City Council - public_hearing

Thank you all for being here. Public Safety Department, thank you. Operations. I'm going to put my glasses on and see further back than that. And Ms. Standards, certainly you and your staff are the linchpin to this deal. So thank you. Good breakfast, Vicki. If you're listening, good breakfast. I've asked Ms. Standridge to get us started this morning, to ease us back down in the water, pick us back up with the review that we were doing in committee yesterday of these different... SEPARATE FUNDS, OF WHICH THERE ARE VERY MANY, AND WHICH WE DON'T HAVE AN INTEREST IN ALL OF THEM, BUT CERTAINLY THERE'S FOUR OR FIVE THAT WE WANT TO TALK THROUGH. AND THEN, DIRECTOR BLANKLEY, WE'LL MOVE ON TO PUBLIC SAFETY DEPARTMENT. WE'LL TALK FIRST ABOUT THE BIGGER PIECE OF THAT, AND THEN WE'LL MOVE DOWN... CHIEFS WILL MOVE DOWN INTO POLICE AND FIRE. AND I DON'T... I don't think there will be any surprises, okay? I plan to follow the general grouping category that's outlined in the budget. We'll just move down through it, see what strikes us. Members or non-members of the committee, any questions or comments before we get started? Okay. Mayor, you are...

I'm gonna turn it over to the person that's forgotten more about my budget than I know. Okay.

No, no, no, that would be the man sitting on this corner over here.

Okay, Ms. Sanchez.

Okay, what you have in front of you is a listing of the, what I like to call the major transactional funds. It is not every fund by any means, but all of the other funds that are not listed on here are extremely small and very specific.

Oh, I forgot to note distinguished guests in the back there.

Representative Norman Crowe, my boss. He's just not paying attention.

All right, I'm sorry, go ahead. No, no.

If he could be our extra vote, that would be great. So what you have in front of you are the major transactional funds. We do have other funds, but they're extremely small. They generally are grant-related funds for specific items, especially when it comes to law enforcement things. But what I went through yesterday in the finance committee meeting, through a certain number of funds, that really is the first page that you have in front of you. So if you'll like, so we've gone through all of those, and I can answer any questions that you may have about them, but I think to start where we left off yesterday would be on the back page. So if you will flip over to the back page.

I'm going to ask for a two-minute remedial. So we were in the River District Fund as we came to close the finance. We talked a little bit about the Tourism Capital Fund and some changes coming up in this fund. proposed budget? Yes, sir. How about reviewing that?

Okay, sure. So, the River District Fund is, as we mentioned yesterday, is formerly the amphitheater fund, and per code currently is funded through a 2% set-aside of the 11% lodging tax.

What we are proposing in this upcoming... Again, two of the 11 points, not 2% of...

Correct, correct, yes. Yeah, so if our overall is 11%, two of the 11 is set aside immediately in the River District Fund by code currently. What we are proposing to update is to use another half of a percent of that 11% that is currently slated for tourism capital and move that into the River District Fund to pay for a lot of the items that are gonna be coming up in the River District Fund specifically the river district parking project that was briefed during the mayor's budget presentation.

So are we gonna do away with the tourism capital fund? It has no future source of income. Are we just gonna do away with it?

That is the current proposal on deck is that once all of the projects that have currently been allocated funding within tourism capital are expended, that we would then close that fund and that half of a percent of lodging tax will be dedicated to the river district fund.

What's the rationale behind in the future doing that out of river district fund instead of tourism capital?

For me, the rationale is this. The majority of what we look at in terms of tourism happens within our central city. The River District Fund has basically taken over that role of the central city, whether it's Sabin Center in the future, Amphitheater, River Market, Riverwalk.

What was the history of that fund, and how did it come about?

Tourism Capital Fund?

Sure. What are we undoing that was done some time ago?

Sure. So back, I think, in the late 2000s, when we increased the lodging tax to construct the amphitheater and the river market, part of the deal with increasing lodging tax, part of the negotiations, especially with hoteliers, was that if we're going to increase this tax, then it needs to be related towards at least increasing their margins when it comes to commercial activity. So if a hotelier or a property owner that does short-term rentals, if they're going to have to pay a little bit higher, charge their visitors a little bit higher in taxes, they want to at least know that that tax is going towards something that will increase their business. And so part of that negotiation was to set up this thing called the Tourism Capital Fund that would take that half of a percent, set it aside, and only spend it on capital projects that would enhance tourism events within the city.

Are they going to have heartburn that we do this?

Tourism? They've rarely used that fund in the past.

Like the hoteliers that were kind of changing the mission of the, were narrowing the mission of the half a point.

To get into inside baseball, but it may be useful for the discussion that we're having, when the 1% increase was proposed by Lee Garrison sometime before 2013, It was basically an agreement between him and I. I felt that that half, that full half percent should have gone to overtime for police and fire for tourism related events. He felt it needed to go to bid fees and tourism capital. I ultimately relented because frankly, I think the majority of the council took his position and not my position. So that's the way it's just rolled for the last 11 to 12 years. We've rarely used that tourism capital I can't think of anything, it doesn't mean it hasn't happened, but I can't think of anything that we've used out of tourism capital that's been a direct request of TTS. Most of the time it's been initiated.

A few, not big ones, but where that came in sometimes as a Sunday punch, if needed, was when they were competing for bigger, I mean, I'm the World Series of Little League. And what was it, 300 and change? Yes, sir. We used to redo the field out there to make it visible. But again, just like our district... capital funds originally were for capital projects. They were things you wanted to build or improve. That's what the tourism capital fund, something that you could connect. And I mean, you could make the connection for the parking lot down there. Certainly, that could be presented as a

tourism capital enhancement. Mr. Busby, that's exactly where we're going with this. We see that amount of $400,000 plus over seven years paying for the $2.8 million cost of that parking lot. The act itself that created that additional 1%, I asked Mr. Holmes to look it up, it was passed in 2011.

And when? 2011.

I was only a couple years off. Other things were happening in 2011 that took up.

It was a busy year. Yeah.

I think it was April 12th. Thanks, Scott. Visit Tuscaloosa and get their thoughts on it. They generally are not the main. Most of those things come out of here. And, Mayor, you've got to sign off on them to move them to council, right? Right.

Well, on the bid fees, we do not sign off on that. No, no, not the capital. But on the tourism capital, that always runs through the city council.

Yeah, those items have to be approved by city council. It's within the code that says that council approves all disbursements from that fund.

Okay. Where does that leave us?

Okay. Anything else on river district fund, or do we have any other questions? related to that.

I don't want to go over it.

I'd love to see it, but I think we'll have more questions on all of that as we get into A&E and A couple of quick questions, just so I can get up to speed on this front page. The 104 corrections?

Yes.

So that's money that comes through the courts, and then how and when can it be used?

So honestly, Mr. Holmes might be pulled in to answer a couple of these items, but there are certain court fees that are applied through municipal court cases. There are certain ones that are required to be given to the district attorney's office, certain ones that are required to be remitted to the state, and then there are certain ones that we can keep for general purposes. Then there are certain ones that we can keep only for law enforcement purposes, specific law enforcement purposes, like their training and technology set aside, the indigent treatment set aside are two of those examples. And then there are some that are set aside specifically for municipal court. So it breaks down in an extremely tiered and involved way, and I would rather have an attorney answer that than me.

Yes, and I have a whole spreadsheet on it buried somewhere. There are probably somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 different entities that court costs get split into, and that is dependent not only just our standard court costs, but court costs and fines related to DUIs get split out a different way to the point that if you're paying $292 in court costs. A dollar of it goes to American Village in Montevallo. You know, $2 goes to the head injury fund. $3 goes to the circuit clerk's office. It's just a bunch of things. Those all come from various state acts. Those aren't things that we control locally.

But this money that, as of this time last year, was $4.5 million. Is that further earmarked down, or is that what was moved after you sent it out to everybody? That's what's left for us.

So on this sheet is the fund balance that is basically your equity within the fund. So that amount might be budgeted for something or earmarked for something that just hasn't been spent yet.

But that money is going to stay here with us.

Yes, correct.

It's not going to get sent out to all those different places.

No, yeah, that corrections fund is what we get to keep, but it is directed towards specific law enforcement, municipal court-type related items. And I will say that prior to my tenure in this position, corrections fund was not really utilized for an extended period of time. And that fund balance is saved up via those back years when it was literally just a setting ground.

I'd love to see just a breakdown of maybe what's available, just so we have funding requests, if that's an available pot of money that we know that that's available.

Sure. I will tell you that generally it brings in a little bit less than we have spent out the last couple of years. We've been spending it on our jail contract, so the contract that we have with the sheriff's office. And also, Pickens County Jail? Yeah, Pickens County Jail. So we get charged to house our inmates. And usually, we will use corrections funds to pay for those. But yes, I can get you a breakdown of everything that we've paid out in the last couple of years and then what we have left over. OK.

I'm good. Facility renewal, we did talk about yesterday. We've got million one in there now. Elevate. I think that's pretty well understood. Raven or Richards, anything y'all wanted to ask Joe on Elevate?

I'm pretty good on the front page.

I would ask kind of ideologically, Mayor, is that your view of Elevate, is that unending or is that a finite purpose for a... Would you repeat that?

I want to make sure I understood.

Sure. So your view of Elevate, do you see it as an always ongoing piece of municipal government, or is it something that you yourself would think at some point it's done what it needed to do?

Very good question. Right now, my thought process is to keep it, even though it's ultimately wrapped under the general fund, is to separate it out. The covenant that we made in 2019 when we passed Elevate It began effective in 2020 as those dollars, that 1%, would be separated out. It would go to these certain types of activities and that the public and the council would be able to identify those activities. If it gets wrapped into the general fund, certainly I think this council and myself would continue to keep the spirit of Elevate, but I do worry over time that it would lose its direct purpose of why we passed it and it would get folded into other general fund operations.

Can I speak on that financially also? Elevate is nearing its capacity for spending when it especially when it comes to the debt service amounts that we have booked for the for the next 30 years.

It's capacity for spending.

Meaning that when you take into account all the education programming that we budget every year and the debt service that we have that we will expend every year for debt that we have already issued. we are reaching a point where we're getting closer to expenses meeting the revenues that we're bringing in. So debt service amounts are gonna be, at least for the next 30 years, right? So I'm not, whether or not the spirit of Elevate stays as a separate funding source and a standalone, you know, ideal, At some point, we will near the point where the only thing that Elevate can really do is pay the debt service that we've already incurred, set aside the operations and maintenance, and then fund the education programming. So I would say that in the next, 10 years that has kind of been programmed and then we'll start moving forward with what operations and maintenance look like. I will say that the set aside for operations and maintenance right now at 15% is not going to cover every single piece of an Elevate project that comes on board. We have multiple, Elevate projects, capital projects that will be activated and in service in the next year that will take up more operations and maintenance funding needs. So I caution with the idea of can Elevate be used for something else? We are already directing Elevate dollars at least for the next 30 years with debt service.

I guess my thoughts on I'm not trying to change the use of the money or use it for something else. I understand what you just explained. I guess for me, if we've reached the end of the runway, the spirit has been used. We've got a lot of stuff that half of it comes from here, half of it comes from there. It's bouncing back and forth. I'm just thinking on a understanding the budget and the financials, does it make it cleaner to put them together? If we've already earmarked all of it, we're not really changing the spirit because we've already, that ship's already sailed.

I see what you all are saying, but my fear is, and again, us Sikhs aren't going to always be up here. So if Four years from now, by combining these funds, if somebody decides to merge the two, a future council decides to merge the two, and now they decide to do something else with the money and we can't meet the debt services that we're obligated to for these projects, then that puts the city in a bind.

No, obligated is a key word.

Well, that's what I'm saying. if a council decides to do something else for the money. Because as council, we can vote to do whatever we want to do.

But the credit rating agencies are going to come in and tap us on the shoulder and say, hey, Bubba, you told us this. So I understand your concern, Mr. Eatman. But I want to reassure you, I don't think anything we're talking about here is. altering obligation. I don't think.

