[Music] all right well it's 6:30 and in our in our desire to finish on time we better start on time so we will get started tonight is Monday March 18th 2024 this is a uh meeting of the minona city council it is a study session and I will call this meeting to order and then I will start at my far left and uh we will go around and um introduce ourselves and we'll do that and then um we'll go back to the back wall and have everyone just say uh state your name r do assistant city manager Kar heiney City attorney Darren Nelson Finance director Mike Funk city manager py Foster Bolton W One Rebecca sha W two Brad woron mayor KY kopley War for Kimberly Wilburn at large will Manchester Public Works director Julie wish community development director Kelly OD Recreation director Kevin fox interm fire chief Scott boram police chief Andy Gardner police captain Jason Tate Deputy Chief of Police introduction and Jennings uh scoreboard Baron gril Bob Tinsley boo restaurant Kirk Anderson Hopkins football boosters Nate runquist menaka rotary Lyn Melcher Hopkins youth hockey uh gambling assistant gambling manager Chris Rosland menaka rotary and Deb de Calbert city council at large great I think we got everybody thank you all for being here tonight um let's see that that brings us to item three um which is business items and we'll start with Mike I don't know Mr funk I don't know if you have any uh comments you'd like to make before we jump into the agenda otherwise I don't think so mayor and councel good evening uh this first agenda item as you just as noted is the discussion really the chair gambling for our liquor license establishments and so a discussion here this evening really mayor and Council turn us over to Julie wish KN our committee development director for presentation we've got about I think 20 30 minute type presentation to give you a lot of this background information related to chable gambling and then allowing time for convers I know tonight's agenda is full as you noted mayor and so we're we're hoping we a good quick robust conversation next 45 minutes 45 minutes sounds good Julie thank you um I was telling Kelly before the meeting this is probably one of the harder reports I've had to write lately I don't know why the subject matter was just more difficult to write about in terms of um what exactly charitable gambling is what the hist is in motanka and um how this uh proposal might work um and so I think it's very difficult to um what do you got there different all right uh difficult to explain so I'm going to try to kind of piece through it I should ask is everybody familiar with charitable gambling in some fashion some fashion okay barely if you were to rate yourself on 1 to 10 10 10 being the most that you understand it how what's the number you got a five five five you got three over here I would say more like three three okay four okay back we're back six maybe okay all right that helps me because then it helps me understand how deep I should probably go into some of this so I appreciate you just sharing with me what your experiences so the definition of charitable gambling and this is under the state law is really um the operation of any lawful gambling activities by an organization that is eligible for a licens or from the state gambling control board to conduct such activities so basically um that's the premise of charitable gambling some people might ask well what doesn't Menat tanka allow some gambling and we do we have charitable gambling in the city and there's an ordinance about it where we don't allow it though is where there's uh an existing liquor Li so that's the difference between what is in minona and what is in other cities so if you asked how many permits have we issued for charitable gambling um over the last 10 years there's been about 85 permits um that were issued for that kind of activity so think of a raffle for something or some kind of um uh something charitable that's going on with the church or a synagogue or some kind of foundation that sort of thing um so that happens pretty regularly and the city not only City staff but city council members uh the mayor has been contacted by various folks about trying to have the conversation again about reopening um this this idea of charitable gambling within an establishment with a liquor license so that's why we're here tonight and you did Express that you wanted to talk about this when you met um as a group to kind of plan out your year yes that's working there we go so really if you didn't know there the state agency that regulates this type of activity has actually been around since 1945 I wasn't I didn't know that I didn't know it was around for that long of a period I guess it has been longer than most people think the definition of who can be licensed though is it has to be a nonprofit uh either a fraternal veterans group religious or other nonprofit and they may apply for licensing if they've been in existence for at least 3 years and have at least 15 members so not everybody can do this sort of activity so it has to meet those parameters to do the activity I don't know if we have more chairs for people I don't know if we have more guests coming in but if somebody can get more chairs that would be great um in addition to licensing organizations are required to get separate premises permits and that comes from the director of the board for each location where the gambling would be conducted and like licenses they're Perpetual meaning they stay around um as long as that entity is conducting the nonprofit uh activities um this is the ordinance that's actually on the books today about what charitable gambling activities can take place that's in section 605 if you're famili familiar with how the codes laid out so5 deals with a lot of business Regulation and Licensing regulation so and this is a section in the liquor law area that is the preventative part so this is the actual language that talks about gambling and then the fact that people who have operations that involve liquor can't do gambling it's interesting when I was doing the research for kind of what was happening in Minot tonka's history and why this kind of never has has seen the light of day as far as um uh something allowed in the city code in the um 1980s um the state abolished local licensing regulations for gambling um and it allowed the city to have some Authority and there was some pressure at that time and I was Finding quite a few requests to do gambling um and they actually voted down every single application um think about the will hop that was on Highway 7 and biston Road I've been there yeah um bone shakers you remember that restaurant okay she Paula remembers that um so there were restaurants that were interested at that time and the council just really took a hard line at at that point and every decade since then there really hasn't been that much interest from the council level to do it so when people ask me why does it why does an ordinance say what it does it's it's usually the basis of what the council believes at that time so that's kind of where um the history is so how does it really work in terms of the city aspect of charitable gambling and basically it's a pretty easy change in terms of the language however it's really complicated all the elements that have to go into the change if you want to do that so it I just took the section out of the state kind of charitable gambling law it requires the city to approve a premises permit um it also requires us to decide whether or not we're going to have local taxes it also um asks if we would have more stringent gambling regulations than the state law um and that does include that complete prohibition so we are able to do that um as we have done today and then I started thinking I need something visual um because I think it's hard to to kind of comprehend the organization the premises who is using it how does the money get funnel and I thought this was the easiest way that I could probably explain it so in the middle is a charitable organization they have to have a host location though so that would be a bar or restaurant type atmosphere typically is where you see this happening they can in the host location sometimes you see the host location have a separate kind of area and that's a separate um The Entity itself the charitable organization is usually running that they have people that sit in the booth if you will there's also cases where the host location will sell it at the kind of behind the bar sometimes you'll see boxes behind the bar and the bartender will be the people Distributing the charitable gambling um this is in a pull tab situation um um what happens then is on the left side is the state is controlling it they're licensing they're monitoring they're enforcing they're taxing there's a lot of aspects that are happening on the state level but on the city Side you know one of the main decisions you'll probably have to think about is whether or not we'll see up to 10% of the net profits that would go to the city and that can be for a variety of approved there's a list of approved uses I think I linked linked it in the report for you to take a peek at the state also says that if you're a charitable organization you have to give at least 30% of your profits to a charitable recipient so think about I think were we from hockey who was hockey back here okay so we have a Hockey Association they're giving most of their money I you know I would assume to some of their hockey participants but then they also give to the wider community so there's lots of different examples of who they give to and I don't have all that information for you you can probably have a conversation with those um uh charitable organizations if you want to get that deep into it on the left hand side of the screen I'm also showing you it's not just pole tabs that we're talking about it's things like electronic pull tabs um it's a kind of a immersive um iPad experience where you're press you're loading money onto it through someone who's loading the the dollar figure and then you're playing the game on an iPad and then on the very left if you can't see it it's a meat raffle so that's meat in front of a a wheel so I mean it can come in various forms but um that's generally the main ways that we see it used in and around um minona so one of the main questions you have to ask is what are you going to require for the residency requirements so the location of the the nonprofit does it have to be in minaka or do people just have to live here who are on the board and not necessarily the charitable organization isn't based here but the people who are on the board are minaka residents or are you going to say something a little bit more casual meetings have to occur in the city and then when I looked at Bloomington was the most recent example of a city that updated their charitable gambling ordinances and they were they did a city survey and about half the cities they looked at um required an entity or its members be residents within the city so that's one thing you have to think about and then the charitable fund contribution so the city or county can uh require up to 10% of its net gambling profits that's a big word there so don't don't think it's the gross it's the net of their profits because this is after they do all of their um Administration and spending then um you would have to at some point decide if you wanted to take that and then decide what to use it for um I would say try to stay away from answering that question tonight I think you could probably get really sidetracked and trying to answer where you would spend the money but there's a lot of good uses of that money um also don't ask me how much money I think we could receive because I have no idea really depends on how many establishments there are how many charitable organizations there are and all of that is TBD because I can't really even give you an estimate of what that might be the table you provided had some of that information I know that was from other cities though but I can't tell you what it would be for minetonka so and it could be very different here let's just say only two locations set up you know as compared to other cities or it took long a longer period of time time to you know make some of this occur got um so out of the 10 CI some 10 cities out of the one surveyed there were um 5 to 10% was their contribution so there were some that had lower contributions but if they did have a contribution sometimes it ended up being 10% and these were the numbers that we were seeing um and then you would develop a a distribution uh process and then we would have to report and ually to the state so one option is you just don't require it right and you don't have to deal with it you don't have to do anything so that's that is definitely on the table and then it cannot be used for staff time um that administers the um paperwork for this I'll show you another area where we can charge for that another area of that needs to be determined and I think probably this is the one I spent the most time with when I was thinking about the report is the trade area and I think in the report I was thinking about um a joining and what did I have here I'm looking at the numbers so we had three school districts but then I was also thinking about all the other schools so we have District 287 and we have uh charter schools and we have you know there's lots of different school things that don't necessarily fall into the three big buck kid like menaka WIA and Hopkins High School so or Hopkins um school districts so there's a little bit of that thinking going on then there's also nine adjacent cities so if you look at every piece of menaka's borders I kind of put out what cities those were so if you put it synonomous with school districts that's a pretty big area we all know how big those school districts are you can get pretty far into the western part um that too much the South but definitely to the East and North you're going to get further than your adjacent communities when you're when you're thinking about a trade area um Bloomington actually requires 30% of the proceeds be spent in the trade area so they're requiring not only does 30% have to be uh provided to charitable activities but they're saying 30% of the um money has to be spent in their trade area um and then 13 cities that were surveyed uh they actually ranged uh from 30 to 100% the average was 70% being spent within the trade area and then what was my final Point here uh average estimated trade area expenditure in Bloomington was 65% even though their requirement was 30 so so I just kind of put a map here to help you um think about how big that could be and then finally we have local tax uh cities and counties can Levy up to 3% of the organizations now now we're going to gross gambling uh receipts as long as the revenues are used for GR gambling regulation so there are things that the city does um administratively paperwork wise um process wise that will need to be done um I've talked to a lot of cities about this particular provision um some have unrolled it after adopting it