's okay, it is on that screen, talk about what role do these various outposts, I'll call them, these various physical buildings, I'll these locations and I'll take a quick tangent here. If you just pull up on Google Maps, if you pull up on Google Maps you're living and I'm I'm at home living in West Toledo, and I search Toledo Police Department, it pins on the map the Northwest Substation. It doesn't say on the map, this technically isn't a it just says Toledo Police. And so the the community perception then is then framed by that. So my hope for this conversation, and I'm I'm assuming that you have a presentation to to to do just this, is to let's zoom out a little bit and have a conversation about the role of substations in our overall public safety strategy and the role of all the various locations that that Toledo Police maintains in the community.

It's my hope personally that we're also able to have a big picture forward, like future oriented visionary type conversation about what should a modern public safety presence look like in our neighborhoods. I think that's a worthwhile conversation to explore as well. So a lot to do here. I'm very excited to do it. And, of course, we have a strong community presence here. Not to make assumptions, but I have a feeling I know what neighborhood. A good amount of our attendees are here. Quick logistical point. We do have a sign up for public comment. Okay?

If if you missed if anyone attending missed that there's a sign up for public comment, is it at the back table or is it at the podium? It's at the back table. No one will interpret you getting up and writing your name on that piece of paper as you being rude. But if you are interested in doing that, my assumption, chair, is that at the end of the presentation, we will open it up for public comment. I want I want to stress something here about public comment at council meetings.

It's kind of interesting. Often, something will hit the news, and we'll get people that want to attend the next very council meeting and give public comment, and we don't necessarily take them there. A committee hearing is the place for public comment. So thank you all for being here. And if there's anything you wanna say, I know everyone here is excited and and and gonna be all ears to listen. So so that's that's my perspective. That's what I hope we're here to do. We're not here to say, well, this was the idea, now here's our definitive decision of what we're gonna be doing. I think this is a more open ended conversation, in my opinion, but we'll see where it goes. And, that was longer than you probably anticipated, and but thank you for the time, councilman Hobbs.

Thank you, councilman Melden. Councilwoman Williams.

Thank you. Thank you, chair Hobbs. I just wanna say thank you to everyone. I'm Vanice Williams. I represent District 44, and I know all too well how important police presence is within a neighborhood.

When you look at our homicide maps or our crime maps, a lot of crime typically is concentrated in in in District 4, for various reasons. There's various factors. But the topic of police operations has been on our agenda for a long time in having conversations. So I'm glad that we're having this meeting. I know that we wanted to use some of our leftover ARPA dollars to kinda see how we can, we wanted to do that.

I actually wanted to vote for that, but we voted for a CWA and I don't wanna go back. But we wanted to see how police operations could be, shifting because our buildings are horrible. Safety building is terrible. A lot of people has have given me comments of why do we have police operations right down the street from the safety building? Well, if you ever been in a safety building, it's hot, it's old, and it is failing.

So we were hopeful that we would find some dollars, to build a new police central station. And one of those locations happened to be the where the old welfare office was on Monroe Street. That was one, but we didn't vote to pass for that study to be done to see if that was a good location. So, the Toledo Police Department has had to pivot quite a bit. I'm thankful thankful to Mercy, to for allowing, our police department to take that, building and utilize it.

I definitely wanna make sure that we clear up any misunderstandings. I did attend a community meeting, with my colleague, George Sorontu, and sir Sandra McPherson. And, if there was any misunderstandings, I'm definitely here to clear that up today. I'm glad to have dialogue. I love to have dialogue.

Within this this area, there is a a decorum that we have, but if we need to talk afterwards, I'm definitely available. Police presence is very important, and voting to open the, Mercy Campus Police Station did not vote to close the Northwest Station. It's actually still open, but no officers are there. I know it's a skeleton crew, but I know chief attended that meeting as well and, he had already been looking at places. Discussion, but I thank you all for being here and definitely, ready to dive into this discussion. Thanks, chair.

Thank you, councilwoman Williams. Councilwoman Morris.

Thank you, chair. Thank you, chief. Thank you, assistant chief. Thank you for, coming and coming to our, committee hearing. My name is Theresa Morris. I represent District 6, which is a neighbor of District 5. And, I have gone many times into the d Michael Collins station. I can tell you that that building is just absolutely awful. There's black mold, the parking lot, floods. It's it's it's not safe for anybody to be in that building.

Having said that, that doesn't mean that there aren't other places such as perhaps Devoe Village, other places that might be a little bit more conducive to having a police presence. I love I love committee meetings because we get to hear from you, and you don't have to always hear from us. And so that's one thing that I really like about these meetings. I will be brief, but I think it's very important that we have a front facing police department. They you know, we serve the city serves you as people who live in the city.

And so when we have a no entry or depressed entry into the safety building, what does that tell individuals and how they are welcome, into the police department? I understand some of the decisions that are made, but, right now, we've got some retirements with our, community service officers, some promotions, and that is another piece of the puzzle. The police department is not just a building. It's the people that serve in that capacity. So we also have our CSOs.

I wonder how many people are familiar with their CSO in your neighborhood. And if you aren't, you need to be. You know, part in that section that sector five, and that's Cliff, Worsler, and he's gonna be retiring soon. And so part of the challenge is is that how do we keep our CSOs at the forefront of our policing. And so, they build rapport.

They are the people that you talk to that, maybe you don't feel necessarily comfortable when a crew comes into the area. These are people you see every day. This is community policing. And that's, in my opinion, that's what I think that we should be focusing on. Teresa Gaddis and I were talking earlier today about what about putting some of them in our, community centers, and have regular office there.

I mean, there's other ways to to kind of work with this, and that's why we're here today. And so, I I just want us to kind of let's all be open, and let's start listening to each other because that's what our community does. We try to make it better for all of us. So thank you so much for coming. Thank you for taking time on a very hot day today, but thank you for for investing in your community. Thank you, chair.

Thank you. I do wanna say I received many calls and emails from a lot of people that are sitting here. Thank you for being very passionate and expressing your concern, and I thank you again for being here today. Now, our Chief, Chief Trendley, the floor is yours.

All right, thank you, sir. Good afternoon, everybody. So Chief Mike Trendley and I have Assistant Chief Kevin Braun with me. And today's hearing here today, we just kind of wanted to cover a few topics. One of the things we were asked is kind of define what the different buildings in our police department are and what they serve. Also kind of give an overview of all of our buildings and the condition of our buildings. And I realize the main topic is the D. Michael Collins Northwest Station. But in order to get into that conversation I think it's good for us to understand what we currently have in our inventory and how it serves our department and our community for that matter. So we'll go ahead and get started.

