Public Safety Committee - Regular Meeting

Good afternoon. It is September 9th, 2026. Then we will call the public safety meeting to order. If everyone wants to please rise for the Pledge of Allegiance. So we'll start with roll call and attendance. Ron Herman, present. Robert Chenoweth? Present. Eric Forty? Present. Kevin Kimberley? Present. Matthew Ladd? Present. Emery Payne? Joseph Rosenberger? Any opening comments? Start to my left, Eric? No. I have none? I have none. Approval of agenda. Do I have a motion to approve agenda? I'll make a motion. Second. All in favor?

Aye. Opposed?

Approval of minutes. Is there a motion? Motion. Second. Second. All in favor? Aye. Minutes approved. Any old business?

None listed for tonight.

Thus forth proceed to new business. We're halfway through. You're smoking this, man.

You're smoking this.

All right, we move to new business, Palm Beach County Fire Rescue Report. Hi, good afternoon.

Hello, good afternoon, everybody. So I have some exciting news. Chief Kennedy has given me an opportunity to serve the community and the department in a little bit of a different role. So I was promoted to Division Chief of Community Engagement. And your new District Chief is District Chief Jose Garcia. So he will be taking command of Battalion 2. So this will be my last report to the Public Safety Committee. And from here on out, it'll be Chief Garcia. Chief Garcia was a battalion chief in battalion four and he's been a captain for many many years prior to that and Just prior to his promotion to district chief. He was the battalion chief over facilities So he worked very closely with support services on any type of station needs or maintenance needs or logistical needs things like that. So Did you want to say hello? I'll let him talk after report if he has anything or if anybody has any questions for us.

Is that congratulations then? Yes. It is. Congratulations and welcome both of you.

I mean, if I will say something, the biggest compliment was... If I could say something, the biggest compliment is allowing me to be the Battalion 2 District Chief. They're aware of the work she's done here and the relationship she's built. And to put that in trust in me says a lot. So that's all I have.

Wonderful. Congratulations.

Doesn't report to me by the way doesn't have to be nice Okay, so last quarter we had 1738 total calls to the village and the response times was six minutes and 44 seconds This quarter, I went June 7th through September 7th, the average dispatch handling time was 45 seconds. The average turnout time was 45 seconds. The average travel time was 5 minutes and 8 seconds. So an overall average response time of 6 minutes and 38 seconds, and there was 1,700 calls. So we're about 38 calls less and 6 seconds faster than the previous quarter.

So it's pretty good.

What we've been watching is about a year ago, we put in traffic preemption where it preempts and changes the cameras as the rescue and the engine come code three lights and sirens. So I'm interested to see over time how well the response times do improve. But that's pretty good. Six seconds is very good. Traffic is terrible, as you all are well aware. And then throw in a little rain and forget it. And then just happenings for Palm Beach County besides the promotion and some changes we did take applications for firefighter parent excuse me EMT firefighter and We had about 450 applicants that passed the first process. They were all invited to an in-person chief's interview that they did in August. They will be hiring 90 positions next year, and the first 35 will start January 11. So that's very exciting. So we will be changing our shift schedule. Right now we're on a 24-48 shift schedule, 24 on, 48 off. April of 2027, we are switching to a 24-72. So 24 hours on, 72 hours off. And so we're doing a lot of hiring to make up for that extra shift. Because we have A, B, and C shift now, we will be adding a D shift in April. We currently have a department-wide Asher active shooter drill that we are training on. And all the Battalion 2 units are a part of that training. It's at the South Florida Fairgrounds, and it is in coordination with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office. And that obviously is to prepare should there ever be an active shooter type event at anywhere, the mall, the schools, one of our community events. So we're training on that. I reported last time on our hurricane preparations and the countywide hurricane training drill that we did. Let me think.

Am I missing anything? As far as current training. That's good.

Does anybody have any questions?

Yeah. Sounds good. Thank you. Okay. Thank you.

Thank you.

Okay. We'll move to then the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office report.

So I don't have any recent report. Basically, I'm going to do a report, the captain's report, which is an annual review of 2025. Okay. Okay. Is this going to load up on there? Because it's on my screen.

Yeah. Spin around. There you go.