I do, Mr. Busby, I do think, and Ms. Sanders may have already touched on this, and I missed it during her remarks on this particular subject. When you look at our overall operating budget audit at the end of the year, it is, Elevate is actually consolidated as part of the general fund. From a budgetary standpoint, though, we do segregate that out and present that to you over the course of the year in keeping with the political commitment we made in 2009.

And I guess, and if I'm- Well, and I was gonna say, we actually just changed it this last year. So it is, because it's its own major fund now, because it is so large.

Then I take back that.

But you are absolutely right, except for literally this last year. 2025 was the first year that we separated out as its own major fund. And it will be separated out moving forward.

So I take that back.

Sorry, I'm so sorry.

But I guess for me, I would like to see us, maybe not this morning, but take a deeper dive at the Elevate budget, because I think it's important for us all to understand if we are getting, you know, If Elevate has done its job and so now we're getting just to get services and maintenance, then I think it's important for us to remember that the parks and the assets that we have brought into this budget still need to be maintained or we will be in the same situation that we've been in in the past, having amenities in our community that are there but are not being maintained. And that has been a big issue for some of our districts. So I feel, I think that we should probably take a deeper look at it and make sure that we all understand the importance of Elevate. And I also believe having Elevate helps us all remain a lot more transparent. And I think that's the main goal is transparency. of where our dollars and our cents are and where exactly they come from in the budget. I just want to make sure that we understand that the maintenance and the debt services is important.

In my remarks, I did not mean to alarm. There's no alarm bells going off, but it is something to just be aware of that we have done four large debt issuances within Elevate um... and we have plans another two and so and then and those play i'm considering those planned at services in when i'm considering what we've you know earmarked for elevate to be uh... and so i think and they're still going to be i guess you know some smaller some smaller movement capabilities within Elevate, especially as revenues grow, if the sales tax continues to grow. It seemed that the conversation was kind of moving towards changing Elevate as it kind of sits, and I just wanted to make sure that we were all aware that we've already earmarked so much of Elevate, that if we moved it and changed it, we still have to think about those earmarks.

That's not moving anymore.

Excuse me, I just get confused. I see us using Elevate money for different things, and I'm just confused sometimes about what's eligible, and specifically.

I don't need the overall general. I'm sorry. In part of that, to what you're saying, when you take the savings center, we've got $2.5 million in the budget from the general fund to help pay for the operations of an Elevate project. It's just when, and it sounds like we're going to have more of that. So we're going to have half coming from here, half coming from there. We got money from Elevate going to public safety. We got general fund mostly paying for public safety. So it's just a lot moving back and forth. I'm not trying to change anything we use it for or pay for or any of that. Just trying to, there's a consolidated set of financials as it becomes clearer and easier to make.

I do want, though, the general fund is not picking up Sabin Center operations per se. That is the Elevate O&M, the 15% set-aside, is going to be the funding source like with all Elevate projects. So that's not going to be, that's not the plan that's presented to you in your budget. Again, going back to 2019, and I know Mr. Tyner and Ms. Howard, we were the only ones here at the time, Our pledge to the community was any Elevate project would not take away from the existing 2% that the existing sales tax was paying for. So our goal has always been that those Elevate projects would be funded out of that 1% increase in sales tax. And thus far, we've been able to accomplish it. We believe in our 10-year plan. That is accomplished. Again, I just wanted you to know that the savings center, for example, again, is coming from Elevate and not coming from the general fund.

And we keep the Elevate operational dollars within the general fund just to keep operating departments together. And then we transfer in the amount of the savings center Expenditure planned expenditures to offset them like the mayor was mentioning from elevate O&M and River District Fund the Yeah, the general fund itself won't pay for saving centers operations like the the 2% sales tax and the business licenses and all that won't pay for saving center But you are correct in that it's all Layered and intertwined And that is why we have a team of extremely intelligent accountants to try and track it all.

So let's, and I didn't want to reroute us because we literally have the elephant in the living room this morning. We've got public safety department is a relatively new departmental creation here. I think we're in the first year at, You know, we've talked over and over. It's a 42% stroke of our general fund expenditure. So I appreciate y'all being here this morning, and I promise you we're going to get to you real quick and give you plenty of time, all right? So, Carly, let's pick... Let's keep this fund balanced as someplace we can go back to as filler. Let's pick one more of the more significant ones, cover it, and then I want to start gear shifting into public safety.

Sure, so the rest of them we kind of have, we have slightly touched on or they're not possibly the biggest consumers of transactions. The water and sewer fund is also down there, which we'll be diving into and is required to have budget adoption also. But one of the ones that I do want to point out is the Alabama Trust Fund because you do see that quite frequently, especially when it comes to capital project proposals. The Alabama Trust Fund is a check that we get from the state of Alabama annually. It's usually about $900,000. And it comes from oil drilling rights from the Gulf of Mexico or the Gulf of America. And then whatever the amount the state sends us is required to be spent on infrastructure. That definition can be broad. We usually use it to pay for specific capital projects and fit it within the mayor's capital proposal. But that's in there too, so that was one I did want to highlight because you do see that at times. The one above it, the very first one on the back page, the debt trust fund, this just holds all of our debt issuances and then the projects associated with them. So whenever we issue debt, the debt proceeds that are issued get transferred into the debt trust fund and then we create the projects off of that. That's why that is so large. Yeah, that's $104 million of debt that we've issued and projects that we have assigned a fund or a budget to that just haven't been spent yet.

So it's the proceeds from the bonds. It's where it's held until we spend it.

Correct. Other than that, there are some fun little nuggets that are in there. The health insurance fund is one. We are a self-insured entity. And so we withhold a certain amount from employee paychecks for health insurance that you've seen in the mayor's presentation. And then we have a city match amount for that. All of that gets transferred into the health insurance fund. And then we pay claims. out of that. That is considered an internal service fund and at the end of the day we will split that between the general fund and water and sewer.

It's a tiny one amphitheater operation.

Sure, amphitheater operations is, like the mayor mentioned with Elevate, is that the amp operations is one that is consolidated within the general fund. So it basically is a sub fund of the general fund, and it houses everything dealing with city costs for I wanna say shows, but.

It's where all the ticket sales come in and we pay the artist out and all that, right?

Yes, yeah, it's not. Production costs, thank you, that's what I was looking for. And it was a P word. Yes, it's where we pay for all the city-related production costs for putting on shows at the amphitheater. And then at the end of the day, or at the end of the fiscal year, we roll that up and consolidate it within the general fund. But instead of having to have 15 different ticket sale revenue line items and 20 different expenditure line items for every show, we just hold it in the sub fund, and then at the end of the day, the general fund kind of just pulls it all in.

Do we augment that?

Do we augment that?

Augment that. So if I'm running an amphitheater, I book acts, I pay money out, I sell tickets, I bring money in. I assume there's other, obviously I redo the seats every now and then. I change out the big screens. Operationally, is that fair? Is that function augmented financially from other sources?

So you're saying, is there a profit or loss in the fund? And if there's a loss, how do we fund it?

Where is it coming from?

Sure. So if there is a loss within the fund, then the general fund surplus will usually take care of that. But when it is consolidated within the general fund, that's how that happens. It's not that the fund itself is augmented by a transfer. It is that if there is a profit in the fund, then the general fund gets a little extra... revenue, and if there's a loss, then the general fund will pay it.

So there's one spot we go in the general fund to see what that is?

No, it is, so the amphitheater fund, the operations is designed to be at break even. So there is no budgeted amount in the general fund to pay for a profit or a loss. We don't know what shows are gonna happen in the next,

Well, they're going to be rained out.

Six months, right. So there is no smart foundation for budget projection for that.

Okay. And again, the longer I'm here, the more I find myself providing history lessons. When we created the amphitheater fund in 2009, 2010, and we moved forward with the amphitheater itself, The goal was over a five-year, ten-year period to be a break-even operation enterprise within the city. Again, similar to the example I gave earlier, we never wanted to choose between purchasing a fire truck or buying LED screens at the amphitheater. Our challenge at the amphitheater, and I like the challenge and I want to keep the challenge, is we've never been profit-driven. Our goal is always over a course of years to break even. And the reason why is this. If you want to be simply just a profitable amphitheater, schedule 8 to 12 country shows, and you will generate a profit at the end of the year, and it will be a profit center for the city. But if you do that, you're excluding large swaths of the community. You also exclude the opportunity for things such as the Fourth of July show that loses tens of thousands of dollars every single year. You would lose that community aspect of the amphitheater. If you want to have R&B, if you want to have hip-hop, if you want to have legacy rock and roll, if we were just simply about the P&L, you wouldn't have those shows. So what we've tried to do and have worked very hard is to make this a break-even proposition. And the vast majority of years, we've actually come out on the positive side, even with those challenges. There are some years where we haven't. And over the course of 10 or 15 years, we have kept that break-even line. That's been our philosophy. Certainly, that's up to the city council. I mean, you could say we want a different philosophy, and that would be certainly your right to do so. That's how we have approached it over time.

And I think there's a general acceptance of that. I think your lead-in sentence there that, This is not just for profit, that there are shows that couldn't be seen otherwise. I think all that's good. I do think we need to be kept abreast of how that's waxing and waning in terms of changes we've made to that amphitheater booking, for example, seating, things like that. That's all.

I would love for all of you to sit down, and I know Dr. Day would as well, to sit down and talk to her individually about it. We have contracts with artists, and that limits what we can talk about because we're competing against other venues, offers, and such. But we would love to sit down and talk to you. Let me just say generally, and I don't want to monopolize this particular subject, we realized when we moved from Live Nation When we moved away from Live Nation, and, well, really, Live Nation moved away from us with the Birmingham facility, we knew we were going to have to put a different thought process in place for the Tuscaloosa Amphitheater because we're a tertiary market. Our metro area is less than 300,000. The Birmingham metro area is 1.6 million. So, you know, certainly they've got scale on their side. I've been very pleased with the approach that Brendan Moore, who is now directly responsible for arts and entertainment, that we're taking with DWP. Recently, I won't say the name of the show for contractional reasons, but it was what we call a four-wall event. Under Live Nation, we could not have an event where a promoter took full responsibility for the act itself. In other words, they basically rent the facility, we're guaranteed our profit, and they take the risk on the ticket sales. We recently had a show that had a little over 2,000-plus people, and you would go, well, hey, that was a bad night. Well, actually, our profit that night was probably somewhere in the neighborhood of $20,000. And so what we're trying to do is engage. I mean, there are going to be certain shows where we will have that risk, but there are others where we have some opportunities. Brendan, I didn't mean to put you on the spot, and I know you may not be prepared to talk about it, but is there anything else you'd want to add to that to give the council an understanding of our overall philosophy in this new era?

I came on to help probably in late October of last year, and so I think what you're seeing as you roll into the fall is a little bit more of a change in that philosophy of artists. starting around I think it's the 10th in this section with Ty Myers and as we move through the end of this concert year and fiscal year, you have a merge of either fully promoted bias, co-promoted, or four wall. And previously that was not necessarily a financial consideration. So we can take a little bit more risk on some of those larger artists. We may not necessarily be holding the bag, for lack of a better way to put it. We can be more targeted in the co-promotes. We do a full financial model and analysis of each contract that comes in with my team based off of historical information, market demographics, where they're touring. I mean, it's a full broken-out process, so that way we can mitigate risk as much as possible. It's worked fairly well, as Mayor Maddox has alluded to, for this year. I think the one thing that he mentioned that is important, if you want it to be a profit center, you're going to be doing country and rock and roll. non-legacy. Those would be your specific areas if you want to make a profit. If you want to have a more distributed model, then you may have some shows where you may lose a little bit here, and I'm going to try to make it back up somewhere else to get back to that break-even point. That's kind of where we are right now.

Can you explain again, Mayor, maybe this is you, the difference between Red Mountain and Live Nation in the way that we assume the risk or the cost?