And first thing I want to talk about is our district stations and what traditionally is considered a substation. So for us our district stations are we have two district stations. It's the Central District Station also known as the Safety Building and the Scott Park District Station. So those are our two stations that are fully operational twenty fourseven open to the public. We have operational units working out of both of those stations handling calls for service, but we also have desk officers at those stations as well.

So, people can come inside, file a report twenty four hours a day, seven days a week. Traditionally, a substation is a secondary facility within your district station. And traditionally those are open for routine tasks like taking reports, addressing local concerns, or conducting community policing initiatives. As we'll go through the list of our buildings technically including Northwest does not fit the true definition of a substation because all of our buildings except for the Central District Station and Scott Park District Station are closed to the public without an appointment. We don't take walk ins, we don't take reports at those district stations, those desks are not manned, and those stations do not operate 20 fourseven.

So as we start going through, we'll start with the safety Building in Central District Station. And I'll just kind of go through what operations are inside there and kind of a quick overview of our current conditions. Have a long list of needs that need to be fixed. And I'll preface this with by no means am I attacking our facilities department because they do an outstanding job for us keeping band aids on and old buildings running for us. So, I don't want anybody to think that it's a lack of effort and or commitment by our other departments.

So, as we talk about safety building, our police administration works out of our Safety Building. Our investigative services division, our operations division and our sport administrative services divisions. So this is our primary building. So the majority of all of our operations actually occur within the Safety Building. I know we talked about a little bit getting into Safety Building, it's not as open and free as it used to be.

And unfortunately, that's for good realistic reasons, right? So, we do have metal detectors, we do have officers behind bulletproof glass. Unfortunately, as you've seen even in the last week, the number of ambush style policing attacks across this country are getting out of control. So for the safety of the officers, we do have different security measures that have to happen for people to come inside our safety building. Our investigative services, this is the main section detectives.

We'll talk a little bit about some of our other detectives that work out of Northwest. And then half of our city for our operations division work out of this building. So the city is cut in two. There's a divide between well basically 475 and Jackman Road, but it kind of splits the city in half. And Central District Station is over here towards the East and Scott Park is towards the West and South.

And then for our Sport and Administrative Services division, this is where all of our personnel are planning, everybody that pays the bills make sure that the department runs, that's where everybody works out of. So the lion's share of our officers work out of the safety Building. Current condition, we do have roof leaks and water seepage. Unfortunately, we do have heating and cooling issues, old boilers tied to courts and stuff like that. Elevators are old.

We have insect problems. And when I say insect, we have a lot of cockroaches in our building unfortunately, including my office. But that's a part of having an old building having a lot of traffic in and out, having a lot of property stored in the basement, sub basement. They like to run the pipes. They do a good job trying to spray and keep them under control, but that is the status of our safety Building.

Which I will say too is come next year, I think it's in May, it was built in 1926. So the safety Building will be 100 years old next year. We're hoping to have some kind of celebration to celebrate its 100 year anniversary. All right, so as we look at our next main district station, it's the Scott Park District Station. Found an old picture of the Scott Park Pool.

I thought that was kinda cool, actually. And that's how that building started. It started as a bathhouse back in 1937 for the Scott Park Pool. Eventually, in, 1976, we start moving police officers into that building, and in 'seventy seven, all of the renovations were complete and we opened it up. But this is the other half of our operations division, And then this also includes some of our training section because this is where our indoor shooting range is.

So when we do all of our qualifications and any time we have to shoot for training, that's where that happens. Current conditions, parking lot needs to be resurfaced. Unfortunately our basement out there does flood, and we'll talk about some flooding issues at Northwest. Scott Park is nowhere near the condition of Northwest, and because of the style of building, technically our basement is not an operational floor of the building. It's mainly for storage, so the small flooding that does occur there does not cause us huge issues.

And then we do have some cooling and lighting issues inside that building. So let's talk about Northwest stations. So back in the '90s we actually had three district stations. And Northwest was a fully functioning operational building 20, and we had our city broken down into thirds back then. Unfortunately, staffing issues, layoffs in the 2008, 2009 required us to rethink our personnel and rethink the way our dispatch center works, and we ended up closing the station down and redistributing between Scott Park and Central.

And when you have a third station open, you don't think too much about transfer the crews over, no big deal. Unfortunately, when you start looking at command structures that are required to run a station and to run shifts, you ended up having to have three lieutenants working every shift instead of two lieutenants. So it is manpower intensive every time you open up another district station. And those are some of the downsides of from a sheer operational efficiency, every building we open is it just strains our resources all that much more. In big cities, take New York, by no means can you run a police department that size without having several substations to work out of just because you can't get around the city.

Our city, you know, is a larger, mid sized city. However, it is a city that operates fairly easily with our road networks, our expressways, and our officers are able to transient the entire city fairly easily in a small number of or small amount of time. So, even when we were centralized out of downtown, it was still easy officers to hit each side of the city just based on our road networks. So at Northwest currently, like I said earlier, this does not operate 20 fourseven, does not operate seven days a week, and it is not open to the public currently. Inside there, we have traffic section officers, and then we have our special victims unit that also includes our domestic violence office.

So there are vehicles that come in and out of there that are marked, and those are purely our traffic officers. They come in, they leave at the beginning of their shift, they come back at the end of their shift. They're supposed to be out in their districts during the day unless they have to report back in for some kind of reporting incident or something like or they have a hysskip meeting or something like that that has to happen. So traditionally during the day, as a uniformed officer present there, even while the building is open, there's only a couple officers inside that building at any given time. Our special victims units are plainclothes detectives, so they are operating out of that building.

One of the reasons we place those detectives in that building is because of the special nature of their investigations and their victims and having, some place where they could be away from the court system and the downtown where everybody is filing their reports and coming in and being arrested and brought through the building. So let's talk about the condition of the Northwest. So unfortunately, when I talk about parking lot floodings and basement floodings, when the parking lot floods there, it actually floods out our vehicles. We've lost many vehicles, both marked and personal vehicles, because inside the vehicles, and actually when you open the doors, it will run right through the vehicles. Unfortunately, that means when that parking lot floods, so does the Northwest Station.