just because it's painful to document all of that and track time and and all of that so I think it's a little bit difficult it might be one of those things where you want to just try it out and see how it goes and then see how much staff time and then you know you can always adopt later a local tax if you feel like it's too burdensome on the general fund so that's my presentation the questions in the packet were really does a council agree that charitable Grambling in liquor establishments should be considered and then if you can get to a general agreement about that then you should tackle the other questions I wouldn't recommend you to talk about anything until you get over the first hump so uh mayor I'm just going to keep it at that um I'll turn it back to you for questions and discussion yep well before we jump into the First Council question um Council any question questions for Julie or staff anyone well I'm always good for questions I have I have a question about the trade there do we want to ask all the questions or well just just some I mean you know as we consider you know should we consider charitable gambling what what you know what questions do we have as we tackle that uh question um and then because you know if we if we think it shouldn't be considered the questions become but so my only question on a larger scale is I mean have in in your research and conversations have you heard of any problems that this has created in any way the only thing I can kind of think of is occasionally you hear about a rogue employee who is skimmed off the top or something but right I think um and that's really really a function of the state and so there's a couple of different Departments of the state that are involved in gambling so um let's just say that happened in our community and some uh gambling manager went rogue and something was illegally Done Right city is actually not the enforcement arm for that to U be rectified it's really the gambling um control board as well as the uh there was another agency I mentioned in the report that has the control over that so we would not there's not enforcement activity it's not like liquor I mean liquor can you can have enforcement at the state level too but often times it's more of a locally managed issue you know we do regular enforcement that sort of thing tobacco same thing gambling totally different and your I mean my sensitivity is taking on a significant burden for staff but in talking to Mike today and kind of in it's getting it stood up and then it's pretty minimal staff involvement from your perspective yeah I don't I don't see a huge burden I think the only thing is yeah getting it kind of organized and and figuring out the procedures I think that's just one lift once it's done assuming it's the same folks you know um that we're talking to right now it's that's going to be the easier part um but I you know you don't know until you get into it right right and I think we would report back to you during the budget season like Hey we're having a hard time keeping up with applications or we you know we can't manage this or you know and then we would let Mike know to see if we needed more staff or money or local tax gotcha all right KY and then Deb I think you had a question too Deb is that correct okay KY go ahead I guess I have one question kind of piggy back on what re was saying I guess my question would be around um maybe further cheap um far as like crime do you think it would increase crime because I'm thinking about like when you're having an EXA establishment where there's liquor and gambling and this is maybe stereotyping from what I see on TV I've never seen this play out in real life but you know you got folks gambling with um drinking and just kind of addicted to gambling and you know I know sometimes people get pretty upset about they lose their money or whatever or and then they're drinking this this what I see on TV I be like I don't know do we speculate something increasing police calls maybe I don't and you know I have neighboring Chiefs and they have this in their cities and I have never had a conversation where they said hey be careful with g gambling in these in with liquor um could it happen sure but I haven't heard anybody that's neighboring to us that had that concern so okay I don't think it would be maybe it stays in maybe that's one thing that does stay in TV shows right okay so all right that's that was like my biggest concern like if people are getting drunk and like hav getting upset about their money and pull tabs something I don't know all right thank you and then Deb and then and then we'll go to Paul after you yeah I'm still trying to I'm I'm hearing two different things about uh you know just St to you know there's there's uh sounds like not a real understanding yet you know what kind of a heavy lift it would be I shared uh Rebecca's concern about you know adding to staff burden and and it sounds like really it's it it's sort of confined to the front end as you're trying to pull everything together and then we sort of more or less hand it off to the state to enforce and the charitable organizations to manage um and so my question is uh you know just making sure I mean I'm just wanting to make sure I understood what Julie was saying about basically recouping the you know we charge fees or we charge taxes to try to recoup um the amount of money it costs to to run certain programs and recoup the cost of the staff time to do that so whether it's something like you know inspections or even getting something like this up and running was I understanding that you felt like as you got deeper into it you could give us more of an idea before we actually had to say yay or NE nay sort of what we would have to recoup and to make sure that staff time was covered and that this doesn't just become another expense to the city yeah Julie yeah I don't I don't know that I'll have a great answer before you would adopt an ordinance I think I would have an answer after we went through kind of this initial phase I think you have to understand though that when I say I don't know that it's a huge lift I mean I'm I'm thinking scope right so we issue 650 food licenses a year we issue 75 liquor licenses a year this is not going to be we're not going to have 75 uh licenses I mean I think we would I don't know what we would do but I mean it's just not going to be the same um amount it's going to be less than 75 right so um I think that's where the scale in my head was going and but again I can't and I there's only so many um charitable organizations as well so you can't have 7 there's probably not 75 organizations um so that's my educated guess that it's less than 75 probably more like 5 to 10 you know so that's where but I don't have the experience yet and I can't other than that that's all I can tell you so in reading the um just follow up in Reading you know when you go to the link about guidelines for expenditures it doesn't sound like it we can even recoup the money for that staff time if I am understanding it correctly yeah not for the 10% so the 10% link is just what you can spend that money on the the tax uh if you can go back to the tax side brand if you would um you may there you go you can Levy up to 3% to deal with the administrative costs of it okay but the problem with if you Levy it and you don't know what the you know the taxes are or the administrative costs are and you overt you know that's the situation I'm trying to avoid you'd have to so so we could potentially however let's say we're over taxing or under taxing could we change it later it sounds like kind of a it would be very difficult to change we would have to we would have to adopt a new ordinance with a new tax correct Kine yeah all right thank you Paula so my understanding just to Circle back with this local tax that if you overcharge and you have to refund yes whatever was over correct that so if you did charge that tax okay um um and then secondly can you um the investigative fee of up to $250 that can go towards staff it can go um typically that would be for the police to do the background information got it and that's a maximum just St why that's a maximum you can charge for our siid of City okay all right and then um could you just uh clarify for me it was temporary versus you know is this licensing then going to go with the establishment or is it going to go with the organization uh Karine I need your help on this one just a little bit so the when you license it's the premises license is issued by the state correct and then the local approval is for the charitable organization conducting the the activity um right so the state issues the premises permit before they can issue the permit the local jurisdiction has to approve that so then they know motanka is allowing that right so um right now anybody could apply for permit but if it was a premises permit if they did the state would contact the city and if the um premises permit was for a licensed liquor establishment the city would not approve it and that's why people haven't been applying got it got it thanks it's kind of like how I I compare it to liquor license same thing happens with liquor so we have the state will sign a liquor license then city has to sign the liquor lense sign off as well same kind of yeah and then just one more thing in your research um have you found with other cities or pure cities that it's been a boon um to business I mean our you know I understand one of the reasons is because some of our local businesses feels that it could it's somewhat disadvantaging them not to have that ability to conduct that in you know bars and restaurants and things like that for charitable gambling right um is there any data or research that shows that that would or would not be the case um we do have one owner who had submitted a pretty detailed PowerPoint of sales information and impact kind of that they had been experiencing and then kind of the surrounding area and the locational distance and how close some of these establishments were making the point that obviously that business might be going elsewhere um because of uh lack of activity so we have that PowerPoint for your knowledge if you want to see that before your next meeting um I would say when I visit with colleagues I do there's definitely you know you got that rent piece coming in and so that's a pretty predictable stream of rent depending on how they do it there's parameters um with a booth versus um the other kind of situation behind the bar um so that continuous stream I think is attractive as well um and so but also the reciprocal business that they're getting out of it either for a longer visit or for the fact that people are you know coming to that location so there's kind of two things going on you're going to support the local hockey team instead of going to Wendy's they'll go to right whatever establishment I'm not going to name one okay yeah can't play favorites today okay thank you thank you y are there other other questions anyone anyone um I've I've got a couple um one is you know I'd really love to see a pro forma p&l on where does the money go um you know I mean okay you've got a charitable gambling operation it brings in $10,000 okay um does that all get paid out in prize money I would say probably not um so how much goes to prize money how much goes is there rent um to be in the uh in the facility um is there um is there a certain amount that goes to the city it sounds there might be there might not be um you know I I kind of I want to know where the money goes and and how it works um you know I think that we've got um uh Facility Owners bars and restaurant owners that are interested in this and I'm I don't really understand their interest other than the fact that they expect that they will make more money if they have it than if they don't but I'm not sure what the source of that money is is are is charitable gambling so popular that that they're going to have more patrons because they have charitable gambling maybe okay I'd like to understand that um or do they get do they get 10 20 30% off the top because um because that's the way charitable gambling is set up in Minnesota I don't have an appreciation for where the money that comes in goes and and I want to understand that if this is going to be something that we're going to approve I mean I I want a business case you know based on reality and and if somebody doesn't have the numbers for their because they don't have charitable gambling in minaka well I'd be happy to have it from Hopkins or from y Zetta but I want to understand what's going on I don't need to know the name of the establishment but I want to see what a p&l looks like and where the money go goes I think that's I I think that's fundamental to um you know evaluating this over time I don't I don't need to see that tonight but I think it's I think it's an important consideration to see okay you know you know I mean it's kind of the rule of large numbers I mean what happens um you know and uh to ky's point um you know gambling does attract crime it's because the numbers are big and when there's a lot of when there's a lot of money there tends to be crime but I don't think charitable gambling Min tank would be so big that that would crime would be an issue but I think that we just want to have the facts so we understand it and so those that's my biggest question is I just want to understand okay where's how's money come in and where does it go and and who benefits from that money beyond the charity yeah we can get that for you the organizations we spoke with were very upfront and very detailed about information that they they have no problem giving that information in fact it's a lot of it's online they have to file reports all those uh reports are online um and then the rent limits that I just want to make sure that everybody understood this rent limits are set out by the gambling laws so let's just say you have Booth operations the or the host the bar restaurant can't charge more than 10% of the monthly gross profits that's the maximum um and then total for all Booth operations at a single single location would' be maximized at 1750 per month so all this is spelled out if it's a bar operation that changes if it's a booth and a bar operation meaning they have it at a booth and behind the bar then there's different parameters so that is static there's no um that's the same for every city every city across the state that never changes what they do with the money who they give it to what their percentage of giving is that's all filed with the state and those records are all readily available um for you to look at so I can I can make that more digestible for you to great yeah that would be helpful for me um and so you know the qu the top question is do we think do we agree that charitable gambling in liquor establishments um bars and restaurants um should be considered and are we are we in a position to take I think we can answer that question then we can decide what we're want to do with the others but can I ask just one more question yes go ahead sorry just um are we how much an