Also, please bear with me because I'm fighting a little sore throat, cold, whatever you want to call it. So that's why I didn't shake everybody's hands. So I'm going to also skim through this. It's redundant. We did this a couple of weeks ago at the council meeting. And there are some slides in here that aren't really pertinent to what we need to know. So for 2025, calls for service. was 94,963 compared to, obviously, 2021, 22, 23, 24. It slowly made its way up from 77,000 up to 94,000. So basically, the community is growing. It's getting busier. And we're doing a little bit more enforcement, and it shows. 2025 calls for service continued. So on this particular screen here, it shows 94,000 total calls of service compared to 91,000 in 2024, a 4% increase. 17,820 were non-self-initiated incidents. Basically, these were calls for service that were reactive that came in through our dispatch and dispatched out to deputies to respond to. 77,143 were self-initiated incidents, and those included 17,599 traffic stops, which is 23% of self-initiated incidents. 51,388 business residence checks. Basically, a residence check, we call it a 1061, and the deputies, when they're in the area, they'll call out their location and they'll make sure that the area or the business or the home or residence is secure. 8,156 are all other self-initiated incidents. This is actually a call for service map that shows all of our zones. So if you want to look closely and identify where you live, you can see what zone you live in. The busiest zone is 8,156. 5-1, which incorporates the, well... Oh, that's the mall. Actually, the mall, but 8-2-2 is a little bit higher. But anywhere you see businesses that we're doing business checks and so forth. Also, traffic. So, we do a lot of traffic. We have a traffic unit now, and they do a lot of proactive stops. So... This slide basically just shows our community policing effort. We have four CP sites. That just skipped ahead, let me go backwards. Four CP sites, Goldenrod Road and Hyacinth Place, Hawthorne Place and Morning Glory. Yarmouth Drive, Folkestone Circle and White Pine Drive and 12th Fairway. Everybody familiar what community policing is or no? Basically, we build partnerships within communities in certain areas and basically help reduce crime in a higher crime area with the residents and a partnership with the village. The Courtyard Shops and Wellington Marketplace, I don't believe they're actually CP sites anymore.

Yeah, I don't think so.

Yeah, I don't think so.

Okay.