The basement floods and with that, the way that's set up is, it's like a walkout basement, if you will. And so our locker rooms, our office space, our workout equipment is all down in the basement as well. So whenever that floods, it ruins those spaces. Over the years we've had to cut out all the drywall, and now so for three or four feet off the ground there's no drywall. Eventually they put some plastic down there just to try to separate the space.

When you had the men's and women's bathrooms and, locker rooms where you could have a four foot gap in between, you know, needed some way to try to create some privacy. So they've done what they can with non, non molding material, if you will, because there is mold in that building. There is, constant water. Though, you know, the flood and drying out has caused the steps to kind of swell and the treads and stuff will pop up occasionally. We've had officers fall trying to get up and down the steps and hurt their shoulders and end up having to be on light duty.

So unfortunately, the building is not in a good condition. We have been looking at this building for years trying to figure out what we can do to get our officers out of there. We've looked at fixes, and the city's done a lot of different things to try to clean out drains, to figure out what it is. In layman's terms, what I'm told is that this is actually the low point for that neighborhood. And this property was actually intended to flood and collect all the drainage from the rest of the neighborhood.

So in order to rework the pipes and the drainage, we're talking tens of millions of dollars to make that fix. So from that standpoint and from the condition of the building, it just does not make sense. It is not good for us to continue to place our officers in those kind of working conditions. So for their welfare and for economic sense, we were actually intended to close that building or to remove our people from that building. In January, we just kind of kicked the can down the road a little bit.

We started working for how can we squeeze them into splitting the traffic section up, squeeze them into Central District Station, squeeze them into Scott Park District Station. Just trying to find a way to get our people out of that building. It is just not a safe environment for them to work. Thankfully, we started having conversations, with Mercy, and, an opportunity arose that that actually was better than we were thinking because we were only thinking how can we find a place for our special victims unit. And when we got into that particular building, we said this is big enough actually to re repurpose all of our people from Northwest.

And I'll talk about why we're not sending everybody from Northwest and how we're doing a shuffle with the Ottawa Park Station. But as we get to Ottawa Park and we talk about the new Cherry Building. So that's how that came about, and it just turned out to be a perfect fit for what we were hoping to accomplish. But at the end of the day, the current building is just not It's not a good building. It's not.

It's not something that we want our officers in. Ottawa Park. This is currently where we have our community service officers. This building is actually in fairly good condition. There's just some minor exterior issue with some gutters and stuff like that that we battle and continue to work with.

But overall, this is a good building. This is actually where we're intending to move our special victims unit to. It's a good off-site location close to Toledo Hospital, a place where we can have those kind of interviews and those kind of victims come into that building, which would allow us to actually in the mercy, I'll talk about that real quick, I guess. We have a we have a bureau that's headed by captain Morelli, and it's called our operational support and planning bureau. Actually, the two main units inside that bureau are community services and our traffic section.

Captain Morelli currently works out of the Central District Station because he's also in charge of a lot of different things, including our mobile field force, our strategic communication team, all of our special event planning. But then he also had to travel between the Central District Station to Northwest to Ottawa Parks to see his personnel. So he constantly was moving around the city just to be able to see his personnel. So when the Mercy Building came available, we said that would be a perfect place to combine that bureau into one bureau, give captain Morelli an office inside that station, and allow him to actually be able to supervise his entire bureau. So that's how that came about.

That's why we decided that we were going to move special victims out to Ottawa Park. Just talk about a few other buildings and offices, however you want to call it. Guess this is a good point to say. The reason we have the buildings we do have is because we can't operate completely out of the Safety Building and Scott Park combined. Each building is not big enough and was not built for a modern police department.

And the type of technology and different units that we now have today that we did not have in 1926 or 1976. We have completely outgrown these buildings. So that's why we have so many satellite buildings, so many other office spaces. So the Alarm Building, I don't have a list of the problems. I will tell you that it is in very bad shape.

It's one of our worst buildings. And that currently operates our SWAT section and our special intelligence group. Those officers work out of there, and it actually is currently, for a very short period of time now, is our backup center for our nine eleven communications, because that's where we used to run our communications out of. We've looked at different buildings and trying to find a different building to consolidate our special operations out of downtown. We have some promising buildings.

It's just unfortunately everything comes down to money at some point. Owens Community College, obviously, have a good presence out there, and that's where our training academy is. I I and know former chiefs have always wanted to try to bring our training academy into the city of Toledo. It is a long term goal that we have been working towards and trying to figure out if there's a way to make that happen. It is something that I would like to see happen.

And then we have a lot of different satellite offices. We have our you know, and some of these are for they're purpose driven. Like, take our our health and wellness officer, basically, mental health, works out of the Goodwill Building downtown. It's a it's a good off-site building where officers can come in and kind of, talk to our officer and get some counseling and just kind of get some services, and no one sees them coming in and out of the building. No one pays attention.

So it's a good off-site building. Goodwill, was a great partner. They offered up the building for us in fire and, you know, very happy to have our wellness officer out there. We have task force officers across the city in different buildings. And then, you know, even we have our RSVP inside the area office on aging.

So it's a good space for them and, you know, another partner that offered up a space, and we were able to do that. So we do have a lot of different buildings across the city that we have officers in right now. One of the other things that was asked is just our calls for service for each substation. And as I described earlier, our substations don't operate that way. Really, we only have

two

buildings that are handling calls for service. So these are your calls for service by year broken down for those service areas. These are not our total calls for service, but these are the calls for service that are broken down by our beat that we can attribute to a given geographic area. We do have a lot of different calls for service that come in that are handled either through a telephone reporting unit or other means. Take, for example, 2024, you're looking at roughly 145,000 calls for service there.

In reality, we had 153,671 calls for service that year and 189,904 total incidents, which includes our self initiated activity. But this is how we would be able to attribute it to each sector that is responsible to a district station. All right. So that is the overview of our buildings and what we were asked to kind of present. I know a lot of things we want to talk about is what does Sylvania Avenue look like?

What does the old Northwest Area look like once that building is unoccupied? Know, Councilman Melden, we've had conversations. We've had a lot of internal conversations about what things could look like. I'll just kind of give a guess I'll just give a kind of a brief overview of some of the things we're talking about that we can possibly accomplish. And then that maybe will jump start the conversation into what the community needs are and wants and desires of council and or community and how we can accomplish all of our goals together, if you will.

