Public Safety Committee - Regular Meeting

Meeting. Please stand for the pledge of allegiance.

Pledge allegiance to the flag

of The United States Of America, to the republic for which it stands in one nation under god, indivisible, liberty, and justice for all.

We'll start with the roll call. Matthew Aldrich is not present. Michael Arena? Present. Robert Chenoweth is not present. Ron Herman?

Present.

Matthew Ladd. Present. Helena Munoz is not present. And I am Michael Weil. Perfect. Mister Green, any opening comments?

No comments today. No Excellent.

We have a did you all get a copy of the agenda? Yes. Do we have a motion to, I guess, change the agenda to move the essay contest to first? Motion.

Second. Second.

All in favor?

Aye. Fantastic.

And did you get a copy of the minutes?

Yes. We have

a motion to approve the minutes?

Motion to approve. Second.

Second.

All in favor? Aye. All opposed? Sondack. Excellent. So we're doing the math right now.

Okay. Yeah. I might need a little bit. I think I'm missing one more from Michael Arena, Chief Arena.

Oh, do you want me to hand this back to you? Is that what you're saying? Yeah.

I'm gonna tally up here where we are. So Leila Laverne is our first place winner for creative writing and I'm tallying up to the second. So I have one for Safira, one for Emma.

Okay. I'll change.

Another for Safira. So she looks like she might be our second.

I'm away with it.

And mister Herman.

I will Is that miss Smith here? Safira Smith?

Yes.

Okay. I will You need I will That will be my second vote.

Okay. Wonderful. So that would set the first place for Leila Laverne for creative writing and Safira Minakopelli Smith for second. And so now, in the art category, telling that. I have one for Laken, one two for Natalie. One for Jocelyn and one for Riley. So I have two for Natalie and mister Herman.

I put who do I put for Art? I put Maya Akhil. That name's not here. Oh. And then I put Jackson Cable? Okay. Do any of those have any more? Jackson Cable or Maya Akhil? No?

No. Okay.

Which one has two?

Natalie Ponsick. And then I have Laken, Jocelyn, and Riley Green.

Alright. I'll vote for the Natalie.

Okay.

And then And

I have Lakin, Jocelyn, Riley Green.

Okay.

And we'll vote for Laken. Oh, there's Laken.

Okay. So Laken would be our second place winner. And then video, I think that was settled. Ray Stewart got four votes and Hudson Press Baird leaded with second place with three. Perfect.

Congratulations to all the winners.

And what we'll do there is I have on the April, I was gonna present the winners on the first council meeting in April with their prizes, and I would invite the committee there to the council meeting. It's April 8 at 06:30. Gloria Kelly will send you an invite. If you're able to make it, that would be wonderful. And that's also mental health awareness month, April.

Ties in very well.

And we'll get them before they graduate. Some are seniors.

Under the wire?

Yes.

Perfect. Thank you very much. So we are on to new business, Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office.

Good afternoon. Good afternoon. So in lieu of lieutenant Humphrey usually does these meetings, he is acting captain currently because our captain is in the FBI academy.

Oh, yes.

And she's actually gonna be graduating, I believe, next week, and will be back. She's been gone for about two and a half months. So I stepped up in the lieutenant's roles temporarily to, fill in the gap.

So I'm gonna do the presentation today, and if you have any questions, I'll

be more than happy to answer them, best of ability. Last time

I did this, lieutenant Chavis was here. I think it

was about three to four years ago. He had me stand in a couple of times when he was on vacation. So generally, we just produce some stats. Right? Bring some stats to you guys every day. There's no really significant changes, anything to even worry about. Residential burglaries are about the same. We actually saw in from the beginning of the year, from this time last year, a 43% dis decrease. And burglaries to vehicles, we had a slight increase in 20% from comparing last year at this time to the this year at this time in the March. The categories for crashes, have went up for the quarter, but for the year, they're still down by 10 crashes.

Crashes are up and down season when horse season comes. We have an influx of between eight to 14,000 people depending on how many come in for season. And, we also get the out of state drivers not used to Florida and then the horse horse issues we have with all the little mini bikes and more people on the road. So we get a little, spike in crashes during that time frame. If you go down to traffic stops, they're actually up, by 26% from this time last year.

We have a couple operations going on, and I just wanted to talk a little bit about the operations. Currently, we have a one that's gonna actually interest this gentleman here called Moto Madness. What we were experiencing is all the e bikes that were going on. There's actually a difference between an electric bicycle and an actually electric motorcycle. And what we have is these kids and their parents are buying these electric motorcycles, which are not allowed to be on the road. They're considered a a motor vehicle. So what we did is we did some education at first, got to the schools. These kids had their bikes all lined up, own defenses in certain schools, and said, hey, school cops, you know, these aren't supposed to be here. Hey, you know, and and put it on the chain. We noticed there really wasn't a change much.