out as been a Tonka in this how many you know how many of our surrounding pure cities um have this as opposed who don't I can't think of any that don't okay have yep okay thanks so we are an outlier to answer your question okay mayor I've got yeah Rebecca thank you so I you know it has I think it's well established that it is become harder to run a profitable Restaurant and Bar um period over the course of of time you know I I worked in the restaurant business many years ago and the margins were very slim then and I think they're more slim now and and you know people choose to go into that business and and I get it and it's a passion but also as an outlier um in minona and knowing that we're very proud of a lot of these bu businesses and and the restaurants that we have and we support them we supported them in the state of the city and I think this is a way that we can do two things we can help make the put put restaurants and bars on the same equal footing in this regard as our neighbors and I think that we can help raise money for the community and maybe this is you know the 20 bucks that somebody has in their pocket that they might have otherwise bought a lottery ticket with and keep some of that money in the community and that goes to the trade area requirement but um so I I tend to be pretty in favor of this I'm not as I I read the the statute I think it's pretty prescriptive so I'm not as concerned about the p&l on it I think as Brad is although I I understand that I think that the market kind of sort set out either it's worth it for the The Entity to have them there and then um that money is coming I think we can direct it right back into our community and so that's the second bit of enhancement so for those Reasons I'm very interested in this I think it makes a lot of sense if we were sticking our neck out and being the first city maybe I'd have a different different idea but I don't have any reason to think that we should be any different than our neighbors thanks Rebecca other comments anyone I would agree with Rebecca py thanks py yeah yeah I agree too I look at it as a opportunity to bring in some money for organizations and maybe even a little bit for vonka so I'm okay it so um anyone else I mean I'm getting head to head NS May yep Deb yeah I would just say quickly I shared I I actually had the the same question for Mike that you posed about just sort of you know like where does the money go and he gave me some of the answers uh my concern has a little bit to do with just addiction so people that may be a little bit addicted to liquor might also be a little bit you know supposed to be addicted to other things like gambling and um but you know I also feel like we still sell liquor and we still sell cigarettes and we still do all kinds of things and people are grownups um and um you know I was thinking you know who's going to do pull tabs um and who would who would um suffer the consequences of poor choices the most would be people with the least amount of money to lose on pole tabs so that's that's my only rub that I in general agree it's definitely worth um uh considering and I also agree that because we can help direct money um directly into the city um and I I totally agree that um it's it's challenging for um restaurants and frankly uh any retail business excuse me so I do think that you know looking at the surrounding cities that already have um charitable gambling um many of which are directly bordering us um I it very well may put some specific kinds of businesses as as a at a disadvantage with which I would not like to do so I I think we do need a little bit more information but I'm definitely um fine with considering us anyone else um Kimberly I'll just say I mean basically echoing what Rebecca said I feel like reading the the report there it's lays out pretty there are restrictions on where the money can go um so I feel again pretty comfortable with with that information going with that information um and I feel like some judgments were made maybe in the past on the morality of certain activities that maybe it's not my place to make those judgments that you know what I might or might not do personally I don't know that that's that that it's the job of the council to sort of put that on on establishments and in our residents because you know we we allow we allow alcohol consumption and we allow gambling but we're saying you can't do them at the same time and I I understand the concern about people with addiction but the reality is that it would be different if no other city in the state allowed charitable gambling and we were going to be the first but it's sort of the opposite so it's we're not we're not preventing anyone with a problem from Welling so anyway so yes I I am in favor of considering it and and I think that's the point the question here is not do we favor this and are we going to we going to vote for it that's not the question on the table the question is do we think it should be considered and I would agree with my fellow council members that it should be considered um you know I do share you know you all know well enough that I'm the resident prude when it comes to a lot of these things and I'm not a fan of you know combining gambling and liquor at the same time I just in my experience my personal experience liquor does not make me smarter it just doesn't and so that combination to me is not an ideal combination but do I think we should consider it given given the competitive makeup given the challenge um that some of these businesses that we value face I think it it's worthy of consideration but I'm not saying I'm going to vote for it and not I'm not asking anybody here to say that because that's not the question before us the question is should we consider it I think we should and I think we should have a debate and I think we should hear from residents and have their perspectives and then and then vote and and decide as a council uh whether we want to join the rest of our neighboring communities or if we want to be a standalone because um our standards are different than theirs and and uh and we're comfortable with that so but the question is should we consider it I think we're unanimous in that anything else so then if there is agreement do we have any feedback that we want to provide on residen any of these other factors residency requirements charitable fund percentages trade area requirement investigative fee uh regulatory tax is there are there any cities um on this uh chart that staff prepared that we think are doing it the way we want to do it and any opinions on any of those issues Rebecca I'll try to make it really quick I mean I think Simplicity in this regard is probably the best approach especially initially um as much as it would be great to have some money come in it sounds like that comes with a lot of administrative burden and it goes towards a charitable end any Focus anyway so maybe let the people that are doing that do that that's my inclination um I I can appreciate the trade area requirement I it's a challenge because a lot of this is really School District based but um I I think it makes sense to have some kind of um requirement and then I would defer to staff really on the fees what they think makes the most sense because you'd have you have a better you'll have a better sense of what um how how in uh intensive this process is going to be kissy um for me I was thinking that um the business should be located um in man tanka um residency requirements um for us I guess I think it was the business right the business or the it's the charitable organization okay so the charitable organization should be located in um minona and then as far as the fees um I think the mayor used to say this don't break the bank and so I'm thinking about like um because it's going to be new and um the businesses has to see like you know what type of profit that that they would bring in um I would just say like yes you know there should be a percentage but not to the point where if it's new for them then they have to also see like what type of income is bring it in and so not to break the bank for them as well keep that in consideration and maybe if it's doing well maybe re-evaluate it um as time go on maybe like a year or so just to see how how it's doing for them and then far as um the other fees um the 3% um fee I thought would would be fine and um that was pretty much kind of my thought process on most of them other comments Paula yeah um I'm a little bit uh unsure about the um uh the location uh requirement because we do have uh chable organizations that are located just outside or in wetta you know whether it's food Shel or iocp who might want to um so I think maybe the trade area might be the more appropriate um say for that so I I would maybe want to look at that that's not a big thing right now but um I think the trade area might be the more important thing um to to kind of be looking at and then again I agree that uh leaving uh staff to kind of look at the determination make the preliminary determination as to whether we impose a local tax whether that's worth the hassle and the staff time that would take to implement and also the you know the 10% net profits going to the city for some of our projects alongside even though that doesn't make up staff time it you know kind of in some ways um helps uh direct some funding to some City projects that were kind of interesting in the list of projects that were provided other comments um Kimberly um I thought that the Bloomington example was like a pretty good one to follow um I believe they settled on 7% of the of the profits coming to the city I can hardly hear you which means that the that the reporting probably came okay can you hear me now all right okay so I was just saying I thought the Bloomington example was a a pretty good one to follow and that they had settled on 7% for the the amount coming back to the city um I don't recall whether they did the the tax or not they didn't okay and so again I would also defer to staff on that if they think that's too much of a hassle um but they used to but they got rid of it got rid of it because it was too too too difficult so um and so correct me if I wrong I'm I'm thinking that as far as staff time the tax was more of a hassle than just the right the okay um and yeah I would also like the the the Charities to be in or near minetonka I guess that could be up to up for discussion whether it has to be strictly within the minetonka borders and a and a reasonable trade area that includes our school districts which does get to be a large area um and yeah that's that's it very good any other comments um paty um I do like the I mean it seems to me that the organizations in the charit I mean the charitable fund organizations and the hosts are pretty upfront and transparent about their um you know what they see will happen so I feel like and especially the charitable organization sounds like they've been doing this for a while so like not to reinvent the wheel kind of leave it up to them and their expertise but I also really like the idea I mean and I don't know it's up to 10% charitable fund contribution rate I would like to see that 10% and not and um and not five all right KY yeah I was going to say to um because I didn't mention the charitable uh percentage so yeah I'm for the 10% and then also um not I didn't really take into consideration um the school districts because we have um schools in different districts um so I guess that would follow up under the trade as well um because it's going to be important that we make sure that um if we do do the um gambling um ordinance or whatever that we do support the school systems and I'm thinking um especially um schools that's in low in um communities like Hopkins school district so I just want to make sure that we are able to um do something like that as well very good anything else I was thinking that too kiss yeah so I'll just throw out a couple of comments I mean I think we should charge the $250 investigative fee I mean that's basically kind of cost um and and we want to do a thorough investigation um you know I'm I'm good with the 10% um the one thought that I had is you know obviously the simpler we can make this the better and so you know when you kick off you know the Charities are not going to know how much money um you know or the The Establishment whoever charging the 10 10% to is not going to know but I think if we when they fill out their application you say well what's your anticipated revenue and uh they give us a number let's say they say it's going to be $50,000 okay 10% is $5,000 we're going to we're going to we're going to bill you that at the end of the year um and then at the start of the new year you tell us it was and you do a Reconciliation and boom it's done and then you say okay and based on what you did last year we're going to assume that for next year and you know just keep it as simple as possible because I think the Charities um will and The Operators will know what's coming in the front door and um and and whether they met their projections or not and I think that's that's simple um and shouldn't dissuade anyone from you know making it overly burdensome it's not pay every month it's what whatever you know you um you just say you owe it at the end of the year and boom off you go and um and let's reconcile once a year and I think that that's pretty simple um you know I think that um I I like the idea of having our trade area be uh the school districts that fall within the city of motanka so we know that the that the three are Hopkins wi Isetta and minetonka but you know do we have any students I mean not not open enrolled but is there any is there any pinart of in ataka that goes to Eden Prairie schools or because if there if there were then okay let's include those let's have a let's have a bigger let's have the trade area effect you know let me let me come back to you on that a geography you know if it if if a metaka resident who goes to school in their school district um um let's just include all those school districts in our trade area and that's pretty broad trade area but I'm I'm seeing some nervousness from this pardon me for for clarification yeah the city is not required to set a trade area okay but if it sets a trade area it must include every city that is contiguous to the city all right so that's good then yeah every city that touches motanka will have to be included in that and you can make it larger and we have nine and you and that's the point about the school district because you can make it larger than your I me I just want to finish the thought there is another school district in manataka for the uh Bren Road school right so I think we should probably just take a peek at where those that jurisdiction lies and then maybe just over and then follow actually what I'd really be interested in the staff recommendation on that I mean I think I think the trade area thing get can get complex and confusing and I would say Okay staff and if think that's a bad idea then tell us that and I think we can we can handle that I mean the other thing that