One of the things we are definitely looking at and started having conversations on is acquiring some space within the mall for a variety of reasons. The mall is heavily trafficked. It's a lot of people coming out of the mall. And the unit that we're looking to maybe get a presence in there is our recruiting unit. So kind of serves twofold.

Number one, gives us more visible presence at the mall, which I think everybody can appreciate, but it also gets us to where there 's a lot of people too. So, maybe giving us another conduit into conversations with some of our youth about becoming police officers and becoming visible out there. Those are early stage conversations. There's some logistics that come into play because currently as we speak, we do not recruit twenty or three sixty five days a year. So what would it look like when we're outside our recruiting period, those kind of conversations.

We've had some conversations about whether you want to call the neighborhood station, a neighborhood office, along those lines, somewhere along the Sylvania Avenue corridor, Devoe, anywhere where we could get trouble becomes who occupies that space, who's going to be in that space, and what does that space look like. There's been a lot of conversations about our CSOs. Being in district offices. So I have concerns about that. So number one is a lot of times that office is gonna sit completely empty because I push our CSOs to be out on the street walking in their neighborhoods and looking at the condition of their neighborhoods and, you know, making referrals and making community contacts.

Really, their office is their car. Right? And that's the that is the truth for most operational officers. That is their office. We don't use stationary offices too much for them.

So to fill the void along the Sylvania Ave Avenue corridor, we've had some early discussions about expanding our foot patrol program and having a dedicated foot patrol presence down that corridor and in those neighborhoods and using that office space as, a place for them to get in out of the heat to come in and take their breaks, but then also having a space that maybe all of the district units out there can stop in, eat their lunches, use a bathroom, kind of transition in and out of, right? So those are some of the early conversations we are having to try to figure out a way to fill the void of losing that building. So that is kind of my prepared comments that I have for you right now. I would love to have your questions and love to continue the conversation and kind of see where that goes.

Thank you, chief. Council councilman Melvin. Thank

you so much, chair. And thank you for that, chief Trentlay. I think it's think it's a really good overview of where your physical properties are and how you utilize those. You know, I think one of the things that's I don't wanna say most difficult, but it is certainly challenging challenging from from a a district council member. And I think probably the inverse is challenging for an at large member is a hunch I have.

And I I sometimes struggle with how to think only about the needs of my district with while realizing that if I go too far down that road, I will be advocating for decisions that compromise other parts of our community. And here and to be more specific, I think in this conversation, my I am doggedly committed to a presence in District 5, in particular this neighborhood. And yet I'm mindful of the fact that I think most most of the most districts don't have a substation in their district. So I've been thinking over the past few weeks about solutions that scale across districts. How can I advocate for something that accomplishes a police presence in District 5 that is also scalable across other districts so that it is able to be the same?

So when I think of, you know, three, four, six, one, they're all district members here actually, I just realized that. What are solutions we come up with? That is true. Right? I got that right? Okay. Good. That's just one of the ways that I'm thinking about this. I do have a question for you. Super high level first. First question is, you mentioned something you said in '19 in the nineties, there were three district stations. I think that's really interesting to look back what is, like, almost forty years ago. Don't tell anyone, but that was a long time ago. Almost twenty five. We're closing in.

Anyway, we'll check the math later. To look back that far. But in this year, here's my question for you. If you had a magic wand and could say, I get to have any physical presence built environment I could possibly imagine, what would you come up with? What is the ideal built environment for the safest city of Toledo for all of our residents?

And I do have another question after that.

I'm not sure you're gonna like my answer. Personally, and from an operational standpoint, and we've actually looked at designs for this, I would like to re centralize all of our operations. And we've looked at the jobs and family services old site there at, Monroe and, Detroit. We have some concept designs. It comes down to money.

But ideally, for the most efficient running of a police department, for especially a city of our size and the unique location of that particular spot, centralizing all of our operational districts inside we're do to that. That. Everything. It's just things And happen differently at each station because of, you know, style of the building, the old cultures, norms, whatever you wanna call them. Right?

Allowing us to centralize would would allow me to put a shift captain in every shift as well, which then gets us more supervision, more control of the activities of our officers on the street, more cohesive game plan in trying to accomplish our goals and our mission. So from that standpoint, if you're talking about a police department, that would be the ideal model for me. And then I would turn Scott Park into our police academy and bring our academy back into the city. So if I had a magic wand and I could do it any way I wanted and give the best police department, that's the way it would be. Now I say that with the understanding that I truly do understand the mindset of having a police department building in my neighborhood, right?

100% seeing police cars coming and and whether statistically it makes us safer or not, I have an emotional feeling that makes me feel like it's safer. And so my perspective is it's safer because I'm seeing a police officer more often because they're driving in and out. And how that goes is your perception is your reality, right? So it's hard to fight against that. But if you're asking me if I had the ability to run the police department which makes the best police department, it would be a consolidated operations center.

I just think that's interesting. I didn't know. I didn't had no idea what you're gonna say, and you said I'm not gonna like your answer. I I don't think that that's true. I if I don't trust your expertise in this, then we're in trouble. Like, this relationship is way off course. I think the challenge for us is to hear expertise and translate that so that it doesn't get out of line with community desire. I mean, that's the job of an an elect an elected person in a representative democracy. So you you're the expert, so I would love to hear. I wanna know your real answer.

It is interesting. Anytime you kinda zoom out and say what if, you then have to zoom back in and say, but we're not there. We have real challenges, and so everything's relative to our current reality. Right? So I know my colleagues have questions, so I'll just limit myself to one more, which is when you think about CSOs, what if and you you kinda brushed up against this idea. But you talked about a lot of partnerships. You mentioned goodwill, area office on aging. Obviously, Mercy is one. And that's really there's a number of reasons I just love that. What about instead I think the CSOs go to Auto Park. Is that right?

They're currently Auto Park. They're gonna be coming to Central or to Cherry Street. I'm sorry.

To Cherry Street. Is it possible to find a host entity for those CSOs to kinda start and end their day from in the sectors or the neighborhoods, districts. I get the words kinda confused sometimes. But, you know, you think about in this particular area, West Toledo, a host entity, whether it's a, you know, a a a church or a school or who whatever whatever other community minded partner that could offer space, you know, a roof, a desk, an Internet connection, etcetera etcetera etcetera, knowing that their main office is the four wheels, they're driving every day. Is that a possibility that you would be interested in?

