Mr. Mayor, if you want to call the work session to order, we can go right into that. Let me get this going. Call the uh April 28th, 2025 uh work meeting to order. I'll make a motion to adopt the agenda. Second. Have a motion and a second to adopt the agenda. All those in favor? I I opposed. None heard. Item one, zero. So, Mr. Mayor, we have a few items to discuss this evening under the work session. We may not be able to get through all of them, but we wanted to make sure to have Jerry here to go through the top three, which are pertinent issues as it relates to um a new fire chief eventually coming on here. So, um one of the goals is to kind of get things in order for them um so they know where they are when they come in. Anyways, I'll turn it over to Jerry. Chair, mayor, city council, good evening. If you could just give me a minute, I'll start up this presentation since it's not quite 6 yet, right? It's past six. It's past six. All right. Well, there's my there you go. So, there we got that. And we will start. So, tonight I want to talk to you about four topics. Um and of course we've talked about them probably in pieces but this will allow us to talk to them in general. So apologize for the packet coming to you tonight. Uh of course you had the topics but this is the more in depth information. Um if there's there's no request to make a decision tonight. Uh however if you feel you would like to at the council meeting that's your prerogative. So today I want to talk about the East Bethl Fire Department. Over a year ago when I came and conducted a study, there's a lot of questions related to what does the fire department do? Uh what do our full-timers do? Our budget is a million dollars. Uh where does that money go and so on. And uh as we've stated before, I I wasn't at that time expected to come in and have an intimate review of the organization, but um I have. So, I'm going to give you the information that you're paying for. So, the agenda tonight, we're going to talk about the duties of the fire department so you clearly understand the role of the fire department and your role with the fire department. We're going to talk about what chiefs often talk about levels of service, what that means to you, and um we're going to discuss uh sort of reorganization recommendations of the fire department that I see would add value to the volunteer model that you currently offer. Uh we'll talk about daytime response. uh we're going to talk about in the end a the administrative recommendation that I'm making and then reclassifying uh one of the full-time positions to a different uh title. So, the fire department began in 1959 much like the other 735 fire departments in the state of Minnesota. A local group got together wanted to provide a better service to the community. So they they started to form their own fire department and they got a pickup truck from Willie and they bought a a six-wheeler from the military surplus and they ended up with a a fire department. And often times the fire department becomes sort of this ancillary city service that later blends into a a city service that in fact when the city is actually responsible for it. But you currently operate what we call a volunteer model, which is the least expensive model you can get. But as we've talked about in the past, there's two definitions in state law that define a firefighter. There's a career firefighter. You pay them benefits, overtime, FLSA, EEOC, all that stuff. That's defined in Minnesota state law. And then Minnesota state law defines the other type of firefighter as a volunteer. And within that volunteer model, all across the state, in fact, all across the country, it may look different. It doesn't mean you're not paid for your work. It's just the definition under state law. You're not full-time. So, because they're not full-time, your citizen responders typically have a full-time job. And because of that, they're only responsible for or only able to respond to calls during a certain time frame. So, we have broken our time frames down 5:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. is the day shift and then 5:00 p.m. to 5:00 a.m. is the night shift. So, if you work during the daytime hours, the volunteer says, "I'm I can respond on the night shift." and on weekends. And the fire chief is the one who determines the good standing of the firefighters participation based off the hours they can work on that shift. Okay. The same is true for the daytime. I mean, we have paramedics who work for us, law enforcement, maybe there's a nurse, different people who work just odd shifts or they work night shift and uh they are able to respond during the daytime. So our volunteer model allows uh the volunteer to be paid an hourly rate. The first hour is paid at the hourly rate no matter how long the incident is. So most of the incidents are 25 to 35 minutes long but they get paid for that full hour. Any hour after that hour or any time would be paid the next hour rate. All right. than their hourly. And as you know, they're also paid a pension. So, the city puts uh I believe the city puts in $14,000 a year uh for the firefighter pension. And then 2% of all insurance premiums in the responding area goes to the department of revenue and turns around and comes back to the city of East Bethl, which in turn is then given to the relief association. The relief association is a nonprofit organization run by the same firefighters who are on your team as employees and they manage their own account. uh we currently have ours managed through the uh PAR uh system. So as typically as the village or the