I'm thinking is for instance our homelessness program is run by a nonprofit which is technically not operated out of minaka specifically but serves residents of minaka so just thinking about things like that you know that's why I'm thinking the trade area gets very complicated but I want to make ass sure that personally that that the residents of minaka and um their young people are uh served so um but you know uh I'm I'm grateful for kin's um explanation of the trade area that was very helpful and I also think we should keep it simple and I also um and thinking 10% and you know the investigative fee all right can I just make one quick comment about the 10% because I don't my concern is that makes it way less simple but so so hearing that people want to do the 10% we have to Define what that's going to be and have it be Perpetual I don't think we want to be in a position where we're deciding in December every year where we're going to spend our 10% in the following year as a council because I just worry that that right yeah my wouldn't it be just a budget function mik just like we normally would go through the budget we would it' be a budget function and I think a couple things just on how the money is collected my understanding of it is that for for any of the establish so if you approve this ordinance at some point any of the establishments that decide to operate a gambling out of their establishment they have to fill out their paperwork every year so and that has to get to the state of Minnesota so the paperwork's already in place how that money comes to the city is just it's a number based off of their profit and loss so there isn't any calculations made by the city the establishments simply just do their profit and loss reporting to the state they look at what their net profit is take 10% of that and send the city a check so there's there isn't really anything in terms of the city having to the crunch numbers spreadsheets that's all done by The Establishment so it's pretty whether you do zero five % or 10% doesn't change anything on the city's behalf it's really the onus on the uh on on the entities that have the the um permit to submit the paperwork to the city but we're very limited on what we can use that correct and then to that point of the question so then whatever monies come say you do decide on a percentage five or 10% those monies that come to the city then you as a council can decide where to put that and that would be just during the budget process where you decide to allocate it towards we have some needs so whether it's in police fire uh Recreation natural resources you the council can decide how to use those funds but it's so limited on what we and homelessness yeah well I'll say we don't have to decide that now we decide that tonight correct so and given in the interest of time I think we'll move on uh just one I have two questions for the council uh one is how quickly that was one question I'm going to propose like a May introduction if that's acceptable sound about right um to how much more public input we've been doing a lot of talking with charitable organizations we've been talking to a lot of restaurant owners um not sure how big you want to go with public involvement um I think it's hard to explain to people so I'm I'm going to maybe recommend that you not do any more public Outreach like a minota matters just because um I'm not sure people will understand what you're doing because I think people think it's already here um not if they visit restaurants here they know it's not here but you know what I'm saying it's like what don't they have it right you know that kind of thing kind of confusion um but it's up to you how you want to handle that so that's the second question so may intro is what I would do and then public involv it would be intro in May and then um I mean is there any public I mean is there a public hearing involved is that it it doesn't go to the Planning Commission it would just come back to us so it' be introduced one week and and come back you know a month later or whatever yeah you can take input at the May meeting of intro and when you consider adoption yes okay would you rather opt for that just taking hearing testimony or just I think that's appropriate I mean I think I think we want to publicize it a little bit to let people know it's coming but I really think it's the interest interested parties that are going to want to talk to us so it's the it's the Charities who would be supportive of this and the and the businesses uh but we should let our residents know so that if they want to weigh in they can and I don't think news item maybe yeah maybe a news item or a mention you know either on our website or or in a you know uh an email or um or in the menona memo we could um but men is probably an ideal time for the memo okay so that's F that's why I didn't go there okay that's fine but the website or the news item I yeah we can plus we can plus something out and then um I would think that um you know and and we typically don't take public comment on introductions we do it uh when we're considering it so we we take public comment on the second meeting we could do it at either time so if you want to do it I mean I think you could do it either or so that you give people two choices all right that's fine good we don't have we don't have to even decide that right now may may is quite a ways away yet okay thank you all right sorry to belabor any anything else all right mayor yes I I would just I just want to CL I just want to say that as for the percentage of charitable that the 10% I am convincible um if people have other opinions so I just want to clarify my you I don't think we've made any decisions tonight and I think they will be discussed um when it comes forward in a in a regular meeting thank you m all right thank you so that brings us to um Item B um which is director budget presentations and Mike you've got that um item yeah thank you mayor uh before we get going just a quick question on timing so we uh the idea is for the next remaining portion of tonight's study session uh we broke up our director presentation so we'll have our nonpublic safety directors um present first and there are six of those uh we present those alphabetically uh six directors at about 10 minutes each is about an hour so I just want do you want to take a quick break now mayor and Council or do you want to strap in for the uh next next hour yeah let's take a break in an hour yeah let's take a break in hour I'm going to grab another water but we can people can let's get started and uh okay quick I'll do a quick intro while people get uh situated in again thank you mayor and Council so tonight we do as I mentioned have our eight directors here uh with us this evening in May or the may study session we do have scheduled the kickoff to our 2025 budget and as we've done the last couple years we've asked directors to come in and give you really just a quick snapshot of what's happening in each of their departments uh you'll see in the budget presentations here that I'm sorry in the department presentations each of the Departments have touched on their organizational chart their Staffing just kind of give you again an update on where they are with Staffing highlights from 2023 uh they'll also talk about departmental challenges I think it's important for all of you to know just some of the challenges they're facing and then a look ahead at 2025 potential goals and some new innovation and um on the horizon so it's really kind of setting the stage for that may study session as again it's it's information for you as we start to Embark upon our budget process for the next nine months as you know is what it takes uh to pull our budget together so with that Brad and Council um really would kick it over to I think Miranda Dam our assistant city manager we'll start with admin first and then we'll work our way through our department Miss D thank you may Council so I'm the assistant city manager director of admin service say so I wear both hats so I do oversee administrative Department we have uh four divisions and we technically call ourselves five divisions because the city manager division is Mike myself Jason Sissa so this is small so on every slide I do have a photo of each of the divisions uh as well so 2023 Department highlights I tried really hard to condense this but I have five very unique divisions so I tried my best but it is pretty lengthy um there's our HR team in the corner so minetonka matters ongoing success and Community engagement via social media we've really Advanced our mka matters platform as well as all of all of our social media platforms we are one of uh the highest engagement rates on social media of all of our peer cities um that that'll also be in the challenges because that causes other challenges as well um and our Communications manager will be coming shortly to the uh regular meeting very soon here to talk more about our analytics um further implementation of our Erp HCM software I'm really let Mr Nelson talk more about that one but is a joint effort between uh HR and finance the implementation of the agenda management software which was hosted by Sissa faul which has been a huge Improvement for our processes the timeliness of our pack packets it's been a great Improvement organizational wide um continued support for internal Equity committee and external relationship building has been really big um in our department 2023 The Establishment thanks to the Council of the Dei commission ordinance uh we created a non-union compensation plan which was a really Hefty lift and we were able to complete that and it rolled out here in January the implementation of ESS policy so that was a state mandated earn sick and safe time policy so we did um work through that with our seasonal employees as well as all of our full-time regular part-time and we're able to roll that out successfully um we had successful contract negotiations with Local 49 and police sergeants they work we have great working relationships with our unions we had really good smooth negotiation processes with both those groups so very grateful to be wrapped those up um and those been have been approved through Council as well um we did a refresh of our employee badges which you all are wearing our new ones so we refreshed those and then technology advancements at Commons and then of course the marsh were big successes for us too on top of all of this we're we have 28 employees in admin we hired six full-time employees last year so we hired some big positions like our HR manager is new uh she came from the city of chasa our senior Dei coordinator and then four others within the department the city clerk division's here on the right I realized after I did this that it's like they're my challenge but they're not I just had pictures of them all throughout the the slides that's our City Clerk Division as well as our front desk staff in that photo so our challenges um I'm going I have presentation here for 2023 and 2024 Rising costs I think every one of us directors can say that the rising costs have been created some heartaches on us print and postage we see the increase of our menag memo just skyrocketing but we know it's our most used source of information in maanka but it is expensive healthc care has been a huge in huge hug cost on us technology and then of course the general costs of Elections have increased for all of those we did bring those part of our budgeting processes for 2024 and did increase those particularly having five elections this year isn't helping our budget by any means but um we are we have budgeted for those so like I mentioned before the grow of the growth of social media commentary directed at city which must be monitored and created more frequently so we are constantly watching whenever we post something on social media we are constantly watching the comments and we generally don't do much about them unless it gets to a certain level but we've we've got some tools on there that like to follow us and we just have to watch that very carefully um prioritizing daily internal customer needs and new Innovations so admin and finance both serve our internal customers so our employees are our customers and so making sure that when an issue arises in their world we can drop and go and help them right or if they have a new idea they want to implement we want to partner with them and make sure we can make that happen for them and then of course we have projects to on our plates um technology access delivery plus secur security and cyber security so with that cyber security is huge on our plag and making sure that we get the education our employees need it's a challenge for us making sure we can get the technology requested and of course the advanced technology we have a hybrid workplace and ensuring to that when our employees can go back and forth effectively too um this is a really big one and I I know Minon is not alone in the next one but it's that increase in data practice request and the quantity of data requested we don't get reimbursed very high dollars for all of the work that goes into Data practices and it impacts our entire organization when there's a huge data request every single department is spending time polling emails and data and then it's also that time redacting data as well and they've been ramping up the last few years and it's only really getting worse and then administering elections in a highly contentious political environment I don't know how many times I hear a city clerk saying I'm just here to administer elections I have no skin in the game um really trying to play that neutral party on both our Municipal elections as well as our non-municipal elections um Recruitment and Retention is tough I think that's you know that's we're not alone in that either and it goes across all the Departments is a recruitment and retention we're doing all the things we can to make sure that we stve the employer of choice and keeping our employ employees but it is tough making sure policies are in alignment or healthc care options are right so lots of look at what we can do to continue to be an employer of choice and then the polling place uh this is for 2024 especially was polling places for special elections which we did bring that resolution forward to move our locations here into City Hall for the special elections but those are lots of challenges we had last year and continue to have this year 2025 again our it teams I'm going to move the picture R teams over here they service our entire organization I don't know how they get to everywhere all the time but they're just a really great team um recruitment attention again is a challenge for us into next year I don't think we're going to see the end of that for a while and just really staying competitive with our B with our flexible hours our benefits making sure our employees feel valued here and Ure they stay engaged to want to stay here making sure our culture our culture stays at the right um temperature so a couple other things I put here was embracing technology disruptions and I put