So is it a possibility? I mean, obviously, yes. Right? So anything is a possibility. We've had a lot of conversations about this over the last couple of weeks. We struggle with it for a little bit. I'll just kind of give you from our perspective why we struggle a little bit with this concept. We don't like leaving an officer out on an island by themselves. So they would be the only officer coming and going from that station. If anything should happen to that officer or anything attack on that building, most likely it's going be a community partnership, so it's not going to be a building that has protection for the officers, right?

And I get that our officers are out there every single day, right? We have officers on foot. We have officers out there doing things. Any time in our current environment, you provide somebody with a known time and place, someone a single officer is going to be sitting at, I do fear for officer safety. So that is a reason.

That is a primary reason that we've been talking lot about. We also talked a lot about what is the effect really. I mean, how effective is that? We started talking about do we give them office hours? Saying, hey, your community officer will be in this building at this time. So if you have a report you need to file or you have something you need to work on, they're available. You can come meet them here inside your neighborhood area. Obviously, we can't have one that covers all 84 square miles or whatever we are right now. It's impossible to do that, right? But could you have enough satellite locations?

So we have eight CSOs. We have eight sectors in the police department. So we have one CSO per sector. Obviously when you start breaking that up, those are that's a lot of miles they cover already. And I did touch on a little bit too the reality of our CSOs is we want them out in the community.

We want them out there working with because they get signed a lot of problems from Engage Toledo, neighborhood complaints, or neighbor on neighbor, stuff like that, that they're out there dealing with. So we do want them out there. And when they're not in their cars addressing complaints or attending our block watch meetings or community meetings, you do. That's where you see a lot of our officers that are on foot. Lot of our officers that are on bikes.

Our CSOs are on bikes all summer long out there. Our CSOs are currently at pools. You know, we have a couple of pools that have sometimes, where they've had some trouble. So we've assigned the district CSO to be at the pools. So they wear a lot of hats to pin them to a building.

I do worry about how effective it would be.

I'll make one last comment. I appreciate hearing your concerns about that. I think that we're a creative group. I know you approach your work through a creative lens. I appreciate that about you. I think any of these we can solve for. I don't know. I appreciate hearing the concerns. I think that if that whatever idea we came up with that was perhaps a good solution, there's gonna be cons, right? Pros and cons.

I think we can come up with them. If there's an investment in making that particular space more secure that you would have in a station environment proper, maybe we look at that initial investment in that community partner. So we can get into that, but I really this has been a really valuable conversation for me. I could ask more questions, but I'm gonna stop. Thank you. Thank

you, councilman Melvin. Councilwoman Williams.

Thank you, chair. Thank you for the presentation. It a lot of interesting things have come out of, you know, the presentation. I do wanna ask some pointed questions in your discussions on the neighborhood and how keeping officers over there. Have you explored how much rent at the mall would be?

So those are really early conversations. We're hoping that maybe the mall will see the benefit of having us there as well, and, you know, we can work something out. Right?

Yes. Because, I know how much it is to rent just, you know, one of the smaller spaces every month. So that would be something, I think this council would wanna know how much it would cost. So we're still in early conversations, so nothing for DeVoe Village. Right? Not at this point. Okay. Okay. Let us know when if those when those conversations, spur off. I just I just really appreciate the comment you made about, how people feel comfortable having, police in the neighborhood, seeing them come and go.

Well, I tell you what, we didn't get that from Greenville, right? We had patrols, foot patrols in Greenbelt, TPD. If you don't know what Greenbelt is, it's Greenbelt Apartments, also known Cherry Woods, also known North Woods. It's been a very bad problem child in District 4, I think, throughout the city. And, the police presence didn't matter there most of the time.

I mean, you guys visible. I think Belo knows that too when we took our trip over there. Sometimes peep crimes just happen just because people are evil. People have evil or they they have situations in their lives that cause them to do evil things. I just wanna say, I I I I definitely like the idea of the Bow Village just because, these people still need to feel comfortable seeing police.

I do like that idea, but it's not my district, to to say that. But as a citizen, with family that lives in that neighborhood, I I like that idea and I'm hopeful that we can come to some type of resolution with that. I wish we would have paid for that study, chief. Don't you?

Well, we did do a study.

How much how where do you get that money from? We didn't vote for it.

Because I thought it was so important because it involved another building that we were looking for our special operations as well, that we forego a few things that we were gonna buy in order to pay for the study because it was something that I truly believed in and it's something that I wanted to start having conversations about.

Look at you. Because I really wanted that study because I really like the idea of having a new building for the officers to be centralized in. I like that idea, not just because it was in my district. I just think that having our academy in the city, being able to train in the city and, you know, seeing the neighborhoods that they're going to because some people, you know, don't live unfortunately, they don't live in the city and they wanna be officers, and they go out to the training facility and then they see the neighborhoods after they it's time to hit streets for that training, and they don't know. So if they're in the city having to drive to the city to do a training, that would be dope.

So I hope that we can come to a good resolve, and I'm interested to see what our, constituents here have to say. Thank you, chief. Thank you, assistant chief.

Thank you, councilwoman Williams. Councilwoman Morris.

Thank you. The one thing you didn't tell us is when was the building at Northwest Station built? Do you know?

So I looked at, I was trying to find out when we first occupied it. I know we occupied it, or bought it in '94. I don't know when it was first built, unfortunately. Don't have that right in front of me.

And it was put in service in 'eighty four?

'94, When we started, I think we started operating out of it in '95, but, they were making, changes for it, think, in '94. It's when, chief Galvin was our chief.

And if I'm not mistaken, and maybe some of the the neighbors can tell us when they come and speak, I thought it was like dental office. Was it not?

I believe that's what I've been told.

Okay.

It looks like one.

Yeah. It kinda does. You're right. And then, lastly, I just I can't make this, more strongly, especially being in a public, safety meeting. Please renew your commitment to CSOs. We have, promotions. We have retirements. Even the head of of the CSO program is gonna be retiring in January. As district people who are here who really care about our neighborhoods, I am gonna kinda put you on the spot a little bit. Please renew your commitment to getting people in those in in those positions because it makes a world of difference to have regular people that you know that you can go to this person, and you know that you can go to this person whenever you have trouble.

So I'm gonna kinda put you on the spot, chief. Would you be committed to filling those positions?