The kids were still riding them and dealing with it. So then we went and put an operation together, we started dealing with them. We've arrested 15 kids. It is a criminal offense to ride an unregistered motor vehicle on sidewalks and in a roadway. Now the reason we went so severe is because we don't wanna see another kid injured or dead. They were doing 70 miles an hour in these. These things do up to 70 miles an hour. Wow. No helmets, most of them, you know, and and just they're whizzing around doing their thing. We have seen a significant decrease now at the schools.

We're not seeing them at the schools anymore because of our enforcement. And where you were watching them ride up and down all the major highways here in the village, you're not seeing it as much. You'll get a couple that are still doing it, and we're hoping to catch up with them and educate them. So another one we have is called drunk drunken dressage. We always name our operations kinda because of a horse theme because we live in Wellington.

And it's a DUI operation that we're focusing mostly on Saturdays and Sundays, because that's generally when we have a high, influx of people who are in the village drinking and doing things and having, different functions. So far, we've had a total of about 10 operations for the weekends that we started. It's continually gonna go till the end of season. We generally run it during the the time frame that the the horse season's here. Our doormat operation also, we have the DUI unit does join us in on that, and we do heavy traffic enforcement as well.

So it's not just we're looking for DUIs. We're actually correcting speeding, all the other normal things that we would see with traffic enforcement, and then we also do the DUI stuff. The next one that we just started, which is called Dung Deal, is dealing with the, Flankow Road. Flankow Road was brought to our attention by the village manager that part of it cannot handle some of the larger trucks that are traveling that way to go down to the Menorah Processing Center. And so we had this first educate. We went down. We talked to the driver, said, listen. You can't drive on this portion of road. It's dirt. Your heavy load can't handle it.

It's gonna create an issue for the roadways, and then they said, yes. I'm gonna repair it because it's dirt. Once the drivers you know, some did listen and didn't, the other ones still wanna take the shortcut. So we started doing enforcement, and we're writing citations for the roadways, being accessed, and we're doing, pretty strict enforcement that way. Now you're probably aware we have does everybody know what CMV is? Commercial vehicle inspectors. We have we have two of those in the village that the village pays for. Those guys, that's all they do is heavy trucks. They can inspect the brakes. They have the same authority as a state trooper to do the inspections, the DOT inspections, and they they hit them.

They're obligated to do about 250, 300 inspections a year, and most of them are done here in the village. So that's a pretty heavy, you know, task for these two individuals to continue. Now it's 300 apiece, not together. So we're doing about 600 inspections total. And then the last operation we just came up with is called Spare the Rod.

We noticed that with the old Wellington Mall, we never have problems or, honestly, we very, very little have crime or any issues, sometimes sporadic stuff. But we recently had an uptick in some juvenile issues, and we also had an uptick in some retail theft stuff that wasn't going on. They may go hand in hand. We don't know because, we're just getting into it, But we're actually putting some folks to kinda monitor what's going on there and try to dig into that problem to solve it before it becomes a real problem.

So was that the Wellington Mall or the old Wellington? The old Wellington Mall.

The one that's down at Wellington Trace in Forest Hill.

Okay.

So that pretty much concludes most of the stats. There's no no nothing other really pressing. No major events. The city was a victim of some criminal mischief. The kids spray painting the bathroom walls and things of that nature. Our detectives did find them, identify them, and charge them. So they're actually you know, that that case was solved. That was at Tiger Shark Park, and then one of the other parks that they that these juveniles did it. The camera systems are wonderful here in the village. I would not commit a crime on any city property.

The No. Just to put that out to everybody who's listening to this video, I would not do that. We did have one, robbery that was kind of not a robbery, but it was by statute. In the mall, a young man got approached by somebody else, whether I don't think he knew him. He said, hey, can I borrow $5, $10, whatever? Kinda like asking for money. Soon as the guy took out his money, guy just snatched it out of his hand and ran. That's considered a strong-arm robbery. That case has already been dealt with, identified, and they're in a process of charging. So that was probably the most major event that we've had since the last time we've met that I can think of.

Now, today, we're gonna do something a little different. Usually, we'll bring somebody in to make some type of presentation. And since we're in a smaller room, I couldn't bring, like, a drone in here or a horse or you know what I mean? I can't even we're in a small room. So I thought, how cool would it be to just actually let you guys experience some of the fingerprinting, processes that we do as law enforcement, and to let you actually go hands on a little bit. Now if you wanna participate, y'all can, every single one of you. If you'd rather not and just watch, that's fine too. Just a show of hands, Mike, are you interested in actually doing it? Yeah. Matt? Yeah. I can pretend I'm cool. Ron?