township grows and there's more levels of service and it's hard to find volunteers to volunteer, they start to uh as more laws come into place, as technology advances, as more stations need to be in place for better response time, they start to think about adding a full-time chief. You did that in 2007. At that time, there were three stations here. In fact, the mayor was quite responsible for a lot of those stations being constructed at the time. Um, at the time, there were 570 calls when the new chief started and we had 35 firefighters at the time. Uh, so today you have three stations. uh the value is low of those stations because you we're going off tax base value, but if we were to tear those stations down and reconstruct them, you're looking at about a $24 million fee to rebuild the stations. We have two full-time positions. One is the fire chief who's been here since 2007 and five five years ago or a little bit you you added a fire inspector because of the growth. Typically, a fire inspector enforces the Minnesota State Fire Code. That is in the definitions of state law. The fire chief is responsible for prevention, investigation, and and uh so on. And they're the ultimate authority of the Minnesota State Fire Code. But in an effort to minimize or assist with the span of control, they hire an inspector. Inspector is a very technical position. There's a lot of it's like your building official. Uh once the building official gets done with the new building, they issue a certificate of occupancy and it gets handed over to the building code for the rest of its life unless there's another permit that's opened up in that same building. Building code and the uh fire code work hand in hand. We currently have 27 on call firefighters. Um we've lost a couple since I've been here uh for life life issues. uh our newer staff uh two of them have left. We're aware of some who could retire at the end of the year, three to four uh uh because they want to retire. We have members that have been on for almost two years and we have members that are on the East Bethl Fire Department for 44 years and 37 years. So, we have a lot of longstanding to me that means 10 years or more uh individuals on the department. We need, and you saw in my report, we need at least 40. I would even push 50. I think we recruit every day. And whoever wants to come on, we we take them on and we figure out, you know, we don't let them sit in the queue. We take them in, we treat them like a a new employee, and we onboard them, and we get them involved. Uh, in fact, we have a recruitment session coming up May 14th. Uh, that pension credit we talked about is currently at $8,000 a year. So every year of good service, good service is determined by that good standing, they get $8,000. When you take the $8,000 plus the annual hourly rate and you divide it by the numbers they put in that it's it's a pretty good hourly rate. Uh but it's a long-term game to get the uh pension. Uh, of course, we're seeing in the generational differences of today, um, uh, you know, someone like me who joined for service and wanted to do the job my whole life, um, it's different today because time is the new money and, uh, a town home is $450,000. So getting a higher level of hourly rate for our newer generations coming in is going to be something really important and something that I'll discuss with the the new chief when they come in. Um it isn't uncommon to see, for example, Forest Lake is over $30 an hour right now for their on call members. We start at $16 an hour. Uh and their retention is flat, meaning nobody's leaving. So, if you start to impact the pocketbook, it's still cheaper than hiring 12 full-time firefighters, three shifts of 24 hours a day. So, you know, our annual budget, we have a lot of equipment. Uh most of our costs in our budget are uh personnel just like the city budget. It's the cost of hiring skill and people to to manage and to respond to our calls. But it's important to know that our volunteers have full-time jobs. They go to soccer, they go to hockey, they like to hunt, fish, go to the cabin, everything we all like to do. Um, and they do it in their after hours. So, as I've said in the in front of you since I've been here, it's our job to make this easy for them to participate in. And as our community grows, uh, so should our focus on how do we keep people here without burden them with a ton of calls and a ton of requirements, but still provide a quality service and and this this team does that. So in your handout, you'll see in the first packet, you'll see the East Bethl duties and responsibilities. Um, I took the time to list everything that we believe we do in this department. Uh, this the fire department is the largest department in the city. And if you look at all of the stuff we're required to do like like not only respond to calls, but two individuals in the fire department along with two uh volunteer district chiefs and the officers have to manage 35, 40, 45 employees. And because they are employees, we have to think about their safety and the OSHA rules. We have to think about FLSA and we have to, you know, all the other rules we think about just like our city administrator would. We have to manage incidents, go to go to incidents and manage the complexity of that. I'll give a shout out to the city of Andover today who uh woke up at 7 this morning with a house fire baby trapped on the upper level and the crews got on the scene. They have a duty crew model, but the chief and assistant chief and others got on the scene and went in there and grabbed that baby and and brought it out