So right now, we are committed to filling those positions. We are backfilling all those CSO positions right now. I don't have a crystal ball that says what our manpower will look next year, next, you know, five years. I know safety director Carl is back there as well and as a chief, those CSOs also play an incredibly important role for us. They handle a lot of things that they didn't ever expect to handle.

But it's one of those things where I've got a complaint and I don't know who else to give it to, so I call the CSO. So they're doing a tremendous job at conflict resolution and figuring out ways to make things better in our community. So I I do not have any intention of not filling those spots.

Thank you very much. Thank you. I appreciate that. Thank you, chair.

Thank you. Thank you, chief. Thank you, deputy chief Braun. And so if we don't have any other comment from council members, we're going to now call the names of our community members. We have eight names here asking you to do your best to hold our comments to three minutes if we go over.

We're going to really try to hold everybody to three minutes so that we can get everybody's comments or questions. Our first name, and I'm going try my best to say everything right, is I think Carol Scaly. Thank you. Next up, mister John Bibish. Joanne, you're three minutes. We'll give you some extra time, mister Bibish.

Soon to

speak to you. First thing I wanna do is councilman Melden disabuse you of the notion that there's only one philosophy of policing. Chief Trendley is very clearly an advocate of what I like to call starship commands,

and he

said as much. He wants it in one big building. Just for a quick moment, let's go back to when he mentioned that the District 5 Substation opened. That was in 1994, and it was under the under the authority of chief Galvin. Well, I happened to be here at that time, and chief Galvin was an advocate of a different type of policing, which was called community policing.

Now community policing takes the approach that council councilman Melden, councilwoman Williams, councilwoman Gaddis, councilwoman Morris are pretty important, and that policing should reside in the community. And it's a feasible alternative in any environment. It's just different. Why didn't it continue? It didn't continue because after the end of the second term, chief Galvin was gone, and we were back to starship command.

And the very fact that we hadn't heard boo about the problems that existed at the Northwest Station over the last fifteen years ought to be telling. You can draw your own conclusions. Now I didn't come here to complain. I came here to make lemon lemonade out of this lemon that's been presented to us. We want a solution that provides adequate protection to District 5, a robust presence, and I've given each of you a copy of my presentation.

If you look at that first page, you're going to see a line that runs through District 5, District 1, District 4, and District 6. That's 70% of the council districts of the city Of Toledo. This is an indication that Sylvania Avenue could be a very good opportunity for the city of Toledo, if not for the police department, to provide a much more robust presence in West Toledo. Now if you go to Page 2 and look more closely, you'll see at the corner Of Jackman in Sylvania, you've got a location that abuts District 1, District 4, District 6, and is so spitting close to District 5, we don't care. Alright?

Because the whole idea is to provide a presence to stabilize the area from Phillips to Jackman, not to provide a Band Aid to the Franklin Park Mall or some location like St. Ann's that's gonna be more interested in property policing than community policing. Well, where's the beef? Because this all comes down to money. When they came forward with this presentation, they were so anxious to do it, but they didn't give you a single penny to do anything.

They more or less said, we'll figure it out of our own budget. And, gee, I wonder where that money would have come from. Probably the closing of District 5, even though they say they're not gonna do it. But that's okay. That's the way government runs.

I, on the other hand, am gonna present to you a proposal that pays for itself. No doubt about it. Now on the next subsequent page, which you've got is fiscal plans and projections. And if you look at the top half for the year 2024 projected, this is on the city's website. They project in column three that the city is going to lose 2,600,000 and they're going to have equity, money that they can spend of $62,200,000 That's a lot of money.

Well, the next thing to look at is if you'll jump over to the statement called statement of revenues and expenditures. And by the way, this came off of another public record that was published by the city of Toledo, was called a Hinkle Report, and they submitted it to the state of Ohio. Well, if you look down at the bottom of the first column, what you're going to see is surprise, surprise, the city didn't lose $2,500,000 They had a $24,400,000 profit, lots of money. That meant that at the end of the year, the city had $113,925,000 in equity. Now if you just flip back quickly, everybody with me?

Everybody with me? Where you want me to go?

I'm trying to say are I'm sorry. Is this okay? Okay. Are are you on this one?

Next page?

One. Okay. Alright. I'm just making sure.

Okay. And what this page shows you is that there's a $113,000,000 in the general fund. No no claims against it. Okay? It's there to be had.

Now full disclosure, some of it is not spendable, and that is what you're gonna see on this page. Okay? Everybody okay? That means out of the $113,000,000 $7,900,000 is not spendable. And if anybody from administration wants to argue with me about what those other three components mean, I'd be happy to do it.

This is all accounting ease. So there's well over $100,000,000 in the general fund that could be used if there's a if there's a will to use it for something. And I might add, councilwoman Williams, you you may have opened up another Pandora's box that I'd be more than happy for you to use because you brought up the ARPA fund. Now if you look at this balance sheet here, okay, what you'll see at the bottom right hand side is that there's $7,500,000 of money in the ARPA fund that is uncommitted. And don't let the word restricted fool you.

Restricted means it's restricted for ARPA eligible projects. 7 and a half million dollars. Okay? And it's in and and that's all money in the bank. So what am I saying?

I'm saying that I wanna turn that resolution into an ordinance to get things moving and to provide for District 5, District 1, District 4, and District 6, the kind of police protection that they're more than paying for. And there's more than enough money to do it. Now this ordinance is pretty strictly a copy off of the ordinance that was provided by police. They didn't have any numbers in it. Well, I've got a number in it, and the number is $400,000 But that could just be a start.

With the kind of money that exists in the general fund and potentially in the ARPA fund, you should be able to easily add another comma to that. And I can't see any reason why if the will is there, that an ordinance just like this couldn't be pushed onto the next agenda for suspension, emergency, and passage on the next council meeting just like the one did that really in effect closed the Northwest Station. Thank you. If you have any questions, I'd be glad to answer them. Thank you, mister Bibish.

Next. I think I have mister and missus James Buckley here. Miss James and Julie, come on come on down.

Willing to represent the city. No matter what district you're in, I am here to represent a citizen who wants a safer city for their Children. My Children are already out of college, but I want them to stay in the area. I want the schools to be good. I want people to feel feel safe.