Well, when we were a Red Mountain Live Nation venue, our contract prohibited any type of, again, four-wall events, co-promotion events. They wanted to be the exclusive promoter of the venue. And for 13, 14 years, that worked really well for us. But as other amphitheaters came online in our area, they were Live Nation venues. And especially when Birmingham came online, we knew we needed to change directions. We've been very impressed with DWP, who I think we engaged with two years ago. They are very open to that four wall or co-promotion type of event. So that's the key difference is that we're not locked into one promoter. And that gives us a lot of flexibility. So that's the upside. Now the downside is if you lock in, I'm being theoretical here, but let's say you lock in and you know you're going to make $20,000 and that show sells out, that huge profit that will be there, you're not gonna get. You're gonna just get your strict amount per that contract for that four-wall or co-promotion event. But that's the new dynamic we're in. Music has changed. The artists are demanding more. They're demanding more, touring less. So it's a new dynamic. The other thing is, and how many of you have ever heard of Breaking Benjamin? Okay.

I couldn't hear what you said.

How many of you have ever heard of Breaking Benjamin? I think I've heard the name, but I don't know. Don't feel bad. I haven't either. We announced that, and, you know, people, and especially our box holders and sponsorship, they may not know, but those who DWP knew, and... That's going to be another challenge is that we're going to attract artists that we may not necessarily know, but who are going to sell a ton of tickets and create very good nights for the Tuscaloosa Amphitheater.

Is there anything else I can... We have a mixture this fall, and I think to Mayor Maddox's point, there will be a couple shows this fall that are four-wall that are selling quite well that we probably won't be able to maximize, but our risk standpoint is essentially neutral or limited. So I think that's a good balance to strike. The other thing too, just as we're targeting and looking at different acts, It's tricky not being a live nation venue, but when you scan and you look at say Birmingham, you look at Huntsville, you look at some of these other facilities. When I see those names that pop up, I know how much money they're losing. You can look at the blue dot syndrome on their map and see how many tickets they're not selling. So from a performance standpoint, the baseline is pretty nice and we've got a nice indicator I feel like now as we move into the fall into next year to assess our financial performance.

All right? Yes, sir. Thank you.

Ms. Stanger, you're going to send us a copy of that fund budget year to date?

Yes, sir. There was an information request, and I've pulled everything together for it, and I will be sending all of that to the council this afternoon.

If I could make this request, some of the information is proprietary and impacts our negotiations with other artists, so certainly we want you to have that if it could not be shared. The other, I would like you, if you get a chance, to sit down with Brendan and Kay and walk through all of this. For me, it's always an education after 15 years. They teach me something new every time we have these discussions. I would encourage you to do so because it's really fascinating and give you an insight to our thinking and philosophy as it relates to the Mercedes-Benz amputee.

And I'll clearly mark what's confidential and what's not so that that will be.

Ms. Sanders, before you sit down, I want you to literally set the macro stage for us on the public side.

That's dangerous. Uh-huh, yeah.

No, but that, I mean, you and I talked briefly. I told you we had had a little bit of awkwardness trying to, the way it was organized. presentation without, I don't think, was there a separate public safety admin administration? Gotcha. You said there was a reason for that.

Sure.

Tell us what's going on.

So the Department of Public Safety Administration piece is absorbed into the police department that you'll see in your budget book. We did not create a separate Department of Public Safety because there is no department that is adopted within code right now. When we created the Executive Director of Public Safety, that was a one position at the time, and the City Council did not update code to create a specific Department of Public Safety at that time. If we would like to create one and have that administrative piece separated, we can.

Well, so, City Attorney, I don't trust my memory, but I didn't remember creating a Department of Public It is, I mean, it's our largest department, correct? We're treating it as the largest department.

We are treating public safety as the combination.

42% of general fund revenues or funding is going there, right?

Yes, sir.

So what, from a standpoint of good business procedure, what needs to be added?

We are treating public safety in a lot of ways the way we have treated public safety previously, which is the term public safety being the combination of police and fire. We, council, created the position of executive director of public safety to have authority and sort of strategic overview of both those departments. We did not, as Ms. Standrich said, create a separate department. If there is a Department of Public Safety, which I don't know organizationally if there is one that exists at all, then Brent Blankley would be the only employee on it.

I'm sorry, you trailed off right there.

If there is a Department of Public Safety in an HR sense or an accounting sense, I believe that Brent Blankley and I believe probably Courtney would be the only employees of that department, whereas Police and Fire are still employees of the Police and Fire Department.

And Mr. Busby, I would be in favor of doing so to The way that I took the temperature of the city council when we passed these measures last year was let's start slow and build ourself up so the budget doesn't reflect it because there wasn't a department created at the time. But certainly I think for the sake of transparency and accountability, I would like us to see us move in that direction at some point so that you as a council can pinpoint what is public safety and then what is TPD, what is TFR.

So, Mayor, or Chair, so how do we keep track of the expenses for the public safety director's department? I hate to say department, but his section now.

Embedded under TPD? Yes.

Okay, as in TPD. Okay.

A couple questions on that. I guess I feel like if we don't have a department combining them, how did we combine them in the budget? And then if we're not going to restructure it, even under individual budgets, i.e. police, we've already got sub-budgets. or breakouts, I don't know the term, but we're breaking out the school security in a separate budget. I think we could, even if we didn't combine, if we're going to just say it's all NPD, we could still break it out like we do the difference in paramedics and fire and dispatch and all that. So just, I guess, go one way or the other with it. I don't know. I have no opposition to that at all. Because at some level, it's not fair to PD to absorb all the cost of the shared administrative layer, or at least be broke out so you can, I mean, if Brent gets 10 new people under him, PD's getting it out of their budget, so.

And we can do that, yes, yeah. We'll figure out the best way to do it.

I think the recommendation of finance committee to the council would be that it be identifiable separately.

And then feel free to pass this off if you don't want this one, but police and fire pension change.

Yes.

From a budget standpoint is not housed in police and fire.

Well, it is.

It was washed over.

It's not wholly housed in fleece and fire. And no, I will absolutely, yeah, I'm not going to pass this one off. So the City of Tuscaloosa's RSA account is one City of Tuscaloosa RSA account. It is not classed out by employees. It is not determinant on what department you work in or what your classification is within the city employee base. and so when we're moving police and fire in and the large amount of a liability that that brings with it that just increases the liability of the city account overall not directly to the class of employees of and not directly to the cost of police. And so what RSA does to the city is that it says there is a required employer contribution rate based off of salary dollars, covered payroll. And so that employee or employer required contribution amount is attached to every single city employee, regardless of what department they sit in. that increased contribution rate is then calculated on every single employee in their home department and listed in that state pension line. So for me, before, the city was paying 10-ish, 10.5% of my salary to RSA for my state pension. This upcoming year, on me, they're gonna pay 24%. And so that's going to be in accounting and finance as my personnel cost. So when we were doing, and I kind of mentioned this in a lot of the presentations when we went over the RSA conversion. that it will cover every single city employee, that it will impact every single city employee's costing, including the water and sewer fund. So the water and sewer fund even has some additional employee costs to make up because of the RSA conversion.

I guess if I was a department head of another department, my budget went up 15% of payroll.

And you would think that that would be a concern just because of the overall bottom line, but department heads really look at line items and talk to us on a line item basis. And they know that- They get a free pass on that one. that salary and employee benefits is something that they only have control over to a certain extent. Otherwise, it is about tax rates and employee elections for benefits and things of that nature.

There's no way to break it out. I guess we did all that math to tell us what the increase was going to be, and then now We don't know identifiable what that increase was.

Oh, no, we have it identified. We can, I mean, if you would like to know the...

I mean, because we're spending that, I mean, I'm not saying, we've agreed to do it. We knew that public safety expense was going to increase, but we put it in every other department versus just putting it there. Because, I mean, really, if the number was 42%, now we're spending 50% on public safety. I'm not saying that's good or bad. Either way, it's just identifiable where the money gets spent.

So we have a breakdown by department of what the RSA conversion alone is costing by department. We have that, and we can get that to you. And actually when, you know, maybe not in the budget book because that is very like accounting based, but in the mayor's presentation, when you look at that pie chart of overall expenditures of the general fund, we did take that full amount that is attributable to the departments of the RSA conversion and put that with public safeties like impact. So the 42%, 44%. 42%. That includes the extra amount of RSA conversion applied to public safety and taken out of the other departments. Because just like you said, from being able to have a discussion point item within the presentation and it not be line itemed with so many numbers within the budget book, that it's not identifiable anymore.

All right.

Thank you, Paul.

Okay. Take five.

Breakfast already.

So this is your how many months into this position?

About eight months, sir.

Eight months. All right. So this, I mean, we're in the feeling in here. Why don't you start and talk to us about what challenges you're facing? We talked about how the department's organized. Talk to us about how you think of it as organized. Because I'm sure, do you... Do you view it as a department, or do you view it as, I got my police department, I got my fire department, I got me and my little team here?

No, sir, I view it as one department. We've got 624 public safety employees. We all have the same mission every single day is to make Tuscaloosa safe, whether that's catching a criminal, or whether that's putting out a fire or responding to a medical emergency. So we have always seen it. I know from the chief, I was the chief for six years, whether you're police or fire, we're all public safety. So whether you call it a public safety department or individual, it's just names or titles. But I do see it as one department, one division. We're all here for the citizens of Tuscaloosa to serve them. So I believe we are one department.

So what are the biggest challenges you face coming in?

With, you know, on the police side, you know, definitely it's recruitment and retention. That's been the same song and dance for the past six years is getting people in. We truly believe, you know, with RSA, we're going to be able to get lateral officers from other places in. Fire rescue, you're going to see a large turnover with RSA. You're going to see a lot of the firemen with less time coming up and taking those ranks. And that's reflected in this year's budget with them. Chief Delk has time and time again stress the importance of training. And they've got a lot of money this year put into their training budget to do that. They're gonna be bringing in train the trainers. When you have departments our size, you can't constantly send people off to training, it doesn't work. You'll get three or four people trained and then they may move to a different area. You've gotta pay the money to train them to be trainers themselves. Then they bring that knowledge back to their departments, whether that's police or fire. and train the people to do their jobs. That's one thing Chief Delk has focused on last year and done an amazing job, as well as this year in his budget is extra money for training to make sure that his next stage of command staff that will be coming in after RSA is properly trained and can do the best job possible.

So as we're hurtling towards that, what, two, three months away, and I know we've asked you this before when you

I keep asking you.

Yes, sir. What are you expecting? So as we cross the October 1 line and enter into RSA, what are you expecting out of that, the totality of that department in terms of what leaves and what doesn't?

Yeah. Both Chiefs did an amazing job talking to their department within the next year because I don't think you're going to see October 1 a bunch of people leave that one day. It's going to be over. They're going to get their time in to complete their years of service. But I think with Tuscaloosa Fire, you have up to 32, and TPD, you have up to 22. And that's kind of the number we're banking on. We do realize that some people may say, hey, I'm going to go. Then they actually look at those benefits and say, if I stay two more years, then I can get another 4% added on to that pension. But those are the numbers we're kind of working with, and those are the numbers that both chiefs are planning with over the next year that they could lose and having to get new people in and change their command staff around.

I'm sorry. Excuse me. Did you give us a number of how many people you thought would be leaving?

Yes, sir, I did. TFR up to 32, TPD up to 22. That is over an entire year, though. That is not everybody leaving October 1.

Yeah. To me, that's a blessing and a curse. I mean, you hate to lose all that legacy knowledge, but you get an opportunity to promote potentially a just culture. I'm not saying I wish that to happen, but when it does, I hope we'll use it as an opportunity, not just as a downside and I don't think you are looking at it the sky's falling but to use it as an opportunity if we do need to make changes if we don't need as much here and we need it there if you get a bunch of the higher ranking ones to retire do you need as many of those right and y'all know that business yes sir and that's something that both chiefs have been working on if there's any restructuring with with the people actually retire and then being able to enjoy their retirement

The big thing is make sure the knowledge base is there, and especially in TFR, they've been working really hard on their command staff of who they're wanting to select coming up. Both chiefs are going to be very lucky because they will be able to pick their next command staff. And as the six years I was with TPD, it meant a lot being able to pick my own command staff. I got to promote up two assistant chiefs and a deputy chief. And those are people that you count on every day. So while everybody will be sad to see the upper staff leave to retirement, we're happy that they've done their time and they can leave. But it's also going to be nice for the chiefs to be able to pick, like you said, their new command staff to lead their department and change the culture as they want to. And that means a lot to everybody.