disruptions because I feel like it's throwing us off kilter uh things like AI we've got some younger Generations here who are really who have only ever really known Ai and then there's those of us who it scares us so it's really balancing that right is how do you balance the AI in the world of government and making sure that we stay uh authentic as well and then of course the the advanced use of analytics we have lots of dashboards we have lots of really cool things and just making sure that we can stay Cutting Edge and then support it on the the it cyber security side as well um um adapting to a gig economy so what that is and what I learned when I was talking to my managers about this was really this use of um Freelancers because of the flexibility that everybody wants people are going to more freelance work and making sure that we can stay competitive against all of this freelance work that's happening around us that was supposed to be a next bullet point so again a challenge going into next year is our rising cost of Medical Care technology and just making sure with all the requests that is needed that we can stay within a a manageable budget too again data practice is a lot of the same things here we continue to see that volume increase and the quantity of data increasing um and again that's that is Citywide request it impacts every one of our directors and staff cyber Securities remains to be front and center um the pace of digital Technologies and how we deliver them when we went really with Co drove this need for how we deliver things so if we have a speaker coming to City Hall we also know that that day that people may be working remote and so the increase in things that we want recorded the increase in things that we want recorded and saved later every time something's recorded it pulls Our IT staff and so I actually asked them to run a number and it was quite astonishing of how much we recorded preco to how we how much we record postco and it's pulling one to two bodies every time that happens so really watching is we want to be able to provide information every single way we can in the time and space that it works best for our employees and also balancing what that does to our employees on the admin side and making sure we continue to balance that and then again the growth of communication channels videos and Graphics internally and externally there's been this huge shift in our social media and um Andrew can speak to this more is the need for videos and Graphics to grab that attention people aren't reading paragraphs anymore it's what the video and the graphics it catches their attention they're going to pay attention so really that need has increased to creating more videos being creative you needing more Graphics um and that that change in the way we do social media as well as a challenge going forward our small But Mighty Communications and marketing team there we have three full-time and then the one is just part-time so 2025 goals and new Innovations uh talent management and development making sure we really focus on our internal employees and developing them enhancing employee experience and our Wellness to ensure that our medical costs can hopefully stay a little bit lower um continued collaboration with finance and our Erp HCM software um strengthening The motanka Branding who are we and how can we strengthen that to make sure that we are one a city of choice and an employer of choice record management is nobody's favorite but it really needs to become a Forefront because of the data practices we just really need to work on that next year and we have we always working on it but next year it's really going to be a huge focus a part of our city clerk team um efficiently execution of our municipal election again we use rank Choice voting and just is that shifting from one to another that we work through uh it will be reviewing the city's business fiber networks um continued Focus efforts of our internal Equity committee and our external Dei initiatives I'm thinking more of the commission and how we Interlink may be those and do some things together prioritizing technology security enhancements and then again striving to be that employer of choice and that's it and then the city management team is four of us it's jaay Sissa myself and Mike and the amount of work that Sissa and Jace produce is quite astonishing uh so this is our small might little division as well so any questions I happy to answer them thanks Miranda questions from Miranda a lot going on in administration impressive and you keep smiling every day too we we make it through all right well thank you I don't see any questions did I miss any no ready yes okay I'll s Julie oops there we go um I have pictures here too on the first page I I org charts drive me crazy so I don't I I'd rather talk about who works here than an or chart but mainly oh there sorry I had to click it back oh okay you're good now stop moving um we basically have four managers in our division so it's Lauren uh Susan Dale who's building official and then Alicia and I'm mentioning them by first name because you've seen all of them at different meetings so you know them and you know what they do in they uh kind of their areas of responsibility so I'm not going to spend too much time there in the planning division uh there were about 103 cases this year highlights I would say Marsh Run 2 took a lot of time a lot of public Outreach with that Development midcountry Bank which by the way will start soon um permits uh pending I should say uh Ridgewood ponds the walls or Kia of course took time there were various concept plans that you've looked at over the years so uh year so it took a lot of Staff time as well as planning cushion city council to do those reviews and sustainability obviously the climate action plan coming to fruition was a huge lift uh this year Ambassador events that the Commissioners participate in by the way the staff kind of aligns all of that make sure the signups happen so that there's at least a couple of sustainability commission members at each event there were 10 events that they participated in this past year and then the minimize program and that's not spelled wrong that's the way the program is spelled minimize Min MN uh um minimize your waste and energy for businesses if you don't know what they did there they took um basically a half a day uh sustainability staff and the minimized program people from the county went out and just kind of um uh saturated a business area and tried to get people to sign up for waste and energy reduction and it was kind of a cool idea sustainability commission was hoping for more people to sign up so they were a little disappointed with the end result but it was a really good kind of exposure for a lot of the businesses who maybe hadn't taken the time or heard anything about these efforts so that was kind of a neat uh exciting um opportunity they also had uh eight commission Workshop meetings U they also did a lot of educational opportunities like our visit to the recycling center last week or the week before and um that was kind of an an eye openening experience I do recycle better since I went on the tour and I think a lot of the people that participated do as well in the housing econic uh Economic Development Area obviously the Baker Road stuff is moving ahead the rental assistance um that we're providing is always a lot of work and making sure there's money at I to do that assistance rental registry I'll show you a picture in a minute of where we're at with that loan programs Cedar Hills reinvestment and then some grant writing in the environmental health we talked about this we inspect about 675 facilities that includes we Zetta as well so we still do yetta's inspections for health if you didn't remember that and then we did it's a very big uptick this year on investigations we had 73 foodborn investigations this year that's probably double what we normally see the inspectors think it has something to do with Co everybody is really uptight doing things really well handwashing temperature control all of those things were high priority and we're slipping back down so we we' been getting some complaints on food born illness so 73 is a lot in one year uh we handled about 40 437 nuisances um that actually is a little bit lower I'm happy about that number that means people are complaining less so either they're just okay with their neighbors or they're not telling us about it so I'm not sure exactly what that's telling me on building side uh 8,300 permits were issued um we're down in total value but the number of permits is is actually pretty consistent across so sometimes your value is as high as 350 sometimes probably a sweet spot is about 230 250 that's about where we want to see the permit so we're a little bit low but it's because we've had this kind of amazing Market in the apartment and that that value has come online over the last 5 years so um that number did not surprise me commercial permitting actually is really steady which is very surprising to me but it's very steady year-over-year very um much the same we only had 25 new homes this year I think a lot of people think we build a lot of new homes we actually don't there's 40 on on a regular basis 25 were built here this is the the most surprising number $75 million in remodeling it's the highest number I said five years here I actually looked back 20 years I cannot find a higher number than that so people are reinvesting in their homes huge um let's see 70 licenses were issued and then 73 liquor licenses reports prepared we do about four reports a week for you guys planning commission and sustainability commissioner edac and we have about 70 meetings we attend uh throughout the year the number on the very bottom right I want to put your eyeball to this is what Miranda was talking to social media and kind of people paying attention you have 39,0 253 people signed up to look at project updates I'm like what how did that happen I asked them to rerun the number because I like there's something wrong with the number but it's doubled from last year 15 ,000 so what's happening is people are really really paying attention to and this is the development project page so anything that's a project this is how many people you have watching it or signed up to watch it so that's there's a reason like four% but don't those aren't all unique users so like don't be misunderstanding that data so it's not 35 user 35,000 users or 39,000 users they can sign up for like three projects at a time but it did bump up a little bit between 2022 and 2023 and even 2021 absolutely so this goes to her point about people are paying attention much more online the other thing is we sweat when we post things I mean people are looking at it proof reading it one two three four times before something's U produced Communications is giving us feedback um so it takes a lot of time to do this because you know how many people are watching what's being posted so you're very care careful so uh let's see go to the next side and I have three minutes left sorry and Julie sorry to interrupt you I just say council with a lot of the statistics that you're seeing here these do show up in your budget documents so as we get into the budget and more presentations on the budget we have so much data and so you'll see a lot of these stats show up in our budget documents as well and in our performance metrics in our strategic profile so we track all this St that's because Paula is a new council member and you know she wants the facts she wants the facts here they are all about data I'll go quickly guy never asked for data yes you do you do Kimberly too um excuse me K challenges in 2023 24 um really Staffing we have three open positions right now that's really causing some heartburn we've got a a planning position open a the economic development position as well as just learn we lost our electrical inspector to the state so now we're on the search for an electrical inspector um uh you know our development issues have been really complex this year it's been difficult sites so you know that's been challenging for all of you getting rental registry off the ground and kind of Licensing you know there was a lot of discussion about what the right answer was there so that took some time and then Zone Co which is our consultant who does all the research about zoning kind of working through that was a a challenge because it was a lot of time and energy spent on the research you haven't seen it yet but it it was a lot of time that we spent last year looking ahead in 25 really that volatility of interest rates is really impacting what's getting built project timing is really off um commercial reinvestments real estate issues with Office Buildings kind of that's top of Mind as we think forward um same thing as Randa Staffing retention um also legislation the stuff that's going on right now what's the outcome of that what's going to happen for next year how is that going to change things and then implementation of Zone CO's work as well as the climate action plan there's so many things in that document that we have to implement so there's a lot of uh to-do list if you will and then uh just on the side there's a Metro Transit contract that we need to deal with and so that with Light Rail and we're doing a just a Transit kind of evaluation document for you so that you can understand that a little bit better so working on that uh going forward is going to be a little bit of a challenge so the goals and new Innovations I think you can see the registry right off to your right there that's our new registry dashboard so all those little dots are people that either rent a home a building with multiple units in it or whatever we're at 132 right now that's actually a pretty good number um we launched it in February it's now March so in a month 132 people have uh filed their um rental license or rental registry excuse me um continuing our multi-unit housing Outreach that's a lot of time consuming effort it's um police it's fire it's um who else do we have involved I can't remember Rachel we always go with a group a lot of us go and we go out to buildings we talk about all our services we talk about programs and help and anything that's going on at the building kinds of calls for service maybe police is getting uh maybe what fire is getting and then we kind of call us and try to kind of really just group together to problem solve some of the issues that does take a lot of our time and um I expect that will continue in the next uh year ahead twin Home Project getting built on Baker world that'll take some time this year getting out and doing the business survey as well as continuing our Outreach to homeowners associations about improvements they may need uh and and the requests that you will see as home um housing Improvement areas so I hope I met my time thanks excellent nice job who's next oh Finance Finance I heard there aren't any pictures on this one yeah uh contrary to what you've seen from the last two presentations good evening mayor and Council um in our in our template