I may watch.

Okay. That's cool. No. Because it's kinda dirty. Get a little dusty. That's why there's gloves out.

Mean, you watch.

Yeah. You can watch okay. So

It'd be fun explaining to my wife that I was fingerprinted today. Don't ask questions.

Unless you're

in the military. So

typical here's some gloves for you, in case you wanna wear them. You don't have to wear them, but if you don't want, like, little graphite dust gets on your hands, it can

get dirty.

Sergeant, you might need to talk in the mic.

So we don't have portable mics, I'm gonna steal Matt's. If this is his no, he has his own. Alright. So these cards right here, generally, what we'll do is we'll fill them out with the information on them for where we're lifting the prints from on our crime scene, victim's name, address, location, all that stuff. Once we got the card, we gotta be careful not to touch this edit, but with our own fingerprints because you can actually leave prints behind. So that's why there's usually gloves when we do this stuff. If you put a latent print on something and we'll use this card right here, actually, it's worked well. Now, what picks up fingerprints? There's oils that come out of our hands, out of our body constantly. Right?

That's why when we bathe, you get the oil off your body, your face, things, your hands. If you ever wash your hands, get dry. Right? You have to moisturize. If you have a lot of oil on your hands, when you touch a surface, especially something that's smooth like this and shiny, you actually leave that oil behind.

The oil, once it's left behind, leaves an imprint of what we call prints. They're called layers and grooves. The points that it takes to, make a contact, as far as, researching on it, I believe is 12 to 14 points that you have to, so they can actually say, that's my Matt Djoy's fingerprints. We can show through the computer system, has as many locations of lands and grooves that we've identified that that's absolutely his. The printers supposedly, since we've done this, nobody has the same prints. Everyone has individual prints. Once somebody puts a a fingerprint on it would you like your prints lifted, actually? We could just use your fingerprints to lift.

Oh, you want me to put mine down? Yeah. Yeah. I got some shredding going on, though. You want me to put here?

Just just give a so they can lift anything. Alright. Like that? Yeah. Perfect.

Perfect. Okay.

So you did get to participate.

Okay. Wonderful. Alright.

So I brought the box. Because this graphite goes everywhere. I wanna see it get on the table. Don't plant that anywhere.

Yeah. What are you

talking about?

What are All of a sudden, there were no unsolved crimes.

You're what? Do I send me a check?

Alright. Can you grab that?

Yep. So what you're gonna do is you're gonna just touch the dust like little pat pat.

Perfect. Now you're gonna set it down,

and you're gonna start to slightly twirl it, and you're gonna see the prints will start to actually appear. A big contact. Yeah. Little heavy on the dust. So you make a little contact, and I guess it would help to demonstrate a little bit here first. You can see him starting to pop a little bit? Mhmm. See his fingerprints? Yeah. So go ahead. You roll the rest because he touched it pretty good. Now if you overdo too much graphite, it's gonna black it out. Tori, it's very hard to see, but if you had it just right amount, and then we'll lift it. Can you brush on that texture dust off there?

Can I just take up the card and

do it? Yeah. You can do that. That would work. Just don't blow it because it'll go over it.

That way, you'll make a mess. Alright. So as you can see, it's a little dark because we use too much powder, but here's a decent print. You see those prints right there? I hope everyone can see that. So this tape, because you have gloves on, now we're gonna go over to Mike. He'll do the next part of the process.

Participation trophy.

I'm gonna hold that tape. I'll decide the tape. Alright. So, generally, you obviously don't wanna touch the tape with your fingerprints because you'll put prints on it. Now the sticky side goes on to

Close it

up. Cover the there you go.

Just lightly pat it. You want the stick to good.

No. It's hard get

the gloves on. Oh,

okay. But once you go on to whatever the surface is, this might be harder because it's Pushed out too hard. Once you get it onto the surface of whatever the object is you're lifting the prints off of, you actually pull the prints off like that. And I don't know

you can

see that far away.

Yeah.

The prints are actually there.

It is there.

Then you transfer this onto the index card, And then you'll turn that into evidence, the piece where the the print actually is. And then once this goes off, you can see it's right there. And the reason I'm doing this, it's it's not a fantastic print, but there's partial lands and grooves right there. Yeah. You have to go through this entire process when you process a scene.

So when you're going through a burglary of a house, and now you're looking for all these little prints that could be wherever they touched, It's a lot to process. Now all these little index cards that you make like

this that go into evidence, then they have to go through, and they put it down, and

they put the machine over it. And now they have to run each single one through a database to try to identify whoever this was that had those prints. So the process is kinda long, but we do have success. Now, if you can't get prints, let's say the prints are smudged, they didn't lift that well, like these prints were okay,

but they're probably not that good enough to identify.