So between you and Carly, do we think we'd be able to break out budget of Department of Public Safety, kind of like an admin category that we see in the other budgets. Because we don't have admin in police or fire. Do we think we can add an admin budget, even if it's just in police, that we know that's... Sure.

Why don't you let us go back and actually do that this afternoon, and then we can have addendums to your budget book. And because they're in the three ring, we can, like, add and... Oh, yeah.

We don't need it today. And I'm a very small... department within.

What is it?

I have two people that work directly under me, an emergency operations manager and a special projects coordinator. So I only have two additional staff.

An emergency operations manager and a what?

And a special projects coordinator.

And an emergency operations manager. Mayor, that's what we approved a year or so ago, right? Yes, sir. You just haven't been able to make a hire?

No. I waited until we were able to hire an executive director of public safety. Okay. And he's doing an amazing job.

And that's the former chief out at UAPD?

Yes, sir. That's Chief John Hooks from UAPD. He's come under for the city of Tuscaloosa. And he's working, doing a lot of stuff with EMA, our emergency planning. He's been hitting the ground running and already produced some very good documents and providing a lot for the city.

And where's he located?

Right across the hall from me. Here? Yes. I hired him, I believe, about three months ago. I'd have to double check, but around there, it's relatively new. It was definitely needed. We just wanted to find the right person for that.

So I will, any other questions on that? I would point out to y'all, I know there's got to be some, If you're getting ready to come in here, there's got to be some speculation on what are they paying attention to and what are they not. On this, you know, what would seem kind of soft would be the short-term goals, long-term goals.

Where is it? Yeah, 135, the goals.

135, short-term goals and long-term goals. I actually, we do look at that. So bear that in mind when y'all are, the recruiting and retention I would think has got to be dominating

Yes, sir.

Again, thank you for that. Up to 32 in fire, up to 22 in police, and again, not all walking out the door, but kind of spread out over months going in. That's important. I hope it's accurate. Around 20 is kind of what y'all have been advertising on the police side anyway, right? And I think when we talked to Chief Bajentz, again, Chief, you're... You're going to have to have developed your own mental list of, as we move down that ladder, it's going to get scary for a while. What are the points that I've got to pop red star clusters and go, okay, I need emergency help now? Or, no, we're fine. We're going to cruise on out of this thing and be okay. So without a department to talk about, there's not that much on the financial side. Is there anything coming towards us as a council that involves the entire Operation Fire and Police that you want us to be aware of? We talked about some of those yesterday in session. Anything else?

No, sir. Like I said, both police and fire, as you all know, they do an amazing job. Everything's been laid out in our budget for what they're requesting, and they're prepared to answer why they need that. We believe in transparency, so any questions you have, please ask it of us.

We touched on in public safety committee yesterday the cadet program. That strikes me as innovative thinking. It's not just the same thing over and more. So I'll be watching that with interest. Mr. Fayle, Mr. Neer, Mr. Eatman, any questions or comments you want to bring up to the director? No, we're good. No.

I would encourage y'all to look at the goals. I know y'all combined two. It didn't look like there was a lot on recruitment in those positions on the PD side. It was there in the past, but you may look back at that.

Yes, sir. I can guarantee you there's been a lot on recruitment. It may not have been on here. Most of these are financial things, but there's been a lot of, hundreds and thousands of hours on the recruitment. So you can be assured that we are definitely good.

And I know you are, I was just saying. Yes, sir.

I do have a question. Here under the long-term goals, that would be long-term, at the top you've got a new police training facility. Yes, sir. Is there a ballpark figure you think that would cost? And I understand there might be a grant out there somewhere.

Yeah, we've been looking at a grant. As far as the cost, we just don't want to throw a number out there and it would be inaccurate. That's something that I know we sit through some meetings and sometimes the numbers change. don't reflect what it actually costs. So because of the grant that we're gonna apply for next year, we're putting a team together to actually get what we believe it will cost to do that. And we will kind of keep you updated as far as that goes, but a new training facility is definitely needed with driving pads. There's a lot that needs to be done, but we also recognize that costs money, and we appreciate the investment this year into RSA, and even with RSA, you know, the mayor and council is given a coal and a step, and that means a lot, but we'll definitely keep you up to date on what we think that cost estimate. We just want it to be accurate. We don't want to throw a number out there that you said, hey, it's going to cost this, and now it's this much more, so we will definitely keep you updated, and we'll apply for that grant next year to hopefully secure something with that.

Will the training facility be at its current spot?

It would have to go to a new facility. We'd have to find land for it and then build it from there. But like I said, that is far off to do that, but it's definitely needed. The mayor for years has backed that, that we need it. It just has to be the right time to do it.

Is that essentially the firing range or what's involved in it?

As far as we have to find a new location for a training center, like I said, our firing range, y'all know the classroom size is not adequate for what we need. So if we did develop a new training center in the future, the firing range, we would actually have that there as well. Driving pads, we take a lot of high-speed driving. The fire department needs it for their driving as other city departments need it as well. So a driving pad you think would be cheap, but it's not. And then the classroom space to host training. A lot of departments host a lot of training, and that's one way they can generate some revenue and get free training because these experts in these fields, I'm sure the military may do the same thing, they come to your location, they do a class, and you get four to five free spots for hosting. And that way we can maintain to be the best trained department in the southeast, and it cuts some of our costs down in the long run.

Okay. Okay. Did we talk about a vehicle replacement plan for other departments, or we've just been talking about doing that for two people?

In our capital budget, we did PD vehicles as far as the take-home cars and that kind of stuff for PD, but that was out of our capital budget. There's no vehicle requests, I don't believe, inside this budget right here.

I'm sorry, I didn't understand that. Did you say you have no vehicle, new vehicle?

They went through our capital budget that y'all granted a while back, so there's no vehicle requests. I don't believe in this budget at all.

Okay. Thank you, Director.

Yes, sir.

Chief Pagans, come on up. Carly, I had asked you for a breakdown of these 360 positions.

She's like, you're not going to shuffle her papers. We really appreciate it.

Okay, I'll come back and look at it. First of all, Chief of Agents, welcome.

Good morning.

First budget season, is it?

Yeah, I'm nervous. I'm not going to lie. I do. Do you ever watch that?

I'll tell you if you need to be, you don't. We just want to get to know you, your vision for the department, what you're running into. It's not going to be hard. Again, welcome. You took over when?

May 4th.

May 4th. It is a big department. I used to say, Mayor, no offense, but Mayor was the second toughest job in the city. The police chief was the toughest.

The police chief's people have guns.

I don't disagree with you at all. It is the most difficult job.

This has gotten easier since. So in the midst of that, we're at sort of a national level disillusionment with policing as a career that makes it tougher to recruit. There's been high profile incidents and continue to be that make all that tougher. The fun stories are listening to former Captain fail talk about having to buy your own pistol when you checked into the police department. As you've come in, what are the three toughest things you think in front of you?

This. You're going to be okay.

You're going to survive this.

It would be the recruiting. You know, we're I feel like we're doing everything that we possibly can. We've hired an outside agency to help us advertise and recruit. I told y'all, I believe yesterday, that we've had this last testing, I had 91 people apply. We had, I think, 15 show up, 11 passed the physical test. A handful of those failed the written test. So now I'm down to, it was nine or 10 that were eligible, and that's before we even get to background checks. And here at the Tuscaloosa Police Department, we have a standard, and I don't want to hire someone that's come in with problems. Obviously, they don't pass our background check, our polygraph, our drug screens, things like that. We're not going to fool them. I literally had somebody call yesterday trying to come back to the PD that we terminated for dishonesty. We're not going to hire that guy back. We don't want that kind of mess. So recruiting is the biggest challenge for me right now.

What's next?

Sir? What's next? Oh, that's really my toughest thing. We've got a lot of good men and women doing an amazing job. The council has always been really good to us as far as technology and equipment.

Chief, I've always been proud of the police department for its training initiatives. Is that ongoing? Are you having problems with that?

Yes, sir. So one of the things that I wanted to concentrate on when I took over is I don't think we do enough supervisory leadership training. You know, I've actually got somebody I wanted to start sending people command staff to the FBI National Academy. It was a wonderful opportunity for me. I learned a lot. It doesn't cost us anything other than gas to get there. So I wanted a lot of trying to get my command staff into those types of training and then also just first-line supervisor training You know what we do now is the sergeants if they're if we have supervisor promotions They come in and they do like a week of training Well that may be the only training they get from there on out, and I want to do more They should continually get some type of leadership training for the rest of their careers And so that's something I'm actually concentrating on

I think that's important. You have a line item. One person is a police educator. Is that a civilian?

Yes, sir. So that position there is in our administrative programs. She does a lot of the community events, you know, the tech retreat, the The WOW stuff, us setting up programs and stuff like that, or women's self-defense class, or just all the different things that we offer to the community, that's who helps organize all of that.

One more spot. The records supervisor, is that a civilian or a sworn officer?

It is. It's run by a civilian now. I didn't see a reason to keep a captain in that position when we can make that a civilian position. Thank you.

So as you and I have talked about before, the breakdown of your force between sworn and non-sworn, where are you now?

So we have 110 civilian positions. I have nine vacancies. And then we have 255 sworn positions with currently 27 vacancies. If the council adopts the fiscal year budget, it'll drop to 22 vacancies.

Okay. That's because we're reducing.

Total of 365 total. Okay. But it'll drop to.

355, 110, you're short nine. 255, you're short 27 or 22, depending on what we adopt. Okay.

So you're 365 now going to 360.

365 now with the adoption. You remember yesterday when we were in session, we talked about five of those positions being used for the technology.

So I'm going to, as we've talked about where your force is right now, and that is you're on the precipice of a change in retirement plans. That's going to impact, essentially, the force DNA. and the seniority level. I mean, I'm assuming right now, I think in that 360 outline that y'all showed, there were two deputy chiefs?

No, sir, there's one deputy chief.

One deputy, two assistant chiefs.

Yes, sir.

And that's still in there, right?

Yes, sir.

Okay, because I couldn't find the assistant chief. The 14 captains?

Well, it's actually 16 captains, but when RSA hits, that's going to drop. It'll drop to 14.

Okay, and 16 lieutenants, 34 sergeants.

19 lieutenants, 41 sergeants.

So, excuse me, did I understand you were about to say that you weren't going to fill some of those supervisory positions?

Yes, sir. We're going to lose them. We're not losing them, but there's not a need for them. Okay.

I don't need that.

I guess that's my one question is, again, I don't know the policing world, but we have pretty much filled all the upper positions. It's that entry level. So we still do promotions, but is there a ratio that, okay, well, we have less police officers. Do we need less equivalent of managers?

Well, we also won't span of control. So, you know, If I had a shift of 12 officers, which is the number we try to hover at, right, you have roughly two sergeants and then the officers. But I also have one lieutenant that commands that shift. He or she would be the administrator. They do a lot of, if we had any type of major event, meaning shooting or something like that, they're going to be the commanding officer on that scene. The sergeants are the field supervisors. They're out in the field with the officers. They're responding to the calls with the officers. And they're there to be leaned upon when the officer doesn't know necessarily what to do on the scene or something like that. When I was talking about doing away with two of the positions, my vision for the police department is to have a captain over every division. They handle the budgets. Payroll, all those kind of things where, you know, all the administrative type stuff. And then we have an assistant commander, which would be the lieutenant. And then we have sergeants that would handle the day-to-day stuff in the field, basically. Or like, for instance, CID, the sergeants are in charge of a specific unit of investigators. It could be robbery, it could be theft, something like that. I don't know if that really answered your question, but yeah.