and they saved a life because time is of essence. So, uh, they're the same model we are with the exception of of the duty crew. And that 7:00 period, that 5 to 7 a.m. and that, I'm going to say even 3 to 6 p.m. when when our citizens are coming back home for work is a very critical time where we're short staff. So, as you look you look through this packet, you see there's a there's a lot of stuff that this this department is responsible to do on a daily basis from managing our own budget to paying our bills to making sure three stations are equipped and maintained to making sure 35 to 40 employees have all the gear they need. I'm on and on and on. So what we're doing and what I've been hearing since I've been here and we saw it in the survey is people want structure and they want to understand you know what's the expectation of them. So we've created this sheet here. You've heard me talk about swim lanes in the past and this is exactly what this is. You'll see all the way to the left the fire chief's role. He's a departmental leader. He takes full responsibility for the entire department good or bad. He inherits the past. He predicts, you know, he's responsible for the future. It's it's just that role. The fire inspector, uh, believe it or not, we didn't add anything in here other than, you know, some things that we'd like to see, but the fire inspector currently does a lot of work is tonight managing the new records management system and teaching all of our firefighters how to do that. And, uh, you have to remember the past. We had a longtime fire chief in a position with with other volunteers supporting. Our call volume continued to grow. You had the fire chief leave. You had his number one deputy leave. And uh you know, you just we've lost a lot of history and we've lost a lot of uh uh internal support and knowledge. So now we're building that up. You have two district chiefs. one one manages station two, the other one manages station one and station three out on the island. And uh they basically start managing the people. And the reason we have what we call fire officers or supervisors is because the fire chief just can't manage the span of control of this complex monster. So we put people in positions to help manage that span of control. They report to the fire chief. They're they should meet on a regular basis. We should send them the training to learn what they need to know because at any time when we're all sleeping, the newest lieutenant on the job may be managing the most complex incident in the city and it may be their first one. So know that um training is really important. But all the way to the right is the firefighter's role. The firefighter's role is to be a firefighter, be an emergency medical responder, EMT, focus on safety, make sure they get the location right, select the right piece of equipment, the right PPE, get to the scene, size it up, pull the right equipment, and do what they need to do from everything from wildland fires to whatever we end up doing. So, uh, this is when we'll move into the discussion of the level of service. But when I talk about swim lanes, you think about each one of these gray lines as a buoy in an Olympic pool. And uh we don't we don't need someone all the way on the right swimming all the way into the left's business, if you will. And I don't need someone on the left swimming all the way over to the right's business. So when I say Jerry's not responding to medical calls, and they say, "Why?" I say, "Because I have you to do it." Because you're the firefighter, right? If we need a fire chief to go to every call, um I would raise my hand and and and ask uh why that is. Now, the fire chief should be there to support the city and protect the city's uh uh uh public information. They should be there to support their firefighters on major incidents, but not on every incident. We need to stay focused on this administrative role. Any questions on this real quick? Clear as mud. Awesome. So, now we're going to move into the levels of service. And as I travel, as I travel and work with organizations such as this, I often hear my colleagues say, "The council doesn't know what level of service they want to provide." And I say, "Exactly. When was the last time you talked to them about the level of service?" And they say, "Uh, I don't know that I have." So, when I'm talking about levels of service, I want you to think about it as like an incident type. And we have basically I'm going to put it into two categories of incident types. One is fire incidents. What does that entail? The other is a medical incident. And remember that there is no law that requires a fire department to exist. It's the fire service determined by the city council. So when you look at the medical events list, when someone dials 911, the 911 communication goes to the Anoka County Communication Center, now located in Andover on Hansen and Bunker Boulevard in a new facility. They will the telecommunicator 911 dispatcher will answer the phone. A 911 police fire, what's your emergency? What they're trying to do is determine what's the correct event type for this because each one of these event codes is tied to a response plan that the fire chief should work out not not only what station should go there based on latitude and longitude but who may support need to support us if we have a big incident. So on that sheet you'll see some highlighted areas. I believe I had to highlight them. Um, the ones in yellow are the ones that I am calling non-emergent, meaning they're non-lifethreatening. And as you've seen since I've been here, um, there's