Yeah. You can do what's called DNA. Everyone hears about DNA.

Right? So

what we use is distilled water, and basically what looks like a q tip. Once again, we would have gloves on. You pull it out without touching it. Distilled water, it will drip on here. Then whatever the surface is that you think that there was a person touched or whatever, that you're trying to lift the DNA off, You slightly like this in a not really a scrubbing motion, but more like a just in a a collection motion.

Right? You'll collect it. The sample goes back into the into the package it came in, which is, you know, never had DNA on it because it's sealed. You break it off, package it up, send it in, then that gets extracted through a process at the lab and checked for DNA on different, you know, databases that we have. So I thought just a little simple explanation of how we do this. Now think about this on a large crime scene. Why are these guys taking forever on this call for service? This is just a simple burglary. They only took, you know, maybe the credit cards or a purse or something. Well, that house is 3,000 square feet, and they went into 2,500 of it.

So we're now looking in different areas trying to find stuff that we can help solve and solve.

Any questions? What you got?

Are all deputies trained in that? Or is

that a This is basic police academy stuff. You were

taught this in the police academy.

Do identical twins have different fingerprints?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So I'm not they're not really identical. Right?

That's They're DNA. I was lied to.

That's right. So the FBI has a procedure where let's say you don't actually have a fingerprint, but it's a picture. Right? Like, there's a camera.

Okay? And I'm doing Face recognition stuff?

Fingerprint. They take a my fingerprint is

on picture.

Uh-huh. Okay? Then two weeks later, I'm arrested for something. And then they roll my prints in court. They're comparing the picture from the crime scene to the actual your prints. Normally, would need two prints to make the comparisons, as you mentioned, with the bridges and how many lines there are gonna be. Sheriff's office, to my understanding, doesn't do that yet, but FBI does. What your does Sheriff's office do that, and what are your thoughts on that procedure?

Well, how are you getting the image, first of all? Where where is this image coming from? Is it scanned in off of an actual print paper? Are they taking pictures of prints? There could be

You know, I don't want There could be several scenarios. Like, right there, there's a camera. Right? I mean, so let's say I'm I'm I'm here and I'm committing a crime or something and somehow my hands are like this. You could zoom in on the thing.

Right? You're telling me is something new to me.

Right. It'd have to be a really high resolution camera. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, that's pretty amazing stuff, and I'm sure the FBI is not doing that everywhere. Because you gotta think the resolution on this camera, you're not gonna do that on it.

Right.

You'd have to have some special scenario. Maybe they have that on federal properties or something.

I don't

know. Yeah. Or maybe for safes or for rooms where there may be high valuable items. Yeah. It's interesting. I thought that was super interesting too.

You got me interested.

I might have to go do

a little research. Haven't heard of that one. It's like

something out of a novel.

Well, there's facial recognition, and that stuff actually gets you down to at least, an idea who the person is. I mean, I read an article where somebody was arrested on facial recognition.

I ended up not being them. Yeah. Alright. No more questions. Maybe you used all that stuff. One other thing. Except they had a good lawyer.

It was

eye eyes and fingerprints and everything like that.

Still the greatest value you ever have is that individual talking to somebody else during an interview. It really is. But these are just tools to lead us to the person who we believe did it. It's just one small piece of the puzzle. Right? I might get your print on that scene, but can I prove that you were the one that actually committed the crime? If you've never been invited into my home and your prints are in my home after a crime, highly likability. If you weren't doing service on my house, you probably shouldn't have been in my home. Right? So it's a probable cause. Right? It's part of probable cause. It's building that case to actually start to clear

up whatever they're looking.

Excellent. Well, thank you very much. Any questions?

That's it. Perfect.

Thank you. That was excellent. Go read spy novels now. Alright. Palm Beach County Fire Rescue.

Hello. Good afternoon, Chief Arena, it's nice to see you back.

Thank you.

So I don't have a whole lot. No big presentation or demonstration this this quarter. The response time, the average response time report for from December 10 through yesterday, March 10. The average dispatch handling time was forty three seconds. The average turnout time was forty three seconds.

The average travel time was five minutes and twelve seconds for an overall response time average response time of six minutes and thirty nine seconds. And we can certainly tell that we are in season. We were up, about 72 calls from last quarter, but our response times are down ten seconds, so that's good. Just about 73% of those were medical calls, so we had a total of eighteen twenty five calls in the last quarter. And at the last public safety committee, I was able to update you on we had three EMS captains that were put into service that are in that complement battalion two.

So we have six EMS captains in battalion two. And then in January, we had three additional battalion chiefs that also went into service. So we have six battalion chiefs as well. And battalion two had been split. Southern Boulevard is the split.