Well, where I was getting at is, so with the upheaval coming with this, this turnover is also the opportunity of reshaping the command pyramid. What are your visions and thoughts on that?

Well, I'm excited about it. Like I said, a second ago, we ended up moving a captain out of records because there's no need for it.

What will catch our attention is when somebody four grades overpaid is doing it. And we're going to get to your overtime in a minute, which I think is a bright spot here. So keep going. We're heading towards something good.

So with RSA coming, it gives me a chance to restructure a lot of things. I have been doing movements around the police department where we had specific people in certain roles. In October, November 1st, when RSA really hits and we start losing, a lot of these losses initially are command level. It's captains, lieutenants, and I have people in positions now that I don't necessarily, I have supervisors in positions that I don't really need them at. I either need to A, move them over here where this makes more sense, Or B, let's not fill that position, which would help with overtime. And that's part of the vision I have. But I have to wait until these people retire in November. So I don't know if that really answered it or not. I hope so.

So your salaries, as outlined here in the budget presentation, up 11% and change. That is, Ms. Standridge, how much of that is structural stuff that we've implemented here?

So one thing I want to make extremely clear, especially within police and also fire, knowing that there's going to be the large number of retirements. We have worked to predict the individuals that are possibly up for retirement and will choose to take it over the fiscal year. We will have their avail balance, vacation balance, and comp time balance to pay out when they do retire. and that is over and above what we would normally consider budgeting for the fiscal year. So we have looked at all those individuals, their specific avail balances, and tried to calculate what that amount would be. The total amount between the two departments is about $1.4 million, and so those are worked into the salary line item within the two departments. So when you say that there's an increase of 11%.

No, no, yeah. You lost me here. So if I'm on page 131, Brandy, 131. If I'm looking under expenditure category, salary slash benefit, 67,900. bumping up to 75, 75, but that's fire and police, right? Yes, sir. Is police broken out somewhere?

It is in the details in the pages behind that. So if you look on page 136, the salaries line... that's just for police, and then the page after that, there's salaries just for police school security, and then the page after that, there's just fire, you know, so on and so forth.

So, if I'm looking at just police salaries, the 26-7, the 28-5, that's the movement?

Yes, sir. So, the 20...

This is on page 136, Brandi.

Sure, so yeah, the 26.7 million in 2026 versus the 28.5 million recommended in 2027, that is encompassing the COLA, their step raise, and like I just mentioned, their avail payouts for people that are assuming to be retiring in this upcoming fiscal year.

Okay. Can you walk my eyes on the overtime? Because I was looking on the 131 page, which is the total for the two of them, which showed a decrease. So for police, Ms. Standridge, can you put me on the overtime?

Sure. Yeah, so on page 136 for police, salary overtime is in, you know, about the sixth line down. And this upcoming year is going to total, for that specific sector, $4.17 million. That's the projection. And that is down from the prior year.

Come on back up and brag then. So tell us what you were faced with and what you've done about it. Because overtime is where the financial bite for some of that manpower shortage, you don't have them full-time, you work them overtime.

So one of the things I did was this last year I created what was the Delta Detail, which works the strip area, strip and downtown area. So prior to the creation of that unit, what happened was we were drafting officers for overtime to work the strip or downtown bar district. So what I did was I created a unit for officers that are on duty, and their job is to handle that. And so it took away the overtime of a lieutenant or a captain, a couple sergeants, and then five to 10 officers. And so that saved us this last year upwards of over $200,000. And so it's doing really well. Now, I still do have to draft for football. That's not going to change.

You'll have to draft what?

For football, UA football games. That's not going to change. But I don't have to draft as many because that detail still works football. And so on an average ballgame weekend, we have somewhere in the neighborhood of 20 officers on a Friday and Saturday night working the downtown entertainment district. Normally, throughout the year, if it's not an Alabama football game weekend, we only have 10. So I draft 10 more officers during football just for the entertainment district. But throughout the remainder of the entire year, those officers are dedicated to that area, and so that's saving us hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Nice job.

Mr. Chair, can I ask a question?

Sure, go ahead, Mr.

Chair. Chief... You mentioned cutting, and I do agree. You mentioned cutting positions, leadership positions. I do agree. Sometimes organizations can be top-heavy and be too many positions. But what do you see that doing morale-wise to the department, knowing there's less opportunities to advance? When it's already having problems with recruiting, what message do you think that may send to your office?

Well, that's a very fair question. I'm not doing away with all of them. I know you're not doing away with all of them. There's a couple of positions, and I use the example of the captain in records. There does not need to be a captain in records.

We're talking about positions like that? Yes, sir.

It's also moving supervisors around to positions where they're more needed. I don't want to have the reputation that I'm cutting a bunch of positions. It's only a few. But we've made, you know, I know you all saw yesterday. I can't remember a time at the PD, and I don't know if Mr. Fayle can, that we promoted that many within a month. So there's still promotions coming. It was a bunch of folks, I noticed.

It wasn't right now. There's going to be a 14-officer opportunity this one year, you know. Yeah, well, I mean, we're hiring. But yes, or I mean, or.

I mean, I just, when we say, and if we got a captain of records, I do agree. I mean, I don't think that needs to be.

Joe, we used to have captains. I won't mention it here, but we had captains that when I was working there, I wondered what they did. Yeah. I'll be honest.

You know, one other thing that we did do that actually was under direct blame was we used to have a captain on the evening and midnight shift also. The lieutenant can do that. And so that cuts down a little bit of money there.

So can we switch back to page 131 again? And Ms. Sanders may need your help to find this. Richard, you and I looked at these lease payments. So lease payments went from $1,200,000 to $2.6,123,000. What is that?

That's the briefing that you had in executive session yesterday regarding the technology that Chief Bajentz just mentioned he's giving up the five positions to help offset that cost. And so the 1.2 million that was in 2026, we are adding the 1.4 million necessary to increase that technology suite to the maximum capacity that you were briefed on yesterday.

Okay.

Real quick on these five positions. Last year's budget had 360. This year's budget has 360. I'm assuming there was an increase of five throughout the year, i.e., Director of Public Safety, Director of EMA. Those were added throughout the year.

Or is it non-sworn?

But I went to last year's budget and this year's budget, and last year's budget was 360, and this year's budget is 360. But we added, I mean, I know just two or three off the top of my head.

Well, I had 365, and then we lose the five. It drops us to 360. I know that we did have, you know, this last year, the Director of Public Safety, the EMA. I think we added, yeah, Special Projects Coordinator. We added three during the year, a year ago.

While you're standing, Carly, we've got the state pension line item.

Yes, sir.

I assume that's historically been non-sworn.

Yes.

And then we've still got the police and fire pension line item. I'm just curious why those are separate now if

Sure.

If we can't break them out, but yet we got them broken out.

That's an excellent question. Our payroll system runs off of these general ledger accounts right now. And until we actually convert to RSA and we can change the coding within our payroll system, they still need to be withheld and paid to the police and fire pension. But when we do convert and all the record keeping is updated on October 1, that will all consolidate within the state pension line. That is a coding and it's a function of a technology glitch. The two numbers, though, are accurate with regards to... They're the 24 points. Yes, correct, the 24%, but then also by person. So the police and fire pension line is the 24% on sworn police officers and sworn firefighters, and then the state pension is the 24% on all the civilians.

I noticed auto and fuel or auto maintenance are both going up, particularly maintenance. I guess my hope would have been with The large amount of new vehicles, some of that would come down, but I get you probably spent that much this year, but I didn't know if we'd hoped any savings with the capital budget.

Well, and so, and we, sorry, and we budget based on usage. Now, I will say as far as what you're seeing in the fleet maintenance side, you're gonna have to speak to that. But I will say that when we look at raw number data, we will project based on current usage and then extrapolate. So that is really based on current usage. Yes, you would think that newer cars would mean less maintenance. However, I also know that they're very hard on vehicles.

Thanks. That's true.

That's true.

I will say this. I think with the take-home car program, I think you're going to see a lower cost. Now, it'll be over years, but a lower cost in maintenance because, you know, an officer takes pride. I take pride in the fact that I have a take-home car. I take care of it as if I was paying for it. So I do see that as lowering. But also, you know, we had it years ago, and I know Mr. Fale remembers this, where we had cars running 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

That's you know there was this the there was no accountability Those cars either I could blame somebody else.

Oh, yeah At least now you know the officer wants to shift his car takes a break to you know versus that cars running 24 hours a day we you know and What isn't this council, but I know that? Years ago we had cars with upwards of 200 plus thousand miles, and they were dangerous to drive, and we can't have that I mean, that's just not safe for the officers, not safe for the community.

So, Ms. Sanders, again, still on 131, the capital outlay down there at the bottom, is that part of what we were presented yesterday?

What is that?

Capital outlay 144 up to 242.

If you will look on page 137, the detail of that is going to be in the equipment line. Eric, you might need to speak to that. What's in the equipment line in police?

Hey, Eric, you want to come up and let's speak into this mic.

Right now, we pay Axon for the Skydio drones that our cyber intelligent unit uses. That's $135,000. Hold on, I'm going to figure out why we're increasing this.

I heard right now we pay Axio.

Axon for drones. We pay them $135,000. Lease? Sir? Lease? Lease payment? No, it's equipment. They're ours. We acquired them. We acquired them. They're ours. Yes, sir. And then we've done some different transfers this year, line item transfers for other equipment that we've purchased. We purchased, hold on, I wasn't prepared. We purchased several things this year.

That's my question.

We did a couple of budget amendments. We brought money in from some of their designated funds.

I don't know.

Maybe where we bought the bomb suit.

We'll get you a detail.

I'll give you.

That's on the equipment, right?

Also, question on outside services. Going in the right direction. I was just curious how we've historically been pretty well. I guess we're going back to where we were last year. It was just a big year on that.

Outside services like body transport, medical expenses for prisoners that we have to reimburse. It's file storage. It's some tracking stuff that we use for investigations. It's K-9 equipment. boarding and stuff like that. It's also some of our recruitment stuff came out of that, paying for the all-star talent, if y'all remember that. So that's going to be outside services.

So I should do it right? Have more questions, comments?

Maintenance contracts. That is Leeds Online. our APHIS fingerprint machine, Celebrite, drone maintenance contracts. It's the cyber wall. It's the police app. It's flock cameras. That's what that's going to be.

Because it looked like we were at 125, give or take. We budgeted 265, but then we modified down. to 133. I guess throughout the year, we've only, as of three months ago, spent 108. I was just curious. It's kind of moving around.

So are you asking what did we use the difference between 265 and the 133 on? I'm not going to know that detail off the top of my head. We can get you a breakdown.

I mean, I guess I'm just looking at it as we didn't really use it. We used 100-ish, and we're going back up to the budget of 225. I just

So, yeah, and they will line item transfer throughout the year depending on where the expenses will necessarily need to hit. And so whatever the difference between those two are, I would have to look at where the line item transfers went to know if it's.

Yeah, I'm just like 25. We used 108. We used 108 year to date, but we're going to budget 225.

We can get a breakdown of the estimated 225 also. Specifically. Do you have one?

Yeah, it dropped because, I think it's because the All Star Talent, we only paid for up to so many months.

Well, and he's also asking that, like, so this is 108 currently, so that's all we've paid so far. Do you know if we haven't, if we just haven't made payments?

We have, we still have a payment left to All Star Talent, I know that. I don't know if we've made payments on the body transport and medical expenses yet.

Okay. So it sounds like they are anticipating that they will pay more than the 108 just in upcoming invoices that are planned to come in this month and next month.

The medical expenses will be a big one also.

Is that 133 going to cover it? But then why the 225 compared to the 133?

I'll have to get a better line item.

We'll get you the details on that.

One last question while I got you. Lakes Division or Marine Patrol, is that in your budget or is that in the Lakes? No, sir, it's in mine. How many people do we have staffed out there? Let's see.

It's four total, counting one sergeant.

Sergeant and three police officers?

Yes, sir.

What do they do?

I'm sorry, Mr. President. What do they do?

I don't go out there.

Well, they work numerous events, tournaments and stuff that happen out on the lake. They've helped numerous people that get stranded. They do patrol.