This is one of the FDLE reports that I'm going to skip. And this is the other one. This is an interesting slide here. It's the annual cases since 2009. So if you want to take a second to look at it, starting with robberies, back in 2009, we had 30 robberies. In 2025, we had six. And you can see the progression as Wellington or District 8 expanded with allocations with deputies. We grew in size our street crime unit, our community policing unit, our traffic unit. This all helped reduce those incidents from happening, so it shows. Also, we have a really good detective bureau that's following up on a lot of the cases and fraud cases, so it brings down those Well, you can look at all the felony or basically the robbery, sexual assault, shooting, stabbing, homicide. Pretty much we have two zeros in 2025 for stabbing and homicide, so it shows the work they're doing. Give me one second. Burglaries. 2009, we had 494. In 2025, 101. Of those, we had, let's see, 356 residential and 36 business. And those both came down, respectively, down to 22 and 4. In 2025, six cases compared to three. Let me back up. 2025, we had robberies, six robberies compared to 2024, which we had three. Two of the cases, the suspects were juveniles, and none of the suspects resided in Wellington, which is good to note. 2025, stolen vehicles. 29 stolen vehicles in 2025. 12 of the 29 cases, the vehicle's doors were left unlocked with the keys inside. And that's been a pretty big educational role that we're trying to get out to the public is to lock your doors and take your keys out of your vehicles because it's, I wouldn't say it's an epidemic, but it's happening across the nation and the bad guys know and they take advantage of it. But I think over time we've decreased just by educating the public on this. Well, 12 of the 29 cases, the vehicles were recovered. That's 41%. And 11 of the 29 cases involved golf carts. 2025, residential burglaries. 22 residential burglaries in 2025 versus 27 in 2024. That's a 19% decrease. 10 of the 22 cases were cleared. 7 of the 10 cleared cases resulted in arrests. And three of the 22 cases, the victim refused to prosecute. 20-25, vehicle burglaries. 101 vehicle burglaries in 20-25 compared to 108, which is a 6% decrease. Again, we're going on the right track. 21 cases cleared by arrest. 84 of the 101 cases, vehicles were unsecured or left unlocked. 10 of the 101 cases were forced entry. Six of the 101 cases were attempt only. And the way it works with attempt only, the statute states if you attempt a burglary, it's a burglary. 21 of the 101 cases involved suspects who lived in Wellington. Shoplifting. Let's see. 171 shoplifting cases in 2025 compared to 139 in 2024. That's a 23% increase in cases, 124 accounting coming out of the Wellington Green Mall and surrounding areas. You can see all the businesses as well. Golf cart incidents, 2025. 112 incidents involving golf carts in 2025 compared to 80 in 2024. I guess we're having more golf carts in the area. And then I'm sure next year we'll have a slide in here with the e-bikes and so forth like that. Hopefully it's a big decrease on the e-bikes. 2025 residential short-term rentals, this is like Airbnbs and so forth, so 33 total calls for service. Short-term rentals compared to 62 calls for service in 2024, which is a decrease in 47%. And we've basically assigned one of our community policing deputies to oversee this and actually do some real enforcement on this, and it shows. 2025 traffic crashes. Take a couple seconds to look at that. There's a lot of information there. 2025 crashes, 1,137 and leaving the scene of a crash, 154. If you want, you could also see basically the trend, how it is in our busier months here in the village. Basically the winter time. Interestingly enough, the performance goal is to maintain a crash rate of less than three crashes per 100 residents. Basically, we're at 2.09 in 2025, so we're still under the goal. 2025 traffic citations, written warnings, and verbal warnings. This just shows a nice increase from 2024 to 2025. Citations in 2024 were 5590, and in 2025, 9,219, which is a 3,629 difference. And probably because we have a traffic unit and we have an assigned sergeant over there and they're really out there pounding the pavement, trying to make the streets safer for everybody. Written warnings, again, they're up 554 from the prior year, and verbal warnings are up 854 as well. 2025 Detective Bureau. So we had 316 assigned cases, and 73 were cleared. which gives us a clearance rate of 23%. Basically, I believe it's the FBI puts a clearance rate around 15% is good, so we're well above that, so we're doing a really good job with clearing these burglary cases. 2025 performance goals, burglary and theft. This is just stating some goals that we have, performance goals. Maintain burglary and theft crimes less than 800 cases in 2025. Clear at least 10% of burglaries by arrest. Let's see. And result, residential burglary decreased 19% from 27 to 22. Burglary and theft crimes increased 1%. Of the 128 burglaries in 2025, 20% were cleared by arrest, 26 of them. These are just some of the operation plans that we have between our units. We have street crime unit. We have a traffic unit. We have community policing. And these are just some of the operations that we did, if you want to just skim through it. My bad. The biggest one we had, I would say, would be the Operation Moto Madness, basically going out there and enforcing the e-motos and e-bikes and so forth, and I just passed an e-moto on the way here. But compared to the years past, we're seeing a lot less of them. 2025 citizen observer patrol so we have our COPs and basically these are our volunteers Within the agency I believe there's over a thousand and we have 28 members here in Wellington That's I'll just give them some stats on that number of volunteer hours worked for seventeen thousand four hundred and eighty five number of foot patrol hours six thousand six hundred and forty nine number of business checks Let's see. Number of parks. It didn't give me a number on that. Number of parks. Park checks, 1,820. End school patrols, 340. Number of food distributions, 18 with 285 hours worked. So basically our COPs do a lot of work. They devote a lot of time and put back into the community. And these are, again, all volunteers. Between all of our volunteers, they purchased a second patrol car for $33,000 of their own money, which was very kind, yeah. This is the Home Away House Watch Program. I get these emails every so often saying which houses people are leaving on vacation or so forth, and they ask for requests to have their house checked while they're gone. In 2025, we received the following requests. 99 extra patrol requests, 20 requests for extra patrol at temples and places of worship, 36 home away notifications, and 17 parking related requests. Again, this has a lot of information on it, but it's a good read because basically it just shows the similar communities in comparison. So on the top left, 2025 population, Wellington is around 61,800 residents compared to Boca, which is around 100,000. So when you go to the right, top right, 2025 residential burglaries per 100 residents were just below the median on that, which is 0.036. It continues to get better down with vehicle burglaries. Boca, again, a larger city, is 0.348. We're at 0.163. And robberies, which is really good for us. Green Acres has a 0.05, which is actually a smaller populated area than us. And we're at 0.01 for Wellington, which is at the lowest of compared cities. Basically, you want your violent crimes as low as possible. And then a couple of slides back, it showed that our violent crime, homicide, stabbing, murders, and armed robberies are virtually nil. 2025 situated communities comparison again, shoplifting brings us down almost down to the bottom. Sorry about that. Per 100 residents, Wellington is at 0.277. 2025 accidents hit and runs per 100 residents. We are at the bottom of the compared cities at 2.088 compared to Delray Beach being 4.35. This is just showing basically what our stats are for this year. Most of it is that the majority, we see a decrease in all of our crimes. Focus on going forward, continue to address electric or e-bike, which I'm sure Ms. Coats will talk about. after me since we passed the ordinance. Continue to educate the village residents on how to combat auto thefts and auto burglaries. Basically lock your doors and take the keys out of your vehicles. We do a lot of PSAs with that and I think that's working. We have coffee with the cop every so often. I don't know if you are all on Facebook or any other social media, but we put that on there all the time. The village is really good at that. They showcase our community policing deputies and we're always out there shaking hands, getting to learn the community members and building that partnership. Pursue grant opportunities to bring additional resources into the village. Continue to grow our traffic enforcement posture to mitigate unsafe driving. And continue to maintain our hometown police department and culture. Continue to increase community outreach and village integration with our Axon cameras. And that wraps it up. Does anybody have any questions? What are the Axon cameras? The Axon? Well, we use Axon standards. It's our program for our body-worn cameras and our in-car vehicle cameras. And they're being integrated with all the camera systems that you'll see on the light poles and the cameras that you don't see. Any other questions?