North Of Southern is Battalion two North, and South Of Southern is two South. And all of the two South stations are all Wellington stations. We are currently in a dry brush response because of the dry weather conditions. And that just means that we will probably get extra units on scene and dispatched, especially to a brush fire type call. And additional water sources would come like a tender to mitigate any brush fires.

Nicole and I did a walk through at Palm Beach Point of a stable, a barn, and one of the property owners over there of his property and had the crews from Station 20 and Station 27 as well as the EMS captains and the battalion chiefs that would be first due to that area and kinda went over some strategies and tactics and the uniqueness of barn fires. So that was good. And also we've started our hurricane preparations for all of the stations early this year. So we're looking to be done mid April for all of the hurricane preparations. And that's all I have to share. Does anybody have any questions?

Was there like a little

leaf on fire at it would be Panther Run like a week ago?

It's possible. I would have to look it up.

A leaf, but it's very

specific. Couple of leaves.

There was an incident at Panther Run?

Yeah.

Okay. I can look it up. I only really get notified on major incidences or if somebody has a question about it and they give Okay. Me a There may have been. I had not been notified of it. If it was, since I wasn't notified, it it wasn't a big deal.

Yeah. No. That's okay.

Okay. Excellent. I'm I'm always impressed by the the fact that you can get anywhere within six minutes. Takes longer if I

make the case very fast. You

train a lot, I chose.

Thank you.

Thank you very much. Staff report.

Alright. So we touched on it a bit that March is Florida Bicycle Safety Month. And as you all know, we've seen e bikes increase here in the county, all over, and especially here in Wellington. So I've invited Brian Ruscher. He's our deputy director of multimodal for the Palm Beach Transportation Planning Agency. And he's gonna provide us an update on micro mobility safety and Florida Bicycle Safety Month for this month. So with that, I'm gonna turn on his presentation.

Brian Rucher, I'm the Deputy Director of Multimodal at the Palm Beach Transportation Planning Agency. I think I've seen a few of you before at previous committee meetings, maybe your village council meetings as well, but I'm always happy to come out, especially when Nicole makes the call. Florida bike month is a really, really great time of year in Florida, so we celebrate Bicycle Month a few months ahead of the rest of the country who celebrates in May. National Bicycle Month is in May, but it's too hard to pass up on this lovely weather that we got. Unfortunately, I'm here today to talk a little bit about some of the instances that have been happening not just in the village of Wellington, but also countywide.

So the same struggles that you all are dealing with, we are seeing also in Boca Raton. We are seeing in Palm Beach Gardens, Jupiter, West Palm Beach. These are things that are happening not just locally, but also statewide. It's the overall cost of e bikes, e motos, e scooters, they are all coming down very rapidly. And they're becoming more accessible to everybody despite the laws that we have on the books, despite as much safety guidance as we can put out.

These instruments, which were at one point acoustic and in turn less likely to have a high speed and lowered risk of overall injury or fatality in a crash, that's becoming more real and present in our community. So I'm gonna talk to you a little bit today about the kind of history of micro mobility, where we're going, some of the things that we think that would help improve the situation in the state, and potentially some things that we can do in the future. We've already agreed to participate in the village's events in May for kids to park day. Yes. And we have other events that are going on that I'll I'll let you all talk with a little bit more.

I do want this to be an informal presentation. I know I wanna get everybody out of here at 04:00, but we're gonna roll through it. If you have a question, just raise your hand. Happy to be more of a discussion base. So micromobility as defined in Florida statute really goes back to the advent of the e scooter, e bike sharing phenomenon with the dock list and the docked vehicles.

So when you think about micromobility in the legal terms, Florida statutes even going back to chapter three sixteen o three, section 41 defines micro mobility device as any motorized transportation device, which may be available for private use by reservation through an online application. And this is our current Florida stat statutes that talks about these things. So I bring this up simply because I think it's important to recognize that our infrastructure, meaning our walkways, our bikeways, our travel lanes, they weren't really built in the first place to deal with people on the acoustic instruments that that were available ten, twenty, thirty, fifty years ago. So we electrified all of them. Right?

E scooters, e bikes, e skateboards, and now they're capable of going twenty, twenty eight, fifty, seventy miles per hour. So put those two things together quickly along with state statutes that cannot keep up with the pace of how things are changing. Most areas that have e scooters, e bikes, they don't even have a dock anymore. So this statute largely is out of date. So we have to think about that in the context of what local communities are trying to do and how we are we're trying to respond to these issues and getting at some of the problems that are happening at our schools and on our roadways.