So there is no separate Marine patrol out there in a boat?

Well, the state has their own, but we don't operate with them. This is TPD only, and so their response for the lake, Lake Nickel, Lake...

Does that fluctuate seasonally?

Yes, sir. Yeah, do they do something different in the winter? No, they're still out there. Believe it or not, we get calls. You would actually be surprised how often they're called out for stranded people. It's... Surprising, actually. And also the tournaments. The tournaments are year-round. I didn't know, truthfully, until I took over, I had no idea how many bass tournaments there are on Lake Tuscaloosa. It's surprising.

So they stay pretty busy.

From the members, Raven, Richard, anything? Other comments, questions? Non-members? Don, Joe, Ashley, thank you. So good job. Thank you. For showing good job.

We'll be harder next year.

Well, I appreciate it. I want to put this out there because I don't like surprises. Those still remaining 20-something jobs, don't get married to it.

Yes, sir.

Thank you. All right. Thank you. Chief Delt. Chief Delt, you took over around May or June, wasn't it?

Yes, sir. It was June. I think I realized we had such a... Just a little over a year.

What... So what was the biggest challenge you faced when you came in?

I think the biggest challenge I faced coming in was also the, you know, I know we talk about recruitment of vacancies, but I think the biggest thing is making sure you've got the right people in the right place and continually to recruit and give your guys that work there. You know, Tuscaloosa's a very good department, and like Director Blankley spoke on earlier, I pride myself on vacancies. the belief that Tuscaloosa is the best trained in the southeast, if not the nation, on what we do. And so that's what you see in the budget is my focus is continually on training. And that's what I think you've got to do. You've got to engage those people that work with you in this department and make sure that they're continuing the engaging and evolving in what they do because because this city is definitely evolving some of the some of the structures some of the other things that we've got going on constantly changing um and so i think that's one of the biggest biggest things for me is is that the other hurdle the big hurdle that i think i had coming in is going from that station life riding a truck to this role right here um that's a big big transition from actually doing that 360 on a house fire, getting your firefighter to pull that line off, and now we're standing before you today talking about these budget line items. So that's, you know, full transparency. That's a hurdle that I'm working through.

So how is, you know, we had kind of gotten accustomed to in the public safety realm that the dynamic was PD would be looking at a 20 or 30-man hole to fill. TFR had two or three waiting in line to be moved up to interview them. Where are you now?

So currently we've got personnel numbers that Director Blankley went over earlier. We're at 265. We currently have one vacancy. We've got 49 right now on my active roster. Now, just because they're on an active roster doesn't mean that everybody there is hireable or you want to hire them.

But the dynamic is still generally true.

Yes, sir. And I think that's, you know, you look at it. When I came to work here, there was over 100 on the list when I got employed here. And so that was 20, 21 plus years ago. So even though we're not to the level, like you spoke to, of PD, I think that kind of shows the differences there. that public safety together does a different job. I mean, this is one of those things that, you know, people can look at the benefits, but there's a lot of benefits not listed on the paper that you've got to buy into to be in public safety. And I think that's kind of the things that both fire and police are working through.

So, Ms. Standridge, can you talk us on to Chief Gilks? Same line, salary and overtime.

Yes, sir. I can. Okay. So, if we are looking at the fire, we want to go to page 140. Now, fire has two real major divisions. It is their regular fire and then their EMS paramedics. And so, fire salaries... And one thing that I will say about the fire department is that positions or people can bounce back and forth between fire and paramedics throughout the year, depending on where they're assigned. And we will reassign within the payroll system. So from what we have now, the salaries line in fire combined with the salaries line in paramedics and the difference between what was in 2026 versus what we're requesting in 2027, the only difference there is the exact same as PD. It is the COLA, it is the STEP movement, it is the avail and comp payout for the anticipated retirements from FHIR within those two divisions.

Structural question. Budget-wise, we break out FHIR and EMS. But like in PD, we don't break anything out. We don't break out CID or any of that kind of stuff. I'm just curious why we do on one and why we don't on the other.

That is actually a question that we talk about frequently. That is a factor of institutionalism, honestly, we've talked about combining them back again.

I'd rather see them broke out more. We'd get more detail the more broke out it is. No offense to PD, but it's hard to tell what's going on when you just put it all in there together. That big, you take urban development, they got four or five different sub-budgets in a smaller dollar amount. You can boil down into what they got going on.

Sure, and the one thing about PD and fire specifically with that is that they're based on a ranking system, and they get assignments within that ranking system. So you'll have a police sergeant that can be in patrol one day and then be assigned to CID and one of the subunits in CID the next week. And so if you break them out like that, the movements between is more tracking than could possibly be worth it. So you do have to find a balance with that. And with fire, they have historically always had that EMS breakout. But that's really why. We can... I really don't know how you would want to break out police, especially when it comes to patrol and then like CID. How many units does CID even have?

Sir, I'm going to interject here. If you try and break out each division in the police department, it changes. The assignments are done so much, it would be chaotic for finance to even try and do that. We'll answer any questions through the year that you have, but we operate as a whole budget breaking out into five different specialty units And then you also have on there, you've got our VCU, you've got our human trafficking task force. It's going to get so complicated that you're going to put more effort into breaking that out than what we're trying to accomplish. We'll answer any questions you have, but I don't think it's practical to break out individual units inside the police department.

Yeah, I'm okay with just an overview. I think that would be too much information that's necessary for me to know all of those details in that way. I just like the overview. of that one particular line item.

And I think to that point that we just spoke on, the institutionalization that's happened here, it's hard enough to me to budget these individual ones. I think that would make it, I know transparency-wise, it may make it easier for you to look at some specifics on it, but hopefully we can answer those questions for you.

Cool. So back to your salaries and overs.

What is that? So, salaries within FIRE is, last year it was $20,062,000. Correct. This upcoming year is proposed to be $20,200,000. Correct. And then within paramedics, the salary last year was $3,037,000 and projecting to be $4,400,000. So those two. Where are the paramedics? On page 142, 6011. You've got to add 140, page 140 to 142. Okay.

Overtime.

1.3 plus 250.

So total fire, between fire and paramedics, their total salary request this upcoming year is $24.6 million.

Okay. What about overtime? And you can start with the narrative of the dynamic. I know there was some concern several years ago that overtime was getting out of hand. Where do you think it is now?

I think if you look on the past budgets, you can tell that there's not been a lot of upward movement there. So we're doing a lot more now with what was originally budgeted years ago. And so those increases, we are increasing the number of events, the number of ballgame coverage, UA events. You think about the different events that we've already kind of talked about earlier today. We've got medical and fire responses at each one of those. To me, that speaks to not only if we're decreasing this year, but that speaks to we are stretching where we need to stretch to get those covered and not asking for an increase in those.

So has there been a decrease in overtime?

Ma'am?

There has been a decrease in overtime?

There has been a decrease, and we have actually just put out Looking at some structural changes, we've actually just put out that will go into effect September 1st. Another policy that will help deal with even more, hopefully, of our overtime. Basically, the minimums that are there that are required.

Do you all have floaters in the school systems? They basically have permanent substitutes.

We do. And over the years, we've increased trucks. We've increased, you think about the ladder truck and some of that stuff that went to Mercedes. We increased a truck company prior to me taking this role, and those floaters were absorbed a little bit into the system that we've already got. We've still got floaters in place, but some of those floaters were absorbed into the system, and we didn't replace those with more floaters. So we do have floaters that cover spots, so we've got assigned days off based on the work cycles that we work. So those floaters are the first that go to those positions before overtime or any of that's required.

Cool.

If we were to increase the head count of floaters, does that, I'm making this number up, but if fireman all ends 100, does it save us 150 in overtime if we hire somebody?

We're looking at that as some of the things, and I think that's one of the things that after the RSA conversion, I think we need to look at that right there. You know, we talked to the number of people that are on that list, the number that we could potentially lose. I want to make sure we fill those seats that are there before we start expanding what's there. But no, I do agree to your point. That is something that could benefit us. What's your new lease payments? All right, so the new lease payments that was covered in the first budget presentation, that's going to be, and if we're looking at our 6010 right there, that's going to be for the Peregrine software. That's going to allow us to give you hopefully a better dashboard view of what's happening in your district. And that's something that we've kind of had to look at the numbers. We've kind of had to, you know, it's one of those things that, couple of people in the office have had to spend hours processing this information, but now we should have a real-time view where you ask me something today, I should be able to give you right now how many calls were in your district as of this month, or what were those calls, even a breakdown of that. So I think it's, you know, you look at that new lease payment, that's something that I think the fire department, probably a little resistant to technology change and some of that, but I think this will be a huge benefit for us going forward.

What's a couple of examples of what you can go extract?

So in your district, did we make, how many fire alarms did we make? How many service calls, lift assist? What were those lift assists? Were they actually injuries or was this just helping a person that just needed help? On the fires, vehicle fires, structure fires, those structure fires, what did those pair out as? Were they residential structure fires? Were these apartment fires? I think it gives everybody involved a better snapshot of our department and our city and how we respond to it. I think, too, we just talked about response. That peregrine is going to help us out budget-wise. It's going to help us get a snapshot personnel. You think about the training division. We've got guys that are all over the board. They've got their ARF certifications. They've got paramedic certifications and laundry list of stuff that's there that goes on their resume, well, that takes continuing education hours, and that takes some of those things that that training chief right now is working with spreadsheets and other things to keep track of. Peregrine's going to help us out in that category as well. So, administratively and response-wise.

Talking about some of that training, in 25, travel and education was $43,000. Budgeted last year was 288, only 119 to date, but we're still at 282. What's, I mean, what's really changed in that from 43,000 two years ago?

So that was when I took over. When I took over, that was one of the biggest pushes that I saw from where I came from, is that we were not where we needed to be on the training level. We were not, you know, at one time when I first came to this department, we were head and shoulders above everybody in the state. And everybody knew Tuscaloosa was the best trained, the best guys that were there. You look at technical rescue, you look at fire responses, medical responses, we were there. And over the years, that was never fostered to grow. And so that was my biggest push last year to get that. And we have, I can send you the list of those training opportunities that we've had. We've developed apparatus operator courses. company officer courses uh one of the things that you that that number may look low we've got another train the trainer course like director blankly talked about that's coming and that's going to be our senior level officers or those that will be the next senior level officers that's not a class that they're going to come sit and look at a powerpoint these guys are getting gear on and actually doing physically demanding uh command classes and so that's To me, that is one of the biggest leaps that we've made. We talked about the hurdles earlier. I think that's one of the biggest leaps that we've made that I'm proud of since taking over, that we are better trained, I think, than we have been in a very long time.

And I can, just as a fast history lesson too, when Chief Dunn came into his position last year and really entered the budget request cycle in his first two weeks within the position, and he even said that my number one priority in any of this is to communicate why training is important and what we're going to do about it, and that I need to be able to go back to all the fire stations and say how we're going to address this because the rank and file can feel it too. And so we did put that influx of funding in last year. And you did have a great detailed listing of what all it was gonna be that we can get to you from the previous year if you need to. But then also remember we applied for a couple of grants that were specifically for fire training that were in the couple hundred thousands also, and that's part of the whole ecosystem of their training, too.

And you can look at that, too, and it doesn't look like we've spent a lot of that yet, but that was because the government shut down last year. Some of those classes that we had already planned to go to basically got put on hold. Those got canceled, so we should handle a lot more of that this year in that grant side. Should dig into that a lot more, but also we're looking at the scope of that grant to see if we can apply it other places to where we can get the most bang for our buck.

Just a thought on repairs and supplies. It looks like we've generally been a lot more than what we're budgeted this year. Just in the sake of being

And I think that's one of those things just yesterday. We had pump testing and we had ladder testing recently. And during that testing, we found out one of the waterways needed replacing. And so those are unexpected.

No, I was just questioning, did we budget too low if we historically spend more than that?

I think that's one of those that where it's budgeted at, we hope we get there. With some of those repairs and supplies, you get hit with those unexpected, just like the ladder testing that we were not prepared for right now.