I currently work at a hospital that is very big on workplace violence because violence is only getting worse. Physical presence can deter problems. Whether you're driving through the neighborhood, you're visibly present in the neighborhood, at the mall, at the schools, at the libraries, physical presence can deter a problems at all levels of socioeconomical status. So as a taxpayer, a mother, and a nurse, stay together, work together, and keep this city safe. We wanna live in America.

Thank you, miss Buckley. Mister Richard Arnold.

There's something I wanted to bring before you, but it's time sensitive. Do you prefer that I do it now or wait until after everyone is there is the substation issue? Your call. Okay. Briefly, we have an anniversary coming up, and I think it needs to be observed. We're coming up on the tenth anniversary of the death of Falco, the police dog. For anybody who does not remember this, Falco was a two year old German Shepherd. And on 08/12/2015, TPD were pursuing two suspects that had stolen a car. They ran into an abandoned building on Earl Street. The dog was sent in and shot to death.

Turns out the guy who did it was facing a murder charge in Cleveland. The whole community was shocked and outraged. It brought Toledoans together in a way that I don't think I've ever seen before. Falco was buried with complete honors. Mayor Hicks Hudson spoke at the ceremony, and it bears mentioning. At the time this was going on, in Ferguson, Missouri, there was a state of emergency. They had had a police shooting there night after night of rioting rioting and and police clashes and all that. The national media was all over. And remember, this was five years before the George Floyd killing. The whole country was asking a whole lot of questions.

Here in Toledo, no different. But even people that had criticism of our local TBD, they were united in their anger and their grief here. So August 12 is the tenth anniversary. There is a city council meeting on that night, and I think it would be very appropriate for city council to do something to commemorate this dog's Because remember, we need to remember our officers, both those with two legs and four legs. And and the death of Falco is something that brought Toledoans together at a time when we all needed to be brought together. So thank you for your attention.

Thank you, mister Arnold. Mister Torres.

Mister chair, good afternoon, members of council. In this year's state of the city address, the mayor emphasized the continued presence in reducing crime across multiple categories. And Wade credited this success to a focus on increased police presence. City council should be asking then why the administration's change in police presence away from certain neighborhoods. Don't need to tell you the history of this district.

On April 17, Trolley Park experienced one of several incidents at the park. On June 29, a West Toledo shooting at an Airbnb on West Lincolnshire Boulevard left one person dead and another person injured. And neighbors questioning what happened on their peaceful street. If only police had made a visit to the party earlier, it may have been prevented. That's what one neighbor said.

Moving the operations of the D. Michael Collins Northwest District Station leaves the neighborhood without that presence. Councilman Melding, you say whatever it looks like. We know what the Cherry Street Station will look like. It's been detailed in past council meetings.

West Toledo deserves no less. Some council members have stated that the operational history of this district substation has experienced periods of closure and openings, reflecting the priorities of the presiding mayor. Mayor Collins was right in establishing a substation in West Toledo. What's the priority of this administration? Will the city decide that public safety in West Toledo is financially practical?

Chief, you say that it will take tens of millions of dollars for infrastructure improvements. The city had $185,000,000 in ARPA funding in the last three years. Why wasn't this West Toledo project in the plans for funding? Is West Toledo a priority? That's your question. Is West Toledo a priority? I don't get that sense when you say whatever it looks like. Thank you.

Thank you. Mister Tom Names. Mister Mayes. I'm sorry. One second, please. One second. Sorry, councilman. I did not see the button. Councilman Melden.

It's okay. Thank you. I just wanna, just respond to mister Torres' comment. You know, think it's, my words were used to kinda spin that I don't necessarily care about a police presence in West Toledo, and that couldn't be further from the truth. You know, the Lincolnshire shooting was brought up, and it's it's one thing to to to write a statement and try to create these false realities.

It's another thing to think through really complex problems and try to come up with productive solutions. But the truth is, the response time, if I heard the presentation right, and please verify, the presence that party happened that that that violent act happened on Lincolnshire Sunday night at 10PM. How many people were working at that substation at that time? So whether that building was open or closed had zero to do. So I just wanna be clear what we're talking about because it's gonna be really important.

Was addressing my comment, mister chair? Okay. Alright. I was just responding to to the council member.

In order to finish thank you, chair. I just wanna make sure that when we talk about a real problem, we try to bring a real solution. And that's it's it's tough work. It's complicated to do. And that's what this committee is here to do, to be about the productive finding of solutions. We've heard some comments that brought real numbers to try to find solutions, and I appreciate those, and that's part of the deliberation that we have to do. But to suggest that an Airbnb party gone wrong would the the implication is almost that it will continue to happen at scale if we did something like closing the station. I just wanna make sure that we're not conflating, these situations. I think it it would be a big mistake to to confuse those things. Thank you.

Mister Names.

Thank you, Chairman Hobbs. This July has been, I think, probably one of the deadliest in record months in Toledo. I think there's eight or nine homicides this month. If you extrapolate that, we could have a 100 homicides this year. And yet, we're talking about rearranging satellite officers of police stations.

I don't understand that. I I put in a request, Sam, of comments to the peace in motion, and I'm still waiting for a response from you. But this whole idea of satellite officers, we're reports from our police officers on building inspections. Thankfully, you have the calls of services. I think your point is well taken that ideally what should we be looking at in terms of satellite offices around Toledo?

And I haven't heard anybody talk about what the experience has been in Youngstown, Akron, similar cities. What's the economic distribution of satellite offices? How what is the most economical way of responding to calls in Toledo? The matter already asked about is police presence. Doesn't that make a difference?

That was one of the four mayor's recommendations on their 12 plan, more police presence in Toledo. Also, service to the community. I think it's worthwhile that we have at least one other besides Scott Park to making police reports. I'd like to know what this committee who in this committee has been assigned to researching what other cities of this caliber, our size, do in terms of getting the optimum distribution of satellite offices in the city to serve the public. Thank you.

Thank you. Councilwoman Williams.

Thank you so much. Definitely, I know there's more names, I wanted to comment real quick on this topic. District 4 is probably one of the is the most crime field, you would say East Toledo, District 4 is Central city, Central City. We have an abundance of crime. I had a shooting on my street.

I had a after hour on my street. I mean, where I live at. And we have had team operations, LaGrange, Laser, we had Blazer was the booming neighborhood, these are in District 4. We had exes in East Toledo. And I'm I'm not I don't want anyone to think that I'm being insensitive, but the police presence has not helped with the crime.