So just to give you an overview of some of the things that are out there, I wish that I had my e bicycle. I actually have an e cargo bike, so it has an extended tail, which I can't display on here, but imagine off the back wheel, there's actually a rack that's like two and a half feet long. I can put my my child carrier on it for my daughter. I can put two large bags that I've done Costco runs on on with that bicycle and it's a class two bicycle, which means that it has a throttle. I can just push that throttle and it goes, but I can also pedal, which means that it could be you know.

If you had just a pedal, would be class one, but because it has a throttle, it's technically a class two. And the max assist it gives is 20 miles per hour. Class three e bicycle is exclusively pedal assist, and it's 28 miles per hour. So generally speaking, Florida statutes unless local local laws have changed to reflect it in the traffic code, you can pretty much ride anywhere roadways bike lanes trails, motives pass sidewalks, So do pay attention to that. And that's something Nicole and I have talked a lot about, not just for micromobility, but also for the the golf carts and the other issues that, you know, you might see out there.

And yes, you are required to wear a helmet if you're under the age of 16. It is always encouraged, especially when riding one of these vehicles because you can get up to 20 miles per hour pretty quickly, and that is about as fast as you need to be going to be trauma hawked if you get injured in a crash. As the lieutenant, I believe, mentioned earlier, these things are coming in many shapes and sizes and forms. So this if you just Google e bikes, this is what you get as a response from Google. It'll tell you all different kinds of vehicles that are out there, and it's very ambiguous, which I think is one of the main dangers around these vehicles is the ambiguity that manufacturers have right now and what they have to do.

Some e bikes, they have really good standard safety features, for example. You hit the brake and your brake light on the back of the bicycle comes on. Some of them have turn signals. Some of them cap and are not able to be to have that governor removed that lets them go faster and removes restrictions on the motor. Where some of the some of the bikes that are not really bikes that are shown here kind of in the middle row on the left, those are more than likely e motos that will go faster than 28 miles per hour.

They are not regulated by the same traffic code as a bicycle would be. Those are regulated by the motor vehicle code and likely are not properly put into the hands of a unlicensed individual, including minors. Motorized scooters, this was a huge scare. So if anybody remembers like the what twenty twelve ish years time frames, people were really worried about these things just kinda popping up everywhere in communities. It didn't really happen that much in Palm Beach County, but the state had to come in and basically declare that you have to be regulated by regulated by local municipalities, so they did create some regulations around e motorized scooters.

I personally think that these are more dangerous than e bicycles having both an ebike and an e scooter. I can talk to the fact that your center of gravity is much higher on an e scooter. So if you think about you know the breaking power of this thing compared to a bicycle where you're seated, You have multiple points of contact. I have two hands on your bars, the seat, the two pedals. Here, you're making two points of well, kinda like three points of contact if you include the handlebar, but it's called all centered.

If you hit something on an e scooter, you will fall down, and these go very quick to get up to 20 miles per hour. They generally are regulated in the same ways that bicycles are regulated, though. So I do wish that we could do a demonstration, and we'll probably do that at the safe routes safe kids to park day because of that difference. If you're going 20 miles per hour on this versus a bicycle, it's very different if you have something interacting with you in terms of hitting a car, falling off of your your vehicle, or otherwise. Motorized scooters are definitely something to be aware of.

I do want to just draw attention to the fact that this has probably changed a little bit, but e bicycles and e motorcycles and e scooters are trending in the same direction as electric vehicles. So in 2022, the first most popular vehicle was a Tesla Model three, followed by a Tesla Model y, followed by the electric the electric e bicycle. So if that gives you any sentiment about how people are trying to think about how they get around communities, if the third most popular electric motorized vehicle, the means to get around is an ebike, that's pretty substantial. Now there have been a lot of changes in, know, I think the dynamics of the electric vehicle industry, but just the number of e bikes continues to rise regardless of that. And I think it has to do with price point accessibility.

You can buy these on Amazon, Tmu, you go to Costco and they're they're there. So it's it's really interesting to see how these things are continuing to come and just change and we're not able to respond to them quick enough and design facilities that will be able to accommodate them. And I say this because, yes, this is happening even in Florida. In a survey of, you know national survey of states and and specifically some of the data from Florida. Florida mentioned that you know 50% of people that did use micro mobility, they use it to connect to transit. So if you don't who here has ridden tri rail? Okay. Have you ever taken a bike on board Probably went to the Miami Airport on it, I'm guessing, or Fort Lauderdale.

Tri rail? It was a long time ago.

Yeah. Yeah. Like an airport trip. So one out of every one out of every 10 tri rail passengers is now bringing on either a bicycle or a scooter to get to their final destination on the other side. So they're carrying 15,000 passengers a day. So 1,500 people are getting onto the tri rail train with a micromobility device to get them to their final destination. So we are seeing that these things are popular in Florida, and they are going to be something that we'll probably continue to see. I don't mean to, you know, berate these things as totally undangerous. I think that there are absolutely some some benefits to using these. Even on my e bicycle, my Garmin tells me that I still burn about 300 calories.