And in situations like that, finance will hold the department. Again, they have availability to line item transfer within other lines in their department. But only when things rise to the level, like you saw with ESD, to need new influx of funding. Otherwise, we make them be more creative with operations and saving money in certain places to be able to pay for something else. What's your priority, basically?

And the aging apparatus, I mean, that's one of the things... I know you asked Chief Blankley, or Director Blankley and Chief Bajentz. That's one of the things that hopefully we will see in the next years coming, a replacement plan for our apparatus and some of those things that are coming up that may speak to that point of repairs and supplies curbed at the opposite direction.

Okay, so while you mention that, let me ask. So on that, I think it was 131, where you're talking about the long-term goals, is that, to our public safety director, is that for both police and fire? The long-term goals and that apparatus, that was for police and fire, okay. So we don't have a budget, a line item for apparatuses and vehicles for fire either. This budget year? Not this year. No, ma'am. Okay.

Well, and no offense, but like if they did, it would be very large. Their apparatus and equipment is extremely expensive. So that's usually taken care of in like capital request times and not necessarily in the operating budget. Just because they're so large, they're hard to fit in.

Okay, got you. Just as a benchmark for you, an engine, pumper. is around a million dollars. A ladder truck is around 2.1 is where we're at right now.

And what's a rescue vehicle?

Rescue is about $250,000.

When you already have a fully budgeted general fund like we do with what the mayor has mentioned, kind of stagnant revenue growth, Getting a $2 million truck when you've got 18 other departments to talk about also, that's a heavy list.

And we are, to that point, we are exploring any ways possible for grants, anything that's out there to fit into that project.

Y'all talked about these life packs. We just briefly heard about it in the presentation.

Where is that in here? OK. Life Packs is going to be under your ambulance. 6015-4010 is the line item on that.

Yeah. So on page 144, that last one.

And I know you've had a brief overview of what a life pack is and all that. We've got an AED at the back of this room right here that anybody, any layperson should be able to grab, hook onto you, and it basically speaks to you exactly what it will do to you. It will tell you whether you can shock or not. It's not going to, if you've got a slow heartbeat, if you've got some other more heart rhythms that are going on, it's not going to interpret those. That's what a paramedic is able to do. So LifePak 35, the first thing that it does for us, everybody here has done an EKG or an ECG for your heart. That's a 12 lead. So right now, as a paramedic, when I show up, you're having chest pain, shortness of breath, anything like that, I'm going to hook you up and I'm going to look at that heart rhythm to determine if there's elevation in it, depression. Not going to get into the weeds too much on that, but that tells me, hey, this is a true indicator of a heart attack. Life Pack 35 is new technology where we actually get a backside view of the heart, so we should be able to find even more heart attacks earlier on than we could right now. So that's one of the technological advances of that. The second thing that's a big thing to me, you know, when I taught at the fire college, one of the biggest things that you looked at over and over again was... the interruption in CPR kills your success rate. So if somebody had a heart attack today, we start doing compressions on them. Every time I stop those compressions, your blood pressure goes away. That interruption, you look at AHA, you look at all the data points that are out there, that interruption reduces your chance of survival. LifePak 35 has the ability to check your rhythm while we're still doing compressions. And so that right there would prevent a lot of those interruptions Drawing lines here, but that should better patient outcome for us. And I think that's the end goal in all of this is for us to be able to do that. So they have that continuous CPR rhythm checks. That's a big one. And then the last thing that this LifePak 35 will do, we've got reporting software right now that we record heart rate, pulse, you know, everything that if we run on you as a patient, we're recording all of that stuff. This monitor right here will sync up with that current software that we've got, so it maximizes the reporting software that we currently have. And so it timestamps things. It lets me know, hey, when I administered a certain drug, when I did these things, it will report exactly where it's at on there.

I'm all for them. I'm way more worried about having a heart attack than my house burning down. I'm glad we got that one in this budget.

And this does, the other point of this, that 157, right now we've got life packs, we've got six advanced life support, so we've got all the rescue trucks, two engines that are there. This gives every engine in the city the ability to perform ALS procedures. So we're getting more and more paramedics. This gives them the tools they need in each one of your districts to get there.

And this is a seven-year agreement. So this is, you know, year payment one of the seven. And what the contract will give us is, you know, ongoing support repairs of the life packs, replacement for any items that are, you know, deemed unusable. So it really gives us like kind of coverage on if we get something, a piece of equipment in that

This is the equipment and an insurance policy on every piece of equipment. So software updates, anything that comes along during the time. If we're out on a hazmat call and we're using this and it gets exposed, if it gets anything that can't be corrected, it's a replacement.

I mean, it's a seven-year contract, but we would need to keep going. After seven years.

I would hope so.

I imagine it's the kind of piece of equipment that after seven years, you've got to get a new one.

Well, and in seven years, there may be other technology that's developed at that point, and maybe we go that direction.

Anything else on fire from either members or non-members?

Any ways we can save money? Should have been asking the police.

Well, and you look at the salary and overtime. I mean, that to me is one of those things. And I think also that new policy that goes into effect September 1st has potential to save even more there.

And one thing that I would like to point out, especially with the RSA conversion, possible retirements, the way, you know, we have a, in our public safety pay plan, we have eight grades that have 15 steps in them each, right? And so a lot of guys are fully stepped out within their grade. when they retire and leave, it's much more likely that somebody that's being promoted new will go into a much lower step in that grade than whoever was retiring. So there will likely be some salary savings that we'll see as these bulk retirements kind of come on. I can't 100% say that because we don't know who will be promoted at whatever time, but that is a thought that we will probably be tracking throughout the year.

Well, I think it's reasonable to say even if they are topped out of their current position, if they're promoted, everybody that's in those positions right now are topped out. So that puts somebody up that's at least a few steps lower than what it would have been.

We'll hopefully be able to report back on that next fiscal year.

It'll be an interesting 12 months in the farm police. Anything else? Chief Till? Appreciate it. Oh, safe question, Ms. Standridge, Page. What happened to human trafficking?

Yeah, that was a question I had for the director, I guess. We won. Was it the move to the Synergy Building that knocked the money down on this, or was it something else?

The Human Trafficking Task Force. Page 143. No, I'm looking at 139. Oh, I'm looking at 143. There's nothing.

Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. I'm getting confused.

We didn't budget last year, but we spent last year.

There was no 27 recommendation.

And those will likely generally be covered by line item transfers out of the police, the 101-05-010 organization, and you'll line item transfer it as they're needed. Again, not knowing, I guess, what they're going to be, what... scenarios they're going to be pushing to have action on in the next upcoming year whenever they need money it's i guess it's factored into the budget in the regular police item when they need it we'll transfer that over to detail it out was that detailed in here i know you're saying it's not detailed on this sheet no okay okay gotcha okay

Okay, but we've neither won nor stopped combating human trafficking.

No, sir. So they go to the Synergy Center. So it's the same group that was at TPD before. That group does our internal police code enforcement as well as human trafficking. So Officer Branscombe that comes and Officer Champion, they're actually assigned to that union as well. We just switched locations. The Synergy Center had additional office space and wanted to kind of grow the unit with more people from the other agencies. So they've moved over there, and we've used their office space for the different programs at TPD. But we are still as active as ever, and there's some overtime reimbursement through that new task force as well. So that has not changed at all.

OK, thank you. Let's see, where is Mr. Moore? Right there on the front. Okay. 1052. Yeah, let's move on in. Yes, sir. Come on up. When you want to wave a checkered flag at budget hearings, double something. Tell us what's going on. What page?

I'm on 101. 101. Okay.

Operations.

Yes, sir. Would you like me to jump in? Tell us what you got. So what I provided to you, which I think when you have a substantial increase in your budget, I think a visual can help, as I was joking with Mr. Henry yesterday. What you have in front of you is an org chart of our office, right? The yellow boxes represent existing employees, which what would have been roughly that $1 million for budget, right? Your hatchet areas and those boxes represent the increase in potential changes in positions. So as we walk through the budget, you can kind of use this as a visual guide to represent what was FY26 and then what was FY27. Does that make sense?

It does, but just before you do that, just give me what falls to operation? Everything? Okay.

In a given day, yes, anything and everything. Functional areas or economic development, innovation and technology, data, software integration, cost cutting, deployment of what you would think of more specialized teams for projects that may not be permanent, that may be something 90 to 120 days, revamping operations in certain areas. Really, we serve to augment resources for a lot of offices that may not have as technically skilled staff members. So at any given moment, sans public safety, we do work with public safety, some on the technology side, but sans that area, we kind of can be deployed out into any office.

So what did you have and what are you going to have?

Sir?

What did you have and what are you going to have?

So existing today, this budget was submitted and we had existing seven positions, which represents the areas in which we just discussed. During this process, it was requested to provide a recommendation to be able to scale up a couple of areas, right? And so scale up a couple of areas. So in particular, you'll see represented on their capital projects, utility solution centric, and also a lot of data and related web digital services. So in the middle of the budget process, the request and kind of moving through with Ms. Herbert and Mr. Foster, excuse me, Ms. Gilmore, was we had to address web and digital services. We're providing a full recommendation over the mayor's office. I think it's approximately October or late September. But we have to have web services and digital services right now. We have two vacancies. Our office volunteered and said we're happy to take that on, utilize the vacancies and some outsourcing to help revamp our digital and website. So that would be a move from comms, which represents some of that increase in budget. The utility position, which is a water and sewer funded position, I think that rested with either Ms. Michael or Mr. Foster's budget previously. My understanding is that employee didn't last very long, and so that position's been rotated to our office for, I would imagine, for future data optimization, some account-related items as far as drilling a little bit deeper and identifying lost revenue, improving efficiencies and procedural elements within particularly water and sewer. ESD, they're attached to the bill, but this could be more of a water and sewer function.

Is that person funded out of your budget, or there's something similar to that in the water and sewer budget? I can't speak for the water and sewer budget. But I think on their staff list, I think they had something similar on their employee list that was in addition this year.

So is that to be in your budget or to be in theirs? What was listed previously in the water and sewer office that they had, I can't speak for what they submitted for their budget, was a data analyst grade 28. One of the things that was mentioned earlier, which I thought was very on point was when we get vacancies or there's positions, we look at upgrading and we look at changing and what needs to take place. So I think if you're looking at an enterprise operation the size of water and sewer, I don't think we should go to the cupboard and just say, let's just use an existing data analyst or system analyst type position. You need a more robust type position for that office. So we're recommending an upgrade and a change. I do want to note that all those, well, All but one of those hatched boxes would require administrative committee approval, would require full council approval. This is really just the budget vehicle. So what you're looking at in front of you has not been adopted by council. It's just a proposal. So, Councillor Busby, for your terms, it would be, there's multiple checkpoints after this if it were to be advanced to the next stage. So job descriptions have not been written. Those elements are not in place. We have drafts, but they have not been reviewed by HR.

Just looking briefly at water and sewers, they've got a security analyst, and then they've got data analyst senior. Those would be separate. And then two people as GIS. Those would not be. I mean, I know that's not the same, but they've got a data analyst senior. So that's different than the utility data solutions manager. Yes, sir.

I'm a little confused. Feel free. You've got a proposed special projects coordinator.

Yes, sir.

There's one existing in our suite. On 102, you show that you have two already?

No, sir. We have one existing and then one proposed.

Okay. It looks like this is two budgeted.

So you would have one in your existing budget and one that's proposed. So I have a current employee in that position and then there would be a vacancy.

And what was that job title again?

Special Projects Coordinator, grade 22. Okay, yeah.

You've got one now and it's proposed.