And I gotta be honest, I'm I I live I live on in Central City. I've lived there all my life. I've I've witnessed murders with my waking eyes. As I see here as a 46 year old woman I had to go to therapy and I can talk about violence I can talk about crime because I've seen it and I've experienced it. And we have had the police presence.

Even when I see in the Green Belt. Police are there. When we talk about this what we need more of and I don't I don't know about District 5 I'm not speaking about District 5 what I need in my district more of. Is community. I need communities like this I wish. I can get. Folks from District 4 to come out like this. I appreciate you guys. I can't wait to to go in my district and say why don't you come down where will we have committee hearings? Because you don't.

If we and and that's not everybody in District 4 but if I could have more of y'all, I would appreciate it. But when we've had these team operations where police are blitzing, pulling over cars every other minute and and and and raids and SWAT and everything and they're still crying, There's a real issue there and it's the lack of community and I don't I don't I don't think that that that. I don't think that I'm saying you I do I have I will advocate for that that Devoe village or on Sylvania, like mister Bibber said, I'll work on on it with Sam. But community like you guys have is unmet in my district. So I appreciate you coming out, but crime has not deterred because we've had police presence in in my district.

And I keep saying that. Yes, they can walk down the street, but I I guarantee it was we were in the green belt and they were there and somebody got stabbed. Right there, while they were there in the apartment complex. So I I I want everyone to know crime is not random. That's it. Thank you.

Thank you. Is there a Michael Jones here?

Hello council members, and thank you to the officers today for your words and information. Again, my name is Michael Jones, a resident of District 4. Thank you, councilwoman Williams, for your words. I also encourage more people in our district to come out. Unfortunately, the prevalent thought is that we don't matter to the city.

And to a city council that has had its share of scandal in a city that's had its share of scandal, I can't stress enough how important it is for council members to step over those council lines and go into other districts and encourage voters to step into this room. It is needed. I think it would make a difference. Now I did not know John Hobbs was the chair of this committee. So you got to excuse me because I will make reference to some of the behavior engaged in by some of your black Greek letter organization cohorts.

I would not want to be in your shoes. These alarming words were spoken to me by a nurse Michelle Perez at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, and it marked the beginning of what I believe is a pattern of retaliation and mistreatment. Now the situation escalated at Mercy St. Vincent Hospital in Toledo when doctor Singh attempted to deny me care and coerce me into signing an against medical advice form. My refusal to comply and my insistence on my loved one remaining at my bedside led to police and security threats of physical removal and a legal demand that my loved one was ultimately forced to concede.

After that, doctor Ledrick also made inappropriate comments during my treatment, and I was denied crucial diagnostic tests. I now believe that this systemic targeting stems from unknowingly becoming a whistleblower after reporting my former employer for failing to provide PPE. And in fact, one of those providers, Andrew Campbell, was connected to a instance of workplace violence that was mentioned today by a health care worker. Now my suspicions deepen with reports from a private investigator suggesting Toledo police were engaged in gang stalking. I was discovered or it was discovered that individuals I thought were patients were actually confidential informants, part of a smear campaign at my workplace.

The harassment intensified when on 03/07/2025, Toledo police officers Tab and Servetto arrested me on a baseless charge of receiving stolen property, alleging that I tried to steal a rental car and legally rented from Enterprise for my AI startup. Enterprise then filed charges with the Northwood Police Department on March 18, ten days after retrieving the vehicle, leading to the Northwood Police Department coercing me for a DNA sample and holding me overnight, actions I view as misconduct and abuse of power. Just today, officer Civetto in Police Car 296 with her partner tracked me downtown and issued taunts from the driver's side of a squad car.

During my efforts to seize three minutes. Thank you, sir. That's the three minutes. Thank you.

I have here a stack of letters that are notarized and submitted to not just the Department of Health

mister Jones.

But also the medical board. And as I understand that these are confidential in nature, I do urge our city council to pass legislation to address instances of workplace violence as well as

Mister Jones. Instances of abuse

of power With the Would

you please remove him? Gross.

Thank you, Hobbs.

Alright. So I'm thankful again for the comments that we had. You have given us a lot to think about and work on from our council members to our police department to our comments from everyone that came up today. And we definitely wanna make sure we as a council that have an opportunity so that we make the right decision concerning substations and especially our whole city, but this concern especially in District 5. Councilman Melden.

Thank you, Chair. And again, thanks for holding this hearing. My colleagues comments about the engagement of District 5 residents, it's not the first time I've heard that. And I don't take it for granted. I don't take it for granted that I heard about this.

It's interesting anyway. I was actually on vacation, the agenda review day, and had a resident nearby text me, What's going on with this? The amount of engagement from District 5, I don't take for granted it's an honor to represent the entire city in this office, but in particular District 5. I want to say something as a bit of an example of why I think this is so tough is that these types of decisions and these types of topics and conversations are really hard because you're balancing so many different viewpoints and desires. When this popped up, I had someone who's in some way connected to, I think, an officer that is at the Northwest Station who says, You ought to hear about the deplorable conditions in that building.

And so on one hand, I have people saying, Keep it open. On the other hand, I'm saying, Get my friend or family member out of there. Lincolnshire situation, I've been racking my brain since that terrible thing happened. What can we do? I don't think that banning all Airbnbs makes a lot of sense because then a different platform for short term rentals pops up, and then it So what do we do? That street has no streetlights. My story's going somewhere, I promise. That street has no streetlights, that part of West Lincolnshire. And I thought, well, we could do that. We could get streetlights put on the street.

And I floated that idea slightly, just a little bit. And I had three or four residents reach out and say, I don't want streetlights on my street. I'm not saying that it's not about what's right or what's wrong, should we have streetlights or not? These are not objective realities. These are our desires for our quality of life in our communities, and it's tough to balance. So to that end, that's why the engagement is so helpful and important. When this meeting ends, I'm not saying any of you, I have no sense that any of you want to talk to me anymore. I've said enough words today. But I'm gonna hang out here. If you have any other questions or any other ideas, I'd love to hear from them.

You know how to reach me. I won't leave until you're all done. Again, I want to thank you for this committee hearing. I view this as just the beginning of a conversation of trying to figure out the answer of what does meaningful presence look like in our neighborhoods. And I'm 100% committed to figuring out what that is with my colleagues. So thank you.

Thank you. And I do hope to have a further conversation with you, Mr. Bibish. Thank you. If that be all, this meeting is adjourned.