Still get my heart rate up on my six mile commute to downtown. I get more engagement with my community physical mental health. I don't have to worry about parking. Typically, there's always ample bike racks in this community. It's obviously cleaner. It's an electric vehicle trip compared to like a typical gas trip. So there are some benefits that come along with the the micro mobility electrification revolution that we've gone through. So we talked a little bit about the vehicles. I'm gonna talk now about specifics. So I stole these slides from the health care district, and I don't know if you've had a presentation from them recently, but they do a really wonderful job describing some of the impacts of the human body on specifically micro mobility users.

So what they did is that they pulled the past five years of data between November 2019 and the October 2024, and they basically looked at what are the bicycle versus just the bicycle trips that are resulting in trauma incidents. So these are people who have to go to the hospital, and they found that there's about a hundred people that per year that have to go to the hospital just from falling off a bicycle. They also found a very similar number about a 100 per year when there's a motor vehicle versus a bicycle. They only just recently started, so I think the data they had for electric bicycles and scooters was one year worth of data. And collectively, they had fifty fifty six electric bike falls, 45 electric vehicle or electric scooter falls, and 30 electric bike versus vehicle incidents.

So we already are seeing that number start to be competitive comparing the crashes against one another. They also found that a large majority of these crashes were in the pediatric category. So those who are 12 to 15, that was the largest cohort, forty five percent. Another the next substantial number down from that is twenty eight percent to fifty six to 60 five category. So that's you know you're you're aging patients that are starting to look at that.

Seventy six percent of them are white. Something that's not represented, I don't believe on oh, it is. Eighty three percent of them are male. So that classic men are not as risk averse as women stands true with these statistics. Something that's a little bit different, and I talked about this before with respect to the, you know, what the human body is capable of and speed.

So if you're riding on a, like, a standard bicycle, you're going, like, 12 miles per hour. Typically, if you're just getting around town, eight to 10 maybe. But when you're going 20 miles per hour, your reaction time is substantially limited and you require more braking power. So when you have less reaction time, you're less likely to be able to get out of a potentially serious incident. You require additional balancing coordination because you're going at a higher rate of speed.

You have to have a higher visual acuity and also the endurance because I think that there is something to be said for standing and holding on to, especially an electric scooter, my hands feel very fatigued because all of the impact is going through just my hands rather than having a saddle and pedals. So you do actually have a different level of effort that you're putting in even when you're using an electrified vehicle. And one of the things that I think that's really important to talk about in in this is that most frequent types of crashes that you have are head injuries. So obviously, wear a helmet, please, if you use an electrified version of these things, arms, wrists, and collarbones. So if you haven't seen a bicyclist on the road, most one of the most common types of brakes is a collarbone brake, where they fall over their bars, they hit their collarbone on the street.

This is snapped easily six months out of doing anything active. And then soft issue, obviously, sprains, strains, lacerations. Now when you have an impact on the with a motor vehicle, go back. What was your first car? So someone just throw it out there. An Isuzu Rodeo. So look at the typical Isuzu Rodeo when they first made it, let's say, nineteen eighties maybe? Nineteen nineties? Compare that to what would be the equivalent of Isuzu rodeo. Don't think Isuzu is still around anymore. So maybe it's a bad example. But look at compare it to, like, a Honda CR V. Mhmm. There are a few things that are different in vehicles made from the nineteen eighties to today. First thing it you typically notice is that the front end of the vehicle is higher.

So if you think about what that car is going to do to someone if it hits somebody, you're probably gonna be impacting organs. Whereas older vehicles have a lower front end, they're more so hitting, like, the torso and lower. Mhmm. So if you're gonna be having a motor vehicle versus a micromobility incident, you have to be very prepared to ensure that you're riding safely, you're riding visibly, and you're, you know, conspicuous enough so that if you do have an incident against a motor vehicle, that, you know, you're able to effectively get out of that situation in time. So that's why a lot of people still they still choose to ride on sidewalks.

They don't wanna ride on the road because the cars are big. Our roads are bigger. You know, generally speaking, I think the average speed limit is typically 35 miles per hour for any given community. So you you don't survive a crash typically if if you get hit by a car going 40 miles per hour over. So that's just it's something to consider where you ride and the vehicles that you're gonna be contending with if you're using the system.

So I do wanna mention that it is Florida bicycle month, so I do want to share some ways that you can get more involved. We are going to have a webinar specifically about ebikes, e tricycles, and some more safety tips and tricks, kind of like a law refresher, so much of what we did today on the seventeenth. You can learn more about that. We are going to do a bicycle ride on the seventeenth. We're gonna bring people around downtown in one of the new emerald necklace, I think trails that is the city of West Palm Beach is attempting to develop.