One other point. We're coming into the Jewish holiday season in the next few weeks, so I just wanted to point out there was a call out for the houses of worship in the community, and I'll say on behalf of, I'm a board member of the temple, so I'm partial to the Temple Beth Torah, but thank you for all you do for us in the community, and just continue to stay alert and look out for us the next few weeks especially.

Yeah, absolutely, and we appreciate the partnership that we built with all the religious affiliates in our neighborhood. We do have the high holidays coming up, and we have that partnership, and our community policing sergeant is on the ball with that, and I think we're good to go because we do the extra patrols during those times.

Yeah, so thank you. Yep, you're welcome.

Any other questions?

Thank you. You're very welcome. We'll move to staff report.

All right. So I don't have a PowerPoint presentation, but I did hand out some handouts, and I'll start with the e-bike, e-scooter rules, and we'll start from there. As you may already be aware, on August 11th council meeting, the Village of Wellington Council adopted a micromobility ordinance. And this card here that I handed out pretty much outlines what riders need to know. Highlights of the ordinance for e-bikes and e-scooters. And it applies to all non-human powered devices. It could be one of these powered unicycle devices. But mostly what we're seeing a lot is the e-bike and e-scooters out there. So you have to be 15 years old. You have to carry a valid government ID, which has the information of your name, address, and date of birth. You must follow the 15 mile per hour speed limit on our sidewalks and pathways, which is consistent with the state law, maximum speed. It's also consistent with our golf cart ordinance. And per state statute, all riders under the age of 16 are required to wear a helmet. But we do encourage all riders to wear a helmet, regardless of age. We have a dedicated website. It's wellingtonfl.gov slash micromobility that has all the rules. Special thanks to PBSO and Palm Beach County Fire Rescue. There's been a lot of outreach in the community. So this ordinance was passed August 11th, but we're under a grace period, which soon will be coming to an end. And written warnings will begin to be issued on September 15th. And actual citations could be issued starting October 1st. So we're trying to give just that opportunity to get the outreach out. The whole goal of this is compliance. We're not looking to enforce and cite and write tickets. And I know that's never PBSO's goal. Neither is the village. So that is our plan right now. The lieutenant mentioned we've seen some impact already. A lot of really the middle school age demographic is probably most impacted. And we're seeing a lot of bicycles out there now versus the e-bikes and such. So we are seeing people complying. I'll take any questions on this particular ordinance, if you have any.

I have one question. One of the elements here is be 15 years or older. I was just curious if there was discussion. Obviously, we're not solving anything today here in this committee. But was there a discussion as far as, because obviously children look different ages, you know, one person can look at a child and think that person is 17 and maybe another person looks at that person and thinks that's 14. So was there a discussion as far as how that subjective observation can lead to potentially detention or stopping of those vehicles that arguably could be pretextual?

So I don't know if the lieutenant wants to take that. That has been discussed, and they have an approach.

Yeah, I mean, if it's an obvious, six-year-old that's doesn't look 15 you know that's if it's an obvious situation but we're doing it more as a a secondary citation so we're looking for helmets and so forth like that if they are leaving elementary school or middle school you know that may be also a clue that they may not be of age But then again, you know, there are some children at 15 that may be held back. So we're approaching it pretty cautious so we don't violate any rights of anybody and so forth. So, yeah, so right now it's mostly a secondary. Okay. Thank you.

And we are working as well as kind of the procedure and process is that if it is someone under 15 who gets stopped, there would be every attempt to notify their parent of what's occurring. So we are checking all the boxes to make sure the parent is aware as well.