we did not see any pictures and so Finance director did not include any pictures in his presentation for tonight so I don't know it just being very fiscally prudent and we and we appreciate that that you're modeling you're modeling good behavior right right um anyway I'll get i'll get started on this and get and get through as we move on to the the more exciting departments on that end of it um but finance department we've made made up of two divisions we have an assessing Division and then the accounting or Finance side of things on on that end of it on the City Assessor side of it we obviously have our City Assessor um Mel um putz that you saw a couple weeks ago at the when she presented the assessment report for last year and then we have three commercial residential appraisers or um uh their official title is principal appraisers on that end if they're all um moved up from residential appraisers the principal appraisers and we have one commercial appraiser and then we hire a couple interns in the summertime to help with our quintile inspections when we're out in about um inspecting homes on that end of it and such then on the finance side of it we're uh made up of five of us I got uh two supervisors my assistant Finance director and accounting coordinator um and then we have a um account payable specialist and then we have two Utility Billing clerks on the utility billing side of it actually 1.6 one is a part-time employee on that end of it so between the 13 of us and I have a senior accountant as well so between the 13 of us that makes up our finance department so some highlights from 2013 um absolutely one of our key highlights was Mel puts moving into our City Assessor role she took over that position in January of last year and then along with that we had some new um about three new staff on her on her team as well too so we hired uh two appraisers one appraiser and assessing specialist in the late 2022 and then we had a commercial appraiser that we hired in January of 23 so she was dealing with a new position along with a some new staff on her end of it as well too so um and then with that became uh her first assessment report came into being for 2023 um they prepare or 2020 approval of the 2024 assessment report effec of January 1 2024 so they worked on that whole assessment for the year and got that submitted which was uh not easy but she was uh did a great job and got that submitted successfully and then catching up from CO as well too on our commercial side of it with our tax Court petitions we had in 2023 we um cleared two years worth of Court petitions that were backlogged due to covid um scheduling orders and things like that on that end of it so uh we had a new commercial appraiser um Mel was doing some commercial appraising as well and so we're able to clear out those petitions um two years in one year there so with new staff and new roles um that was a pretty successful year on that end of it and then this last year um in 2023 uh was our 40th consecutive year of receiving the certificate of achievement for excellence and financial reporting that's received from the gfoa so um that's not just a testment to the finance department as a testment to all the departments on that end of it and following through with the the process and procedures internal controls of our financial reporting and such like that so um 40 years is a kind of a nice M marker on that end of it and something we should be proud of on on that side of it and then Aon I just speaking as someone who speaks both Layman and a little bit of Finance you might want to tell people what gfoa is oh absolutely so gfoa is the government Finance Officers Association and that's our National Association that has um standards and um guidelines for us to report our financial reports by um that is also governed by gasby which is the governmental Accounting Standards Board lots of fun stuff there um they've been really busy over the last number of years on that end of it they're this is gby 87 that we have to implement for 2023 and that has to do with lease accounting so um these are our antenna leases so if we have leases on top of water towers for um cellular companies and such like that we have to um now recognize an asset and a liability or current um liability on the books there as well too so doesn't necessarily affect our bottom line revenue expenditure wise but it adds um an asset and a liability to our balance sheet and increases those types of things so lots of work for not a lot of data there but it's it probably is best to show those leases as the longterm asset and long-term liability there and then kind of the big topic that will probably touch on a little bit more throughout these slides is the Oracle Erp which is the enterprise resource planning or Finance system and then the HCM human Capital Management pieces that Miranda touched touched on uh we started that process just about a year ago um it took my assistant Finance director's time is probably about 90 95% of his time has been dedicated to that project over the last year so we've had to make some adjustments to help with budget and CIP and those types of things that he was always um crucial in in helping out on and so we're making progress there um we're running into some hiccups along the way we were supposed to be live initially back in August um August 1 to be exact on that end of it and that came and gone a long time ago and we've had lots of deadlines that have come and gone since and so we're are we are um in a spot where we're kind of asking some questions and U we're working through logis with this so Lis is our Consortium that we um utilize a number of different applications through so uh we were trying to get to a spot where we want to make this successful because I don't want to implement something that's going to be not good for a long period of time on that end of it so we are holding firm that we want to make sure that this is a successful project and it has long-term ramifications on that so we want to do it the right way and not just get it done to flip a switch so so that's what we've been working on for 2023 some of for challenges um 2023 2024 we have to also Implement gasby 94 the previous slide was 87 so made a few in between there and that is the 94 is public private and public Public Partnerships so if we have any of those types of um contracts which I believe we do with Hopkins school district for um the Hopkins Activity Center that type of thing we'll have to recognize those um long-term and liabilities and assets on the on the books there so we are still digging into that one and then gasby 96 is subscription based so if we have any software where we have contracts with with a vendor for over a year we have to recognize a long-term liability and an asset there as well too for that right to use that that piece of of software so that was actually a very big project um you wouldn't you'd be amazed of how many subscriptions we have to various um software vendors across the the whole organization on that end of it so that was a lot of work with um it um and finance as well trying to discover all of those across the board and um fortunately we kind of used a uh materiality basis to kind of help us out with and a lot of these subscriptions are now basically just a year long because they want to be able to renew them and be able to increase their fees quickly on those instead of being stuck in you know multi-year contracts and such so um not big impacts but we had to go through the process to actually figure out what was what on those and then here again is the Erp HCM implementation uh we'll working on that for 23 and we'll be um for the foreseeable future in 24 here as well and then also the kind of the the Citywide budget pressure and on both the tax levy and utility fees as uh we here as we work through the budget process on that end of it that kind of falls on on me to kind of try to make that fit somehow on on that end of it and then as we move into 25 some of the chanels there are um talking with the assessing side of things is that U we are seeing a little bit of change in the commercial World obviously with u vacancy rates higher and such like that you know what is the the future of those those properties and such like that and will there be an increase in petitions coming down the pipeline that's what uh um we don't know at this point in time we don't currently see that but that can change um as the years go on here as well too and then with 2025 we would hope that um we would have the Erp implemented and we' be able to start utilizing um some that the capabilities of that and start to maximize our efficiencies on that end of it um and as you may recall we also talked about when we did the Erp implementation that we were going to look at a utility building software upgrade as well and so Lois is taking that on as well um we were a pilot City for the Oracle project I'm not going to be a pilot City for the the utility building system um so there are another there is another couple cities that have have done that and that sounds like that project is going uh much better on on that end of it so we don't have dates yet of when we are scheduled to um be in that um time for an upgrade but we will be doing that I would assume sometime in 25 26 time frame on that end of it so um our staff is looking forward to that and then we also have um probably a utility meter replacement project that'll be taking place as well too so we got to kind of coordinate those two a little bit to um help minimize the headaches on that end of it and there again it'll be um the continued Citywide budget pressures on on tax levies and utility fees and such and then just goals and Innovations for 25 here I kind of mentioned the Erp functionality um that I'll come with that will become a revamp budgeting process for staff as well to we won't be able to utilize our current um reporting software that we currently use um and also with the utility billing piece of that we've also kind of over the last couple years talked about moving to a monthly billing piece of that um depending on when that conversion is that that might be something we'll be able to Mo move up a little bit quicker and look into it um our numbers on the number of payments that we receed electronically is really high I think we're close to 70 or over 70% right now is on what our electronic payments and I think the billing people that residents have receive e bills um is is like 30 31% on that end of it so we moved to a different billing software a couple years ago I think right when Co hit um that was a good uh move at that point in time and it really has made that process a little bit a lot easier for residents to be able to pay a bill it really looks like a normal bill from any other private um company on that end of it so it makes it a lot more user friendly on that end of it so we'll be continuing to keep that on our uh on our Horizon and and see where things go there and then we're also looking at a potential partnership with hanpen County to assist in appraisal writing so if we see a big shift with the commercial properties and we have more petitions on the books we do only have one commercial appraiser and um our City Assessor can help out on that as well too but if we see a big shift in that hien county does have staff that's dedicated to writing actually writing appraisals at the moment and so we don't do a a lot of full-blown appraisals because usually we get to a settle in piece before that that time comes but uh we are looking to see if we could utilize them because we do use their county attorney's office as well for um these petition cases and such like that so it might be a way to utilize some of the resources and and keep some of that knowledge um within both Austin hon County on that end of it and then just continued staff development as well with the rssing staff being new keeping them um growing and developing and kind of covering all the gamuts of commercial and residential appraisal along with rest of the finance staff so I think that's it for me any questions for Darren um Kimberly just quick I was just wondering so did we get any sort of um Financial break for being a pilot with the with the list I see the eye roll so I'm guess no pain and suffering no no Financial break we kind of did it because we were going to get the benefit of having the system implementer that was going to be on board and have this expert company help us and um turns out they're the problem and not necessarily the loia side of thing so um yeah hindsight on that one so anything else no I just wanted to comment you know I know that the Erp thing is is a significant a heavy lift and I was I can't even remember who I was talking if it was the other day but or if it was Joel or Zach but I really appreciate what I heard in terms of you holding their feet to the fire so that we get all the functionality that has been promised because you know when it when it gets painful like this you just want to get done but if you don't if you're not going to get all your your functionality you don't want to get done you want to you I think we're smart to hold out for and I know that's causing you some pain and our team some pain but I really I really appreciate the fact that that we're going to we're going to hold their feet to the fire and get it right because that's that's what we need yep absolutely that and that's the biggest part is really on the HTM side of it because our current system doesn't have the HTM piece of it so we're really trying to build that up from the from the ground up and really utilize I mean Oracle is a worldwide yep you know software application that should be able to do anything that we want to do and and more on that end of it so we really want to take advantage of what the capabilities of it are and and have it Maxim it's benefit here so it's not it's not an easy road so hang in there keep it up there's a road we're we're cheer we are on your we are on your side thank yeah thanks Darren all right after Finance who gets to go next legal Karen dep uh seven positions unchanged from last year six are in the um crimal division uh one of the staff members in the Criminal Division does provide a little bit of assistance to me um the Civil Division she reviews funds and insurance on contracts um we do occasionally contract um with the league for a legal intern but that program is operated through in cooperation with um Mitchell Hamlin and they have not had anybody for a couple of years so um I don't haven't heard any inklings that the'll H next um our highlights um I I'm going to start with the second p k I can't hear you at all oh that is because I forgot to turn my mic on is that better yes thank you okay sorry about that so um uh I'm going to start with the second bullet in the highlights which was um reviewing all of the legislation last year 75 bills that the legislature passed and some of them hundreds of pages and a lot of legislation that impacted uh City operations and uh and then you know cascaded into um assisting in policy revisions like ESS um the