Proposed for another, right. Vacant. And I do think As we were discussing previously with the other offices, this is a situation of transparency. We're giving you worst case scenario. There's absolutely no way that five or six new positions from a vacancy standpoint would be filled on 10-1. We all know that. It will push easily into January or March. That's item one. Two, depending on the talent you're able to hire, if these positions were approved, you may have internal candidate options. You may pick up a really good candidate. You may be able to delete a position off. But I felt like in at least forecasting, projecting would be best to give you worst possible case scenario from a budget standpoint. And then as we move through this process, just provide updates. And we have a lot of different checkpoints that will come up and have that discussion. I think that's the fair way to do it. And I know, Councilor Busby, we've had a few budgets at this point. And you know if I'm doing an increase that there must be some level of meaning behind that. So an intentionality and thoughtfulness. Because I don't think I've ever brought you one that was a direct increase except for this year. So that's not something I take lightly. But I will say from a narrative and an office standpoint, we are very focused on delivering services to your constituents, particularly from a digital standpoint, making it easy. I look at Councilor Henry and Councilor Even, you both have parks in your district, right? As you all do. A constituent shouldn't have to print out a form, scan it, update it, and send it back to Reservoir Pavilion for a child's birthday, right? We're well past that. We have to have a modernization in how we deliver services to our constituents. Some of them are absolutely amazing in how we deliver them. Some of them are a little behind the times. These positions are designed to catch us up. We just completed within the last two weeks online Submission and internal distribution for arts and entertainment for their special events permits which crossed I believe 10 to 12 different departments for review and approval depending on the type of event and also the LDP permitting system which I know Councillor Henry and his group may be a little bit more familiar with which was really back in kind of stone and tablet and we've refreshed that a little bit to where it's a little easier to use and you can be uploaded and submitted online. So that will be a continuation of our goals is to create a frictionless process for our customers to engage with Citi, still deliver a high level of service for anybody that does want to come obviously physically into the building or utilize any of our services in person. Next item would be really to drive down cost where we can. And I want to note on the FTEs, this isn't a new increase in position. This is just holding the same number of positions we have within the organization. So it's not a net increase.

So if I may, Mr. Busby, I know that Mr. Moore is giving you more of the tactical overview here. Let me give you more of the strategic overview. One of the great... Debates is probably not the right word, but discussions that we've had the last two years with the United States Conference of Mayors is how do you foster innovation in a municipality? And then if you want to foster that innovation, where is it housed? Where do you put whoever is going to be responsible for innovation? Where do you place that within your organization? There's a debate about that, because most innovation we think technology-driven, and we certainly, that is where we're leaning into as well. For me, that innovation center needed to be in operations. They can drive innovation better than any other of the 19 city departments. And what has impressed me about operations is what they've done with vehicles in the past year, and Brendan may want to touch on that. Our goal is to drive innovation as part of the operational norms of every single department of the city. Unfortunately, most departments wake up, not unfortunately, every day our departments wake up to conquer their missions. Innovation tends not to be on that to-do list every single day. So if we have an outside driving force like operations, like what we've seen with Peregrine, driving that, it is a benefit to the city. More importantly, it's a benefit to the department. The proposal that we have for you is cost neutral in terms of FTEs. We're reallocating FTEs that are in other departments to make this happen. We're also, we've been closely working with Bloomberg Philanthropy and will be a Bloomberg certified city in the near future. And part of that process has been identifying the correct model to create innovation hubs throughout our city. The other thing that I like unique about this, it also gives us ability to go in and diagnose where there are issues. Let's say there's a particular department that's having a particular issue. we need to do the data runs, the analysis, and ultimately the recommendations to solve it. This gives us the ability to do that in a way that we otherwise could not do it before. And again, just to be frank with you, if I have an issue with the city attorney's office, or I perceive there's an issue with the city, and there are so many issues that we have with the city attorney's office, and I ask the city attorney to solve it, or identified and solve it, I may or may not get the full picture. As CEO of the city, I want to have the ability to be able to, if I think there is an issue within a particular department, and I think the council would want the same, to be able to send in through operations and have the ability to review, identify, and ultimately, if there are issues, recommend solutions. So that is the strategic thought process. about what we are recommending to you. And I have full confidence that operations has the capacity and frankly, the history of success to show that it can work.

You think you can save a million bucks?

Yes. Not in my budget, but I think organizational wide, I think we can.

Mr. Moore, would you mind just briefly describing the phenomenal work that you did with our fleet over the past 12 months?

Yes, sir. So within the last 12 months, let me note all of this is non-public safety based. We revamped the vehicle policy. I'm sure a couple of council members did hear about that last year. We saved approximately 800,000 in commuting miles, 800,000 in commuting miles. That was just going to and from work. revamped the call-out schedules for each individual office to where they're on a rotational, implemented a, I say a system in which there's accountability. You mentioned with police officers, people just kind of in the past rotating that car around. We had a similar issue, right? Who was driving? Who wasn't driving? Is it my fault? Is it their fault? We now have controls in place to make sure those issues don't pop up anymore. This also reduces wear and tear from a fleet maintenance standpoint, optimizes from a performance, because now all of a sudden, That time you maybe are spending off at a store or doing something in a city vehicle you aren't supposed to be. We're able to match your route history with your work order history, for lack of a better way to put it, or inspection history, however you want to think of it. So we're able to marry those together to figure out is everybody on track or are we off track from a discipline or a performance standpoint, which has been a really, really big game changer. It's not necessarily a popularity thing, but as far as a performance for the organization and taxpayers, it's one of the best policies we've done up late. Big credit to Mr. Whitten and Ms. Blank for implementing and deploying that within our office. So we've got a lot more of that coming. And I do think to your question, particularly as we get into account revenues, water and sewer side, I think we'll be able to see some benefit there. I think you also too will see some benefit. Mr. Busby, you asked previously with fire. employees, some of the challenges and narratives. I look at economic development that we discussed. You have an element where we're kind of in that valley for a minute. Optimistic will pop back out. So necessity, we're going to need to probably cut some areas and look at where we can optimize. One of the biggest challenges we have is change management at the end of the day. You know, Chief Delk joked about technology and firefighters. We have items now via pair of room within the last two weeks. We have 100 employees being trained this week. that used to take four or five days, two to three people, and it can now be solved by one person in 15 minutes. That's something we're going to have to quantify. That's something we're going to have to look at in workflow changes and how people do business and how positions are handled moving forward. Those are real examples. We're working with Vicki for your kind of individual training and customization of that from a council perspective. So look forward to that. We're not going to slam it all into this week, but we're going to have something more customized and specialized for this group in particular.

Yes, ma'am. Because over the past week or two, we've talked a lot about the technology. So what you just mentioned, that we'll be getting more training on from Vicki. Was that the same program that Chief Delk was just talking about? Yes, ma'am.

Ours is non-public safety based from a data standpoint, but same platform and same approach.

Okay. I just wanted to clarify that to make sure.

But I do think, ultimately, I think, Councillor Henry, to your question, is we can find those savings and put it back in, but any kind of changes will come back, obviously, to the Finance Committee for how that's allocated in the future. So that's kind of how I look at it is we'll create the savings and then the other elected side can figure out where it needs to be distributed.

And to give you just, again, and I'm so psyched about what Mr. Moore and his department is doing, to give you just two practical examples of how phenomenal this is to our organization and game-changing. One, environmental services begins their routes at 6 o'clock in the morning. If they run, let's say at 6.15, we run into a situation where we don't know if a particular resident actually has an account, has been paying that account, what issues there would be, In the past, we would have to wait to 8 o'clock until accounting and finance or water business operation office opened to get that information. And then you would have to call, hope that the person's there. Sometimes they may be out. You run into a lot of situations in a very humanistic organization. Well, now through Peregrine, our people out in the field no longer have to make that phone call in. They're actually on their phones, on their apps, and can check in real time. saving us two hours in that particular situation, but saving not only their self's time throughout the day, saving our accounting and finance team and water business office time, because now they don't have to stop what they're doing and go and look up an account, see what issues are out there. By the way, Paragon flags not only that account issue, but any other issues with that particular property. So for us, it just gives us so many opportunities. Let me give you an example, though, for me. Two or three Fridays ago, I had a meeting pop up that was going to be Monday morning at 7.30. And I needed a lot of information from three different departments. In the past, I would have had to call Scott and Carly and Chris in and say, hey, over the weekend, I need you to compile X, Y, or Z. I'm going to need these documents this much, maybe even hundreds of pages of information, and try to get it processed, analyzed, summarized in writing to that 730 meeting. Well, in this particular case, it takes Stacey Cooper about 10 minutes. All that information is now downloaded. Now we can have it summarized, categorized by what I need 730 money. We just saved three department heads, a lot of work over the weekend, a lot of paper, and now we realize how quickly and efficiently we can do business at the City of Tuscaloosa. Those small anecdotal things are things that I think we can leverage on a macro level across this organization to reduce our FTEs over time, through attrition and become better and become more efficient and effective in achieving our standard of excellence. Again, I apologize. I'm excited about this technology. I see how it can transform our business operations. And ultimately, that's good for the people who pay our salaries. That is, you know, we're here to provide a service. And this helps us do it more effectively. And it's been his leadership and his department that's really pushed us forward.

I think to echo that point, thank you, Mayor Maddox, is right now I think in our last count it was just over within ESD from a beta test over the summer had already reduced 650 administrative calls. That would be field calls back to the main office. So that's a quantifiable number within 90 days that has already been reduced. That's something previously that would have been a call in, go back in and research it now, count active, inactive, cart matches. This is not. something that's overly complex. You don't have to have a computer science degree to utilize it. It's an app on your phone. You can have an address. It's fairly simple to populate and get the information you need. So that's one of the surprises, I think, in this from an efficiency standpoint is that we're seeing pickups in code enforcement going faster now because they have access to information. I didn't think it was possible for 311 to get better. I guess we can always be better, but now they have access to more information, whether that's a customer's name, email, contact number. count number, just general information, they can now answer questions faster on their calls to constituents calling in, which they're already fantastic, so that takes them to the next level. Yes, sir?

I believe everything you're saying. I believe in it. My biggest concern is I don't feel that we see the reduction in FTEs or reduction in the other way. I'm all about buying a new garbage truck if we don't have to fix it as much, but what I don't want to do is go buy all of this stuff and not pick up the actual savings. I believe we get more efficient, but it just kind of feels like now we just get two more FTEs to do something different.

We don't see the savings.

That we're not seeing the savings is my concern.

No, and you have a right to be weary because in government, we're good at creating one program while keeping the other. And you should absolutely have that fear of any government, regardless of local, state, or federal. The budget that I presented to you has a net reduction in the general fund of 16 FTEs. Some of those reductions are being used to pay for one-time cost, but then will disappear in fiscal 28 and on. In this particular case, the proposal that we have for you is cost neutral. We are reducing FTEs in other departments to be able to fund what's being proposed by his department.

And I'd just like to see that, like, going forward, kind of a proof of concept, like, hey, we're going to do this next year, and the budget process go, here's what we were able to save. And we, for Director Blankley, I think that was a big part of your hire was that, too, and I just want to make sure that we're seeing that cost savings, because we made an investment to add.

Yes, sir. two or three people and some of it's operational but then there's some of it was to be a cost saving that i can't help but believe in 50 or 60 million dollars you can't save a million on something well what i would say from my perspective in coming in is that um i can assure you in the three offices on the chart um if you look at miss day for arts entertainment we've revamped her staffing and recalibrated that without adding FTEs, right? So there's a positive in that situation. Mr. Gardner and I are working through some things that we can workflow and optimize as well. And I think you'll see some modifications in CFG. Mr. Thompson and I have already discussed that. There were some cuts in that office. I think we could continue to reduce. So I think we can marry those worlds together. One of the things that I'll tell you is going to be the biggest challenge is getting people to adopt it or utilize the technology because it is a change management issue of I've been doing the same thing for 10 years. It's hyper inefficient. I don't want to learn something different. I don't want to change how I do business. You may have to change how you do business or else these three gentlemen over here may end up doing it much faster and quicker and it's going to become very obvious very quickly. So I do think that there'll be an element of that.

Moore, thank you. Thank you. Thanks for the presentation, Mayor. Thanks for your enthusiasm on it. Appreciate it. Harley, thank you to your Director, thanks for having me. Chief and Councilman, I know it seems like it's been a long council meeting. That's not right. Thank you for being here this morning. It is important. We'll adjourn unless there's any other questions.