confusion on what I'm talking about when I say we we should balance the organization out by looking at not responding to non-emergent calls. I'm talking talking about the cause of a fever, the cause of a back pain, the calls of dizziness, a cough, diarrhea, sore foot, the things that wake, you know, we get get these calls all 24 hours a day. But my point is abdominal pain, um medical alarm, high blood pressure, the non-emergent calls, a psychological hold, uh medical information, they tone it out, you know, maybe uh our duty officer may handle that. Lift assist is one. Uh I'm highly I'm highlighting the ones that I recommend. If you decide to move forward with these recommend with my recommendation, I'm going to work with the chief officers to determine, you know, what the best ones are for the city of East Bethl. And I know these are non-emergent. I've recently spoken with Alina, which should be in your packet again. There's another uh handout in there from Alina and they showed that their non-emergence calls from from the time they got to our area in emergent they left non-emergent the the where there was only 1% of the 894 calls in there where they left our city in an emerent response. That's a that's a big that's a low number. And uh there's some confusion of maybe the first meeting I had where Alina was up here and the sheriff's office were up here. They weren't saying they don't want us to go to calls. I've talked or or didn't want us uh that they couldn't handle it without us. Of course, they'll take as much help as they can get. What I'm looking at is a comparison between a volunteers's time and what we're spending our time on. And because time is the new money, are there things we can do to balance it out that are going to have minimal risk in order to give them more time? Lift assist is one of them. And like a tube out, like somebody's got a chronic care and a tube. But what you don't hear me say we shouldn't go to is like an allergic reaction, an assault, a a severe bleed, choking, breathing difficulty, not breathing, diabetic, someone drowning, electrocution, a medical fall three times their height, a fracture, a heart attack, an OB, a medical priority of any of the others, a medical seizure, a gunshot wound, a stroke, an unconscious, or a slumper, someone in a car that passed Well, I'm not saying don't go to those. We will continue to go to those. In fact, I've speaking with Mark and the sheriff's office, the line in the sheriff's office. We're going to open it this way. If you need us, call us. But don't immediately tone us out. If you get information along the way that this fall turned into a fracture, call us. We're going to come right away. But at two in the morning for I'm feeling ill and my doctor told me I should come in by ambulance because I don't have a ride. There's not much we can do with that. And in fact I we just disrupted the whole day sleep of a firefighter who's supposed to be focused at work. So uh my recommendation is related to the medical calls is the fire incidents are the responsibility of the city. You you can't give them away. You can hire someone to do your fire service anytime you want, but they're the only people in town that can uh go into an immediately dangerous to life and health environment. They're the only ones that can wear those air packs you see with the mask that have almost $10,000 in gear on um with the air pack and the radio and everything. Um so the fire incident are the people the only ones in town that can do that work. And in fact, since 1959, you've been hiring people, you've been building facilities, you've been buying expensive equipment, you've been doing all kinds of training and so on to ensure that you could deliver this service to your community for many years to come. And you've been doing an awesome job. And like I I've told the candidates who've called me to maybe be the chief. I said, it's an awesome department. It it it always has been. That's the only way I've known it. And because the city grows and because uh times have changed, especially after the pandemic, because time is the new money, it's time to regroup. Focus on what's best for East Bethl right now because I guarantee you anything you reduce in calls right now is going to creep up to that level in the future with this city. Uh because the city is going to continue to grow. Uh what we're going to talk about too in in a little while is the daytime delivery model versus the nighttime delivery model. Uh because it's it's changed. So we talk about service levels related to medicals. Medicals by law are under the medical director of Alina. The Alina ambulance and Alina overall is responsible for all the medical calls in our community. Much like the wildland fires we go to is a responsibility of the Department of Natural Resources. But we respond as a quick responder to try to stop it, slow it down, put it out. But they come in route. They'll bring us air air equipment, helicopters, and big airplanes. They'll do all kinds of stuff, but we we get there and and we know we can make a difference. So, we go in route first. We try to mitigate the incident as we could. But the Alina is by law responsible for all medical calls. and Alina is stationed in our station one off Bunker Bunker Lake Boulevard. So uh again uh my proposal has been since the report to look at uh reducing the emer non-emergent incidents but continue to go to the ones where we can make a difference on and uh allergic reaction for example we just had a discussion about epipins. We don't have epipins in our duty officer vehicles. Well, if that vehicle is the