earn sick and safe time um and other things so and and one of those things was um the what we call ero the extreme risk protection orders statute we have not yet had any um applications for Eros but uh we worked with the police department to develop a an outline of and a plan on how we would address it should we receive um applications um and then the last the last two things here oh we Deb did we lose your camera okay um tell us if you can't see us because we just had a little popup about um the camera not working went up to the corner of the room and now it's Focus back down on the room okay all right so um the last two items are really kind of taking care of um old stuff um we we we assist or our department assist assist all the other departments in their you know things that they want to move forward reviewing contracts for projects assisting with policies helping with ordinances um but I like it when I can go back and clean up old stuff that wouldn't get done if I didn't go back and find it um so we had some uh easements for Trails all throughout the Opus area and uh going back to the early 80s those were supposed to have been conveyed to the city they never that deed never got recorded and so for 40 years we did not have clear title uh to the easements that we've been maintaining um but I was able to track down um a um a a a living officer of a now dissolved Corporation and get a deed um and so for all the torren properties we have now cleared up that problem in the abstract properties we have prescriptive easements so that was good uh and then the other thing uh was uh went back and updated um our Ada transition plan hadn't been looked at since 1993 so we are in the process of um we did a lot of it last year but we'll be finishing that up this year um and updating the transition plan and then we also U developed our title six plan which is a nonis non-discrimination plan required for um Federal Transportation projects so uh got that done challenges um and we were told to kind of say what the challenge was and what we've done or what the status is so um we did have a a big backlog of cases um dating back to the pandemic that backlog has eased a bit there still still is some um but it's um it's decreased and we were having a lot of extra cord appearances um to address the backlog and the court has now discontinued the special appearances requirement so uh that's eased um a little bit of the stress we have seen an increased workload um due to body warn camera um and so both of these challenges on the end kind of carry over to um this year's challenges and and what we're proposing or uh trying to do to minimize that um so we've we've seen just uh a very large number of um videos that are associated with bodyw warn cameras that need to be reviewed um and summarized for the attorneys and then um also just on the Civil side the um the pressure of of supporting um seven other departments in uh Trying to minimize the use of outside Council both of those carry over to this year where um that increased workload uh continues and in fact now with um the DWI enforcement officer that has been added for police we're expecting to see uh and the increased number of Patrol officers we're expecting to see continued increase in that um BW BWC um demand for workload and um what we're doing for that is we're undertaking a staffing study within our department we're talking to other um departments that have um prosecution in-house and civil inous and we're reviewing our staffing needs to determine whether and at what point we're going to need to add additional support staff to meet that demand um and so then goals and Innovations in during this year we will we are collecting and analyzing data to determine the workload and then uh we're hoping to complete that or get to a point by mid year that we will be able to determine whether we need to make a budget request for additional Staffing as part of the 2025 budget um and another thing that we will be doing is reviewing the um just the practices and procedures to determine what changes we might be able to make that would improve efficiency minimize staff load without compromising Public Safety goals thank you Karine any any questions not seeing any just just a comment it's like I mean all all these new new things that come along body warn cameras um adding new trails I mean new trails need to be the best analogy Trails new trails need to be maintained and body War cameras the right thing to do but all of that data needs to M be maintained and so we add these things we add these things and all of a sudden well guess what it's going to take an extra person to do all that work so those are budget pressures so I'll turn it but Karine thank you um next is it Kelly or will it's me excuse good excuse me um we're going to take a break after these two presentations and then between between then and Public Safety take me a break y keep going okay okay go ahead all right um good evening mayor and councel uh in public works we have six different divisions we have admin natural resources utilities fa facilities and then we have our engineering department as well as our park and maintenance facilities or excuse me um Park and maintenance Park and Street Maintenance we have 84 full-time employees uh 20 to 30 seasonals um in addition to those we have three icwc crews um we have six to eight summer interns we also have climate core green Corp hanipa county has an office in public works we have eight to 10 folks that work out of pip County and then in addition to all these other folks um we have a number of fenders contractors other folks that are working in the city so in the summer it's not uncommon in addition to the seasonal and full time to have another 20 to 50 people in the city with Crews and different different folks that we watching over um just some of our highlights um maintaining our core Services is a big job for us so we have our Water Sanitation uh utility Street storm water facilities and then our parks and trails so we have 300 miles of sewer and water 254 Mi of streets 950 water bers 15 facilities 54 parks and then 105 miles of trail that we're working on maintaining uh just to keep up with our natural resources department they began their their habitat restoration plan and Forestry management we also managed 4,000 volunteer hours uh with a number of our volunteers we added a forestry Mower and so we maintain another 15 Acres with that forestry mower which helps us get a lot more done and then we did control burns for a number of restoration areas we completed our tanka Woodcraft uh minat tanka Boulevard Trail project which was our largest reconstruction in the city um we did the Campus Way finding signs as you can see right out the door here uh we worked on the Ridgedale water tower um so not only did we paint it we have to rehab it at the same time so we fix and do repairs on things and as Darren mentioned we have a number of our leases and so prior to doing that we have to get all those folks off of the Tower in service and then we go back and put them back on so a lot of the stuff you don't see that's a 2 million gallon tank and so we take that out of service and then make sure nobody's interrupted we secured around 5 million for Hopkins Crossroad uh which you'll see it's going currently and then another 340,000 for EAB assistance and then we're working on an asset management planning um process in public works so that's helping us identify um costs and needs and different things in the future just some of our challenge um our challenges time and workload I mean there's a lot going on as you can see as I mentioned before so just keeping up with everything we're in a lot of competition as a number of other directors mentioned um not only in competition with other cities for employees but the private sector construction um Consultants we cross cross over a lot of those folks costs are up so our rise in materials projects um Watershed regulations state regulations County different mandates that we function under we have to keep up with those and then we're balancing a number of different factors when we make decisions so another one of the things we're challenged with at times our graphic information system GIS is really growing and so there's a lot of work there and our folks are are keeping up but we're doing our best to keep that in check a lot of those carry over to 25 so I won't repeat them but in addition to that talking to our engineering department there's a number of projects coming up with mot in the county as well as Three Rivers over the next five years and so those are projects that occur in the city we don't just leave them and let them work there we certainly have to keep track of what they're doing and work with them Darren mentioned the meter replacement so uh you'll see a council item coming up we've got around 177,000 meters in the city uh we'll be looking at replacing over the next five to six years currently and then our last one I mentioned before EAB you know not only is it the EAB but the the the material that comes with that so it continues to grow um just goals and new Innovations the EAB so the the program that we got the grant money for natural resources is currently putting that together so we can work with folks the meter replacement um it's a new technology so it'll give us the opportunity to to monitor our water use a lot closer uh the exceler boulevard project uh you've seen that in the CIP but it's a big project we're currently working with Hanan County to see if we can do a road Improvement project at the same time and get some funding assistance our city Forester is working on our reuse program as well as he's looking at drone technology to do inventory on trees as well as health and so that's another thing we're working on um our open space um and our habitat restoration and natural resources and then you know our energy conservation sustainability and then climate action like Julie mentioned before and then this year we're working on our RFP for our recycling Organics program that'll come du at the end of the year so you'll see that um probably in the next couple months there'll be something we'll be talking with you on I think that's it thanks will um any questions for will all right that I mean that's that's that's a lot of stuff oh yeah Paula excuse me just uh hope to follow up with you because I'm getting some questions about Organics Recycling and costs and whether we can negotiate contracts and things like that so um just how I can respond to some of those folks we can maybe do it offline yeah I think there's been a few calls on that I I think we just so we can tell them what's coming down the pike or if there's any assistance now that we can provide yeah especially people on fixed incomes who are yes okay thanks and Mr OD day last but not least last but not least abolutely I need to take more Staff pictures that's for sure well you know I mean see the thing is you know we're going to see most of these sides over again you know so I mean there there's little inner Department competition you know so it'll be understand uh so Recreation so we uh have 31 FTE uh we have six different divisions uh so myself as the the director we've got uh three of our larger facilities the marsh Willison Center and Ice Arena our administrative division is headed by our assistant Rec director we've got a recreation division which is uh kind of a department that we join with the City of Hopkins and then we have our community facilities division which oversees the community center G B Mara and some of our other an ancillary uh facilities uh I also was doing some quick math as Miranda was talking about how many new staff she has between myself and the six division managers the tenure is almost 19 years so we have definitely some staff members who've been here for a long time which uh is comforting for sure uh highlights I was actually going to put just the marsh and then just kind of drop the mic and leave but um the you know we we did have a lot going on in 2023 obviously the marsh was one of the things uh that was the biggest thing I think uh closing on that facility in in February reopening partially reopening in May I think that was um you know stressful uh exciting there was just a lot of different things going on with the March but overall I think that was definitely a highlight that we had uh special event uh attendance you can see the the attendance that we had in 2023 if you think about the past probably three years I think we've probably had record attendance at most of these different events it's all depended on the weather the Burwell spectacular not last year but the two years before that were busy uh this year kidsfest it was 55 degrees and I was directing traffic and we had you know almost 3,000 people so the special event attendance has really uh jumped up significantly over the past few years uh the Willison Center had 250,000 visits so typically you know it's anywhere from a thousand to 1500 when you think about that in January February March in the summer it's definitely a little bit slower but we're also very curious the effect that uh the marsh would have on Willison and and Willison has stayed very strong I think we were still recouping from covid even into 20 you know early 23 a little bit but the numbers at Willis in 23 are really good so we we're happy about that uh almost 30,000 program registrations so people are still registering for programs whether it's youth swim lessons all the way up to our senior programs um very busy uh happy to report again that all of our scholarship requests and our inclusion service requests have been granted so anybody who applied for and asked for a scholarship or needed help needed inclusion Services we were able to to Grant those to everybody so that's really important we're really proud of that uh and then lastly we we had some creative new programming one of them I noted was the sa in the Parks I believe that's the bottom right picture there um just kind of a creative fun yeah we're we're going to try to do more of those programs definitely here in the future some of the challenges you know Staffing was a challenge uh we're kind of in limbo with the marsh not knowing you know we were kind of on that two-year plan and didn't really know the future of that we hopefully we'll we'll know that here soon but um we we stole some people from Willison we've got some interim positions we've been creative and so um you know doing that has kind of taxed the Staffing levels at both the marsh and Willison Center I think that the difference when some of you might remember in 2021 and 22 we were looking for lifeguards and we were looking for seasonal staff members and that has really rebounded well so the seasonal staff is doing well we're just you know between the marsh and Willis and we're kind of sharing some employees Etc uh purchase of the marsh was a challenge like I said a lot of different things um we did put the The Ice Arena and the community center project on hold um and then just the reopening that was a challenge to get that building open and that