Yeah, especially if they're younger, we're not going to let them, you know, We're not going to give a citation and not let the parents know or a warning or so forth. And right now what we are doing is we're going to call a parent or a guardian and make sure they're aware of the situation. And either the parent will come and pick up the child in the bike or a deputy will be transporting them home if they deem necessary. Thank you.

And then just kind of put like a fine amount to this. If it's a municipal ordinance violation, which a lot of this is aside from the helmet, then that would be around a $33 fine per occurrence. And then if it's a state violation, say a pedestrian violation or this helmet violation, it could range to $64.50. Okay. Uh, further beyond just regulating on our pathways, we did decide, and you'll see signs around some of our facilities that prohibit these devices. So say here at town center, these high pedestrian trafficked areas. So that doesn't mean that somebody can't drive, uh, one of these devices here, they just can't, they have to walk it on site. So that's prohibited here. We've experienced a lot of damage to our promenade, the boat docks, and so that's where we had to... say we can't allow them on these areas, just like similar to skateboards and other bicycles are not allowed on stage. We had to just add this as one of those devices. We also have at Village Park certain hours that they can be on our Hart Trail, which is, if you're familiar with the Village Park complex, we have a perimeter sidewalk that goes all around the sports complex. E-bikes and e-scooters are allowed there on certain times of day. And it's usually the early hours of the day. But then when we have all the sporting activities and such, they're not allowed. So we just ask residents to pay attention to the signage posted at our facilities. And that way we can all understand the rules. So they are all on our website for the public to get familiar with. And obviously any questions, you can always direct them to me. Any other questions on e-bike before I move on? Okay. All right. We have a couple big events coming up, and we've been in partnership with a lot of our first responders. We have sent that information out today, but our 9-11 remembrance ceremony, marking the 25th anniversary of 9-11, We partnered with the Fire Chiefs Association, as well as Palm Beach County Fire Rescue, Palm Beach County Fire Rescue, Palm Beach Sheriff's Office, and Palm Beach County. So this is a joint event. It's going to be held here at our Wellington Amphitheater. So we encourage anybody who would like to attend. to join. If you can't attend in person, we are streaming it. So you'll be able to view it on Channel 20 and WPTV will be covering and also Ashley Glass will be our master of ceremonies. So that we look forward to on Friday. And then we also partnered with the Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office for National Night Out. This is a A location is usually determined in Palm Beach County every year, and Wellington was selected as the location this year. It's going to be, again, at our Wellington Amphitheater, and this is on October 22nd from 6 to 9 p.m. We'll have various specialty units. Palm Beach County Sheriff's Office is going to have a full display of a lot of resources that maybe some might not know are here in Palm Beach County, so it's going to be a great opportunity for our residents, as well as the Palm Beach County Fire Rescue. I do believe we'll have some units here too. So we encourage anybody to come out and join us for that. With that, we have coming up I do plan for the next agenda. I'm working on it at the moment, a speed camera update. So right now, the way this works is that we are due to report to FLHSMV, Florida Highway of Safety Motor Vehicles, by the end of September. So I'm working on that report. I will present that to council on the September 22nd meeting. So then I do plan to update and get any feedback as well from... our Public Safety Committee, at the December 9th meeting. That is our next meeting, December 9th. And then if there's any questions on that or anything you would else like to see on the agenda, open to discuss. Or anything from the Sheriff's Office or Fire Rescue.

And as always, if you don't have any ideas now, you can always email you or email the staff for suggestions.

Exactly. And we'll probably put our best thoughts together for what we're going to present. We usually like to showcase some of the units and features here that are not necessarily just Wellington, but unique to Palm Beach County that you might not know exist. And then we will be planning for equestrian season. So we might want to touch on that a bit. So that's what I have. If there's any other questions, I'd be happy to answer.

Okay. I had one question. Is there opportunities for a ride-along if we were interested in doing that since I'm new to the committee? Absolutely.

Yeah. You just have to submit an application, and I believe they make you do a background check. But, yeah, we do that.

What I can do is get that application and share it with the committee if you're interested.

Thanks. That's a good question. I did that like 25 years ago maybe, 26 years ago. It's a good question. Okay. Thank you very much. If no other questions, public comment? Seeing none. Closing comments? I have none. I think we have some good meetings coming up. December 9th, as you said, is the next one. Unless there's anything else, we can adjourn the meeting then.

Thank you. Have a good day. Thank you.