first one out from the home to the scene, my opinion is we should have epipins in it because you can save a life in a matter of minutes by giving someone a shot. So, we're purchasing uh new bags and we're putting medicines in the duty officer truck so that they can make an impact uh that way. They have an AED. They have these little smoke grenades they can throw in houses. That little buggy can do a lot of a lot of damage. um know that a reduction in this call type of call volume the non-emergent could be a 50 60% decrease in calls according to the numbers Alion is providing and so on and that's something new for us because we've gone to medical calls for many many years I can't find anything in our history and of course the mayor is going to have an opportunity to speak on this but I have not found anything in history where we've been in front of you to talk about what type of calls do you want to go to and the the the council made the decision. Um so the the request is going to be to reduce the medical side of the va the fire side will stay the same medical side will be uh reduced in to non-emergent incidents and uh I want to make sure that I leave the recommendations to you to make a decision on uh because we've been working on it for over a year without a formal type of discussion on it. Let's talk about daytime versus nighttime. We talked about the two shifts, the five to five and the five to five. Since I've been here, and we'll talk at 7 o'clock, uh to the to the community, we've had three structure fires that were in our town. Each time I was there, there was one firefighter and one engine. And to me, that's a safety issue. Not only that, nighttime you'll get you'll get three trucks and tender and everybody. It's a little different in the daytime than or than than it is at the night time. So, a recommendation based off the National Institute of Standards and Technology and the National Fire Protection Association who we look as a best practice. They do a lot of testing and they make recommendations to fire fire departments and they have said years ago that if you were to have a 2200 square foot Rambler fire, you should have in order to be compliant with all the rules of OSHA and the standards and all that stuff and uh uh you should have 15 people on the scene in a matter of minutes. and someone who's in my shoes running an on call volunteer model, we sort of chuckle inside because we're hoping to get five, you know, on the scene in a lot of cases around here. And this is why auto aid, automatic aid is so prevalent in our area is because others are facing the same issue of the daytime response. And uh because of that they're automatically dispatched at the exact same time we are for certain incident types. Like structure would be a multi- alarm dispatch where we already have the first alarm predetermined. Dispatch is toning all them out at the same time. If I need a bigger response, I'd call for a second alarm. Second alarm would already have a predetermined status of rigs and what city they're coming from and so on and it just goes up the alarm uh uh chain. But uh in the daytime, I'm concerned about the safety of the firefighters and I'm concerned about our inability to right now provide the staffing that we need during the daytime. Everybody's at work. We have three individuals in the daytime typically who show up. Thankfully, they have over they have probably let's see, they do they have over a hundred years of service combined. Uh, and they know what they're doing and they do it really well, but it's just not sustainable. So, my job is to bring information to you for so you can be aware of it. Um, I don't bring any of this to you lightly. Uh, if if I don't think it's needed, I won't I wouldn't be here. But, uh, I need you to, you know, understand where we're at. So with that being said about the daytime response immediately and my number one focus would be to create a staffing model during the daytime. What does that mean? We call it a duty crew model where we take our volunteers and rather than them uh respond to incidents by a pager or a phone and by the way we have extra pagers and I don't mean this in any but positive. If you want to experience what it's like to be an on call firefighter, I would love to have you carry a pager. And when that p we'll we'll program it for your area. And when that pager goes off, all I want you to do is respond to the fire station any time of the day that you and night that you can 3 in the morning. Sign the sheet and then go home and just do that for a month and experience what our firefighters go through. and you may have a different view of what what these people do. Um, they're very talented. They're balancing lives and and and and not only that, if they don't make the call expectation uh that we place upon them, they typically get disciplined or they lose their pension credit. So, if they if they don't make their 30% uh they they get they get nixed. they may not get that $8,000 or that share of those months for that quarter. And I don't know that's that's fair if we haven't come up with the best balance for them. So, with the staffing model, I'm proposing eight hours a day. We're going to offer it to our volunteers. It's not going to be mandatory at first, uh, but eventually we have to put people on the station. And quite frankly, with no disrespect to anyone, um I don't mind if they're from somewhere else. There's firefighters that are duty crew people and they they work for Plymouth today and they go to Roseville and then they come to East Bethl and then they go to Ice An, you know, sort of the Velcro patch. They're firefighters that make a full-time job out of a part-time job. Um, but we need to find a way to staff it because the next level of staffing for you is a full-time daytime staffing model. So, putting the numbers together and talking about a reduction in medical uh non-emergent calls, uh talking about the next uh step about reorganizing and reclassifying, we've come up with enough funding in the current budget where a daytime staffing model for East Bethl right now would cost about $15,452, which is really reasonable. If you look at this page, you'll see in this box up above right here some of the things that we would move around within the budget. And I spoke to Mike about this already. Um we would look at um if a duty crew were on scene in the green here, these are the type of things that they would be doing during the daytime. And we can manage day hours. We'll work with data. Uh Ben and the chiefs will work and you know we'll work with the best time to put these people in place. But they'll be doing equipment maintenance. They'll be you know they can even train if they want. They'll be doing you'll see an exponential increase in confidence in pumping an engine and using the saw and so on. This is my fourth time recommending this and implementing these programs. Oftenimes we hear people, you know, and next thing you know they're like, "Wow, this is this is awesome." You know, I get to schedule my time on the fire department. Yep. You don't have to come back unless there's an all station call and that's where your percentage is held. And that's rare. Right now, every station responds in the daytime. We tone out every station during the day and we're ending up with a few. So, they'll assist with admin. They'll do public education. We can even train them to do some low priority inspections. They can manage all the lock boxes that we have in the city. Uh the city has a very uh I'm going to say a highly secured lockbox system with a special diamond cut key that's uh used to access buildings after hours. Um keeping those lubed and maintained and making sure those keys actually work. And what that does is it it gets us into the building quickly, but it it it doesn't uh it doesn't require us to smash their window and door out to go check on a smoke alarm or something. So, it gives us access to different doors and so on. They can do that. They can go to the senior center and do blood pressure checks. They can do fire safety stuff. Um they'll come in every day and do station inspections and make sure the truck works and make sure the water's flowing and so on. And then uh they'll be assigned duties every day just like you would as a a firefighter. They'll be in uniform. If there's a call, the chief can take a breath knowing there's at least two people on a truck within a matter of a minute responding to the call. And the chief can get on the truck and the fire inspector can get on the truck. And now you have a crew of four who can make a huge impact on the incident in a matter of minutes rather than waiting the six to 10 minutes to get to the station, assemble at the station, and then go out the door. So, it it greatly enhances the daytime response time. And from our uh estimated cost, 15 grand. Uh that's that's that's a pretty good pretty good deal. And and what you see in here too is the total cost for the duty crew, 93,632. That's two people eight hour a day. But with the with the decrease in calls, with overtime, maintenance nights kind of thing, we will be at 78,000 in savings to give back. And uh the the next step I know to be true, the next step, if you decide to do till 10 at night or whatever it is or weekends, you start you start to add more costs. Weekends will probably cost you if you did a daytime weekend, probably cost you 30 grand. If you did a 12-h hour, it's going to be 50 something grand. But, uh, communities are moving to weekend duty crews as well. I'm not proposing that here because it gives families time to be together on the weekend. They go to the lower priority calls. But in any duty crew case, the major incidents are toned out just like they are now, but we know there's two people going. So, that's the duty crew model. Um I would like to start that ASAP. Um our new chief of course will be involved in all this uh too uh and aware of it, but we can't continue to not provide this safety and the service just because we're waiting another month or or someone to get here. And this has been a year a year discussion. And finally, in order to um reclassify a position that is doing more than what we believe that position is doing, and I I heard that when I first got here a year ago, that the fire inspector does fire inspection stuff, but you may recall me speaking to you. I spoke to that fire inspector at one time. I said, "How how much do you actually work on fire inspection stuff?" And at the time, he said, "About 30% of the time. and he's doing a good job. I've looked at every one of the inspection calls. I've looked at the buildings they go to and what he's doing, the followup. It's in the records management system, but we don't have a ton of buildings. But what he's doing on the uh on the back end is a lot of work that the chief would normally do and a lot of work that we could share. Uh, so I'm I'm asking to move the fire inspector position to an assistant position. Um, and you can do this anytime or you can wait till the new chief gets here. But again, that was in my report. I just see it much more clearer now that I'm here every day and I'm witnessing what's going on and I fully understand uh what's going on in the organization. So uh that those are my recommendations. I'm I'm requesting to one reclassify a job position. Uh that reclassification would put that uh individual into the operations mode, responding to calls 24/7 uh in a buggy. Uh it would take away the overtime budget because they would be classified as uh an exempt employee. That overtime budget would be used toward the duty crew. Um and duty crew would be providing a better service right now at the cost of about 15 grand if we if we validate everything we decide to change and um and so on. So any questions from there? Jerry, I just got one question. Okay. On the calls, how long would it take you to put that together where we could reduce the calls? Yeah. So, I would want to work with the chiefs right away. We could get that done right away. I would say uh you know, give it give it a month. We could have CAD we we have to go into CAD and talk with dispatch basically off off their schedule probably no more than two months. Okay. Because what I see with the numbers that you put together here that I mean it it saves us money by getting a duty crew and having people available to answer calls. And a big thing is safety. We can't have one person on an engine show up. I mean we could have three, four almost right away. That's important to me. So, I mean, I'm in favor of this big time, and if there's no objection, I'd like to have it added to our council meeting uh on new new business and new business to get this moving as soon as possible. That's my opinion. Okay. And I want to say I agree with um almost everything you've said. I agree. Um, especially on the medical calls, the non-emergency ones. I thought it was crazy that people were calling in for ab pain and they could carry themselves to a doctor. I carry myself. I carry my kids to the doctor for years and if they can't drive there are medical transport companies and if we need to we could publish uh make it public all the different ones that are available for people to use because I also think actually that some of our free services shouldn't be free but I think there's a law that they have to be. Um, I do have a question on this 8 hour daytime. Is that going to help our firefighters get their 30% easier or is it going to make it more difficult? So, that's a great question. So the daytime firefighters would go to hourly, like you need to make, for example, don't quote me, but 12 hours a month on a duty crew, and 40% of any all station calls, which would be the big the big calls, but we would change their good standing by changing them to an hourly response. Now, the question I get too is, "What if I'm nighttime and I want to work duty crew?" Love to have you. come. Well, do I get credit? Yep. If you can come to daytime calls and you're off during the day and you want to work a shift in the morning and enhance your skills and be better trained and serve your community, you can do it. Um I I don't care what shift you're on. If you can make any of the shift calls, come and uh I would give extra credit. you know, we still have to meet your requirements for the shift because we're we're balancing how many people will will be on that shift, but the duty crew will go to an hourly type of good standing rather than a percentage. Okay, great. So, I am a little confused on how things save because we are still going to need people to come at night when and on weekends and we're not going to have anybody totally assigned for that if they're working the eight hour days. I'm How are you going to have the health staff to do all of this? So, in the city, there's a daytime staffing crew. Uh, it was at six one time when I did the study. I think it's at it's it's at a good four with a couple people coming in and out, you know, because they work an odd shift. That's our day crew compared to our night crew, which is at 20. So, the night crew will still be there. This is only talking about daytime. So, only talking about a eight hour shift in the daytime. Okay. So, how was it only costing that? I guess the only costing the 15,000. Oh, because because up here on this line, we're we are reducing the line item costs. It costs $93,000 to do this. However, by moving through the reduction in the non-emergency calls and reclassifying and uh staying more focused in different areas, we've come up with about $78,000 the in the budget that can be moved somewhere else. Okay. Okay. So, the 2026 budget I have pretty much done. I sent it to Mike already uh based off this and it's it's actually there's it's a little less than what it was this year, but I've learned some other things just in the last day about what's in the budget and what we're paying for and stuff that I want to I want to talk about. So, I don't think we should continue to keep cutting the fire department budget. It's just it's there isn't much to spend there now. And for the assistant chief position, is there if the chief actually does what he's supposed to do all day long and not go on all these calls, is there enough work for both of them? Because in the way I'm thinking that if they're not going on 800 calls and they're doing their job, then assistant chief might not be necessary. Yeah, it's nice to have the two positions. One is there's plenty of work for them to do. The skill sets are different for between two people. One's a real techy person who wants to do data and, you know, wants to order all the equipment and so on, where the other one's more focused on budget, relationships with the council, coming to these meetings, you know, that kind of stuff that we we may not have been doing in the past. the fire chief's role isn't always about um uh you know staying in the station and work work work. It's about it's about addressing and the community and attending events and so on. But are we getting short on time? Got eight minutes. I got eight minutes. I'm done. I've got a question. I think one of the biggest things that um we're going to hear from doing this move on less calls is residents might say, "Are we in jeopardy? Are we not safe? Are we not covered?" I mean, it's come up before. Uh I know Ham Lake has got a system that they went to and they seem to be doing excellent with it. Um what do I say to someone that is worried about something like that? Yeah. What we what we can never guarantee is that a fall isn't a heart attack, right? It came in as a fall, but it's a heart attack. What we can say is our telecommunicators are professionals. They ask a lot of questions. Their call gets transferred directly to a lineup dispatch paramedics who ask questions and then they say, "Step them up, start them, add another ambulance or so on." Um, but there's there's no guarantee the fall isn't a heart attack. But the as you see in the Alina report, that's from them yesterday, 1% of their response left this city in an emerent mode. So, we're not we're not seeing a lot of those, but you we we're talking about a fever and and do we want to subject our firefighters to a fever and to COVID and everything else, you know, when most of us uh and I I won't ever judge anyone's emergency, but um as I said last time, um these people will end up in an ambulance and get to the hospital in the emergency room and wait just like the people on the other end of the wall in the emergency room for a doctor. But anything that's said to be mergent, we can make life safety and we can we can go in. We'll do it. So, I got uh two questions. Uh first with the fire inspector to assistant chief. Um I assume you've talked to the fire inspector about this. Yes. And what's his feelings on that? um he's he would be elated to have that position. Uh he's not interested in the fire chief's position, but um he feels he's doing what we've defined in the work and uh of course he's willing to step up and and do the work. He lives right down the road from the station. He's a longtime member here. He's a paramedic. He's got a degree. You know, he's he's a sharp he's a sharp kid. So, uh, if I didn't think he was the right guy for the job, I would mention, you know, we would post for it. Just want to make sure it's good by him before we take any action. Uh, the second is, um, have you talked to the fire department as a whole about making the changes to the call responses? Because I have talked to firefighters in the past that they want to go to a lot of the calls because some of them change. Yes. Yes. I understand that. My wife even informs me that I used to love going to all those calls. You know, uh I'm in a different position. I'm bringing this to you today without the firefighters maybe having all the information. Uh but once we get an understanding of what direction we're going, I can present that to them. Um, we don't have to make this uh like overnight. I would I would definitely ask about uh we we work on staffing first, but um they're aware that I've been talking about this since the first day I stepped foot in this city to do an evaluation. It's I I think having their opinion because they will actually be doing the work. Absolutely. That Yeah. council is telling them while council sits here in a separate building that yep does nothing there and we're telling them some might have the feelings that they think council knows better. Well, I want to know what the fire fighters themselves think and to have their input on that and uh with that that may have a smoother transition to um for these changes. Yes, I understand. I'm speaking to you as a professional who's been in the business for a long time, who's implemented this program before, who understands the balance of this this volunteer model versus the next step. Eventually, over time, we're going to be moving into models. Um, uh, and you can go back to the study that was, uh, the capstone study where it talked about non-emergent low priority calls and the number of people that said we go to too many of them. Now, you know, you three may love them and you three may hate them. So, it's it's what's best for the community overall to keep that model as long as we can, but I certainly understand your point. We'll have more conversations tonight because I'll go back. There's training tonight and I'll go talk to them about it. Okay. Yep. I'll make a motion to adjurnn the Oh, never mind. Sorry. So, uh, as far as the assistant chief deal, I don't know. I'm a big opponent for that because when we hired our first full-time chief, I was the chief prior to that. And Mark took the role as the administrator of the department, dealt with the politics, dealt with council, and all the state issues. And it's a big obstacle just doing that. My job was just to handle operations of the whole department, all stations and that. And that's a big job. So there's plenty of work for two people there. I I guarantee you that it's it's a lot of work, a lot of responsibility. So I'm all for that part of it. Um so we're here with three recommendations. What does council want to do? Mr. Mayor, we can bring that to the council meeting tonight to discuss under new business if you'd like. Okay, that's fine. So, motion to adjurnn. Yeah. Second. Have a motion second to adjurnn. All those favor? I I pass couple minute break. Yeah, let's take a couple minute break quick.