wasn't just Recreation that was every Department had had something to do with that we had basically March and April to to get that building ready uh and open the way we wanted it and we're happy that we did that and lastly I have uh gym space uh the minetonka academy one of our events that we just had recently we did a tour of our city facilities we went over to Willison at night and there was two courts fully booked with 30 people waiting to get on for pickle ball so you know the gym space our our softball programs our volleyball programs are are still growing in in pickleball although the you know the private facility just opened in town it seems like the demand is still there for pickle ball so that's been uh definitely a challenge for us uh looking at 2025 the community facility study so I will be talking to you guys at your April study session and how we implement the the results of that you know we've got some older facilities as I mentioned the gym space uh I think that'll be a big challenge for us those free community events so the events that I kind of talked about a little bit that you know the cost of those events is going up the the size of those the more people that attend it it's definitely taking a toll on parking on facilities Etc and so I think more people are attending those and so we have to be creative in how we how we do that uh Willison Center I I talked about that managing capacity there we have over 10,000 members at Willison right now the marsh are almost at 5,000 and we have another thousand members that uh are members of both so those are really really good num numbers again we were curious how Willison would be impacted with the purchase of the marsh and it's it's uh increased slowly but but uh definitely been busy over there and I think I'm probably the third or fourth person that's talked about social media and and just managing all these different you know Instagram and Facebook and all that and I know we've got a a wonderful communication Vision but that also does fall in departments including us so that's definitely a challenge uh looking at goals and Innovation I talked about the community facility study specialty programs like the saas in the Parks I think we're getting more pressure to uh keep things fresh keep things new we've got a jigsaw jamere you know I think we're just looking for new creative ideas to keep people focused full by the way so you can't get into the jigsaw JY um but we're looking for those specialty types of programs over at the marish it's the Pilates classes and things like that so um third is the low and no cost programming again I talked about that a couple times just how we do that making sure that uh we're not taxing facilities too much uh and then lastly just enhancing the customer experience I think we've got a pretty good customer base at our facilities and our programs and we just want to make sure that we are enhancing their experience we want to make sure they're having a good experience when they come to a program when they come to our facility one example is looking at a mobile app for our fitness Fitness facilities so that is it I was told to make up some time here at the end all right well well you did a good job Kelly thank you any questions for Kelly paa first of all great job but um especially on the marsh is the mobile app is is that going to be for for people to sign up for classes and such we're looking uh it has that potential yes okay yep definitely we're looking at that it's it's a feature that our Software System allows we're still kind of looking at it and researching it got it thanks other questions anyone um a quick comment um of course we have the state of the city on Friday and um and I know everybody put a lot of work into that but particularly your team and particularly your team at the marsh and I think uh I think the marsh showed itself off well although I also think that we you know kind of we strained the capacity of the marsh a little bit um but I think you know I think we had generated a lot of excitement on that um you know there's always a few full Paws mine was um you know recognizing um um I didn't recognize Kristen um when I thanked staff and uh Mary Joe did a lot of that work I know but you know you always kind of kick yourself when you um that was pointed out to be by anonymously but um anyway but I you know um we um I think the marsh really showed itself off well I think there people were very interested excited to be there I think we'll probably pick up a few more memberships because we had it there and uh you know I just think that I'm you know just proud of uh the nimbleness that uh we demonstrated as a city um both in terms of buying the marsh but also having that event there and uh I think those are all positive so I really felt that Friday was a successful day for the city so thank you thank you very much to you and your team and to to all all the staff because everyone put a pretty significant shoulder into that so thank you all right we said we take a break we'll take a kind of a a f minute break and we'll keep on going and then we'll get Public Safety and uh we'll be in good shape thank you Miranda are we ready to go um this is supposed to be 45 no no I think I did so um it looks like fire is up so Chief take it away all right good evening mayor and councel um so the fire department our organizational staffing chart here we have three divisions within the fire department uh the Operations Division which is the largest division within the fire department that's where uh the majority of our Personnel all our equipment fire stations all fall under that um I'm kind of serving a dual role in that right now you'll see my names both under the fire chief and the deputy chief position but I've been fortunate to be able to delegate some of those deputy chief uh roles and responsibilities off to some of my Battalion Chiefs um it kind of splits down from the Operations Division so we have uh kind of a two- tiered uh uh Personnel where we have some full-time personnel and then we have what we call paid on call or part-time fir Fighters they do the same job um they all have the same certifications the same uh training but some of them come more on the time that they scheduled to be here and then the fulltime are scheduled to be here more regularly so um and then our uh assistant chief of administration and Emergency Management is Aaron Morris uh and he oversees a part-time public safety data analyst that we share with the police department Aaron's role is primarily responsible for uh everything emergency management related and he handles our development of policy s so's uh standard operating procedures uh he's our uh Grant manager for when we apply for Grants and uh his big project that he's just getting ready to start which we'll talk a little bit more about in a bit is our uh standards of cover that we want to be able to present to the city council and then our third division is our prevention Division and that is overseen by uh assistant chief Luke bite who is serves is also the fire marshal and he has two Deputy Fire Marshals that uh report directly to him some of our 2023 Department highlights is uh we began imp implementation of our Public Safety master plan that was first uh presented to the council last year um some of the we started tackling some of the the low expenditure low Financial impact portions of that um where we one of the things we did is we started Staffing our Station 2 during peak hours so we used to run when we were fully staffed we would run two trucks out of here uh we shifted one of those trucks from uh 8:00 a.m. to 700 p.m. over to our Station 2 because we've uh through our our data that's coming in the ridg Dale area is one of our busiest areas of the city so uh during those peak times we try to keep a a staff truck up in that area to help reduce those overall response times um we brought on three additional full-time firefighters which gave us one that gives us one per day because we run three shifts so that firefighter uh is staffed down at station our station one with our full-time Captain uh We've continued our community outreach last year our public Educators uh they did 120 events uh Citywide with almost 4,000 attendees and that does include our our open house um our family fun days our sensory friendly open house uh our we do our public educator Deputy Fire Marshall does a lot of uh handson CPR classes uh she gives fire safety talks at at senior living facilities uh we started last year a uh smoke alarm installation program so um we receive free smoke alarms from the state from the State Fire Marshall and then we go out when people request usually seniors or people that aren't don't have the mobility or the means to change out service their smoke alarms we'll go out and install those in their homes for them and we did almost 50 of those last year so that that continues to expand um we started revising our Command Staff structure we shifted some of our Battalion Chiefs around a little bit um we have one battalion chief that's a uh training Chief and they're on a 40-hour work week and then we have our 24-hour day Battalion Chiefs and we rotate them around and so we have a new training battalion chief that will serve a two-year stint in that position that position allows them to not only conduct and develop the training within the department they're in charge of Recruitment and Retention and then one of the biggest things is uh we go through this is uh mentoring it's it's kind of a mentoring position where we give that position opportunities uh to seek uh higher education anything to help develop them promote uh professionally so that uh when the opportunities come up we have people ready to to kind of move up into those higher positions and then uh we saw a record number of calls for service last year we ended our year at 5,727 calls for service that we handle primarily with two to three uh trucks every day so uh very busy over 30% of our calls are overlapping calls which means there's at least two calls or more going on at the same time so um when we have three trucks and our battalion chief on we can handle three calls depending on what the calls are but we're we're stretched pretty thin anything past that we have to start uh paging our part-time firefighters back to come in and and help cover so and we're seeing that those those numbers are going to continue to increase in the coming years okay okay and where did my clicker go here here we go so some of the challenges that we're seeing I did uh mention one there but uh our call volume obviously is going up is going to continue uh inconsistent Staffing amongst our paid on call Members so uh our paid on call they schedule their time with us we have minimum requirements that they have to make uh to remain active and and in good standing with the fair department but those overall numbers are are pretty low on what they need to make and uh we're we sit try to sit at at around 70 paay on call but currently we're down at 56 is where we're at and we have a number of those that are on light duty couple that are on military leave and and other types of leav SL that puts us down into closer to 50 and with the number of shifts that we have to have covered uh we find ourselves having a lot of gaps and so there are times when we do have those gaps that we have to pull that third truck out of service and and we have to go down to two trucks uh our aging Fleet inflation and lead time for apparatus build so um our our our Fleet of trucks we have quite a few of them and they range anywhere from a year old to over 20 years old um they're all wellmaintained and well taken care of but they are starting to age and uh kind of prior to co we could order a truck in in January and receive that truck by December or January of the the end of the year and uh now we're seeing fouryear build times on the trucks and on top of that manufacturers would typically do a price increase annually in like February um last year most of the manufacturers now did three price increases throughout the year so we're trying to nav navigate not only those but try to plan out uh when you have a 4-year build time on a truck and you're trying to replace a truck that's 20 years old there's some Logistics involved with that so we've been working a lot on trying to uh streamline that and figure out the the best solution for replacing our Fleet uh fire station infrastructure we I'll talk a little bit more about that too when we get into our our uh master plan review but uh We've uh got four satellite fire stations and our Central Station our Central Station was new in 2020 and our satellite stations uh range from being built uh our Station 2 is 1974 I want to say and our uh newest satellite station which was station five was built in 1991 so all of those were built with the idea of accommodating accommodating a paidon call fire department and they weren't designed for 24-Hour Staffing so they had have no dormatory rooms they have uh small bathrooms very uh small closet sized kitchens really not conducive to to having somebody essentially live there for 24 hours a day so um we have engaged and I'll I'll talk more about that with an architect that will'll begin a study on that this summer and then our Recruitment and Retention you've heard it from all the other directors this continues to be a challenge um not only for us but for for all departments across the board we're seeing far fewer numbers than than we used to see um with the fire department in particular and with us kind of having fulltime and and paid on call it's kind of a parasitic relationship where when we're Hiring Our full-time Staffing a lot of that Staffing is coming from our paid on call um because they're they're ingrained in the culture right they they know the system they're they're trained they're equipped already so it's an easy move to get them from paid on call to the full-time but now we've created gaps in the paid on call that we have to try to fill and uh this time we are actually just now wrapping up our recruitment process for both paid on call and some full-time positions that are coming up and for the first time we actually had more applicants for the full-time positions than we did for our paid on call positions so um that's going to continue to be a challenge as we move forward because the the paid on call for quite a while here is is going to be pretty crucial to to how we continue to operate so we're going to have to continue to invest in that and uh find unique ways to to try to encourage people to to volunteer part of the hard part with the payon call is we have a living requirement so they uh applicants have to live within 15 minutes of a of one of our fire stations so that kind of limits our our Target area as to where we can go 15 minutes installing but it does get us pretty far but nonetheless it it's it's a limiting factor is in that so okay 2025 goals and Innovations uh we're going to continue to implement our Public Safety master plan uh hopefully later this year we'll submit to the council uh for adoption a standards to cover that's