There's a nice picture of it on the next slide. I will ask you to take our survey in a minute, but that's one of the views of Downtown West Palm Beach that you'll be able to see and we actually helped to fund and build this project. This is about a mile and a half west of downtown. So it's a very picturesque, nice place to run, bike. It's actually next to the outlets, so it's it's not too far.

If you're ever in downtown, wanna go see it, just hop just south on Congress, and you'll you'll see it. We are doing a similar e bike and e scooter demonstration event at REI in Palm Beach Gardens. We've done this in Boca Raton, and this is actually our second time going back to Palm Beach Gardens because of how popular it is. And the reason we do this at REI is because I actually I bring my e scooter, and I have a ton of e bikes there that I can demo, and people can then go and test ride. So go to your local Trek store here in Wellington or LC not LC trash shop.

Bike Bike Fit by Rudy. It's in it's in Wellington. Go go ride one of these things and see how different it is than a conventional e bicycle. I think that most people will get blown away. And then lastly, we are doing a survey for Florida Bike Month to try to figure out where we can help build better facilities and infrastructure. So if you wanna take this out, take out your phones. It's a really quick survey. I think it's like seven questions, and then you can put a pin on the map to tell us where you want us to reach out to, let's say, village of Wilmington staff or Palm Beach County staff and put either bike lanes in wider sidewalks that kind of thing so that we create better facilities for everyone. This is live and these are kind of like our flyers. So Nicole, you don't mind sharing this afterwards, you'll be able to get this and maybe promote it within your communities.

We we'd really like to have, like, 500 people with throughout Palm Beach County take this survey this month. So if possible, please, you know, do share that. And I think I'll wrap there. A few minutes over, so I appreciate you all letting me come and talk to you all today, and appreciate any questions you have.

Thank you very much. Any questions? Good, thank you.

Very informative, thank you.

And the village of Wellington did establish our own web page wellingtonfl.gov/ebikesafety. We've done a PSA with PBSO to encourage safety and awareness of all the different levels of e bikes. And we are continuing to look at the trend to see what potential, you know, code updates. You know, there's really no regulations that we see that we want to implement, but we're following this closely from a safety standpoint. And then, I did also want to just mention that we do have a hurricane expo coming up Saturday, May 3 from eleven to 2PM at the Wellington Green Mall.

It's gonna be a new location from where we were last year. So, that should be good. It's gonna allow for more room and growth. We're hoping to get a news weather personality there. I don't wanna say names yet because it's not confirmed, but Awesome. Hoping it's a popular one. And like Brian mentioned, the Kids to Park event is gonna be at the amphitheater, May 17 from nine to noon, and he will be here with the team to do the e scooter, e bike safety demonstrations. We'll continue to get that out in the community.

That's excellent. Thank you very much.

I'll also ask if there's any questions for me I can answer.

One

thing I did I didn't get that. Could you try again? Sorry. One thing I forgot to mention, our next public safety meeting will be held June 11. It's a Wednesday. We're gonna go back to our Wednesday schedule at 4PM. It'll be in the council chambers next door. And one agenda item I already know off the bat is gonna be on is the top cop, top firefighter selection.

June 11, you said?

That will be June 11 at 4PM during the council chambers.

Excellent. Thank you very much. Does anyone have any closing comments?

I have a question for you all. At the last quarter meeting, we did the cardiac arrest demonstration and pediatric drowning in whole blood. Is there anything else that you would like to see fire rescue? Last year, we did ion batteries safety with solid waste authority for proper disposal and uniqueness of that. We've done an electric vehicle presentation because electric vehicle fires are very different than regular vehicle fires. So if there's anything else you can think of that you would be interested in, and I'm happy to bring in anybody.

Just Helicopter.

Oh. Do we all go right now? That may blow everyone's budget.

I mean, what in the future? What's something with kids? I mean, where you bring in, you know, jackets. I mean,

we just do that at

the at the playgrounds for, like, the different food nights. Right? But I mean, at truck night, they have the trucks out there. Right? I mean, food truck night. But I mean, you could do a big event like that where, you know, you do somehow advertise children and they play and splash and right? I'm sure you do that anyway.

Well, we had the public safety night Yeah. In October that was hosted over at the parking lot of the Wellington Green Mall and there was a great turnout.

Yeah. You're talking more specifically for us.

Yeah. Specifically for you guys. If you're happy with just the response time report and whatever's going in fire rescue operations world, if there's anything that you are interested in and would like to learn more about, just let me know.

Okay. That's excellent. Thank you. Will do. Alright.

Any other comments? Excellent. In that case, we are adjourned. Thank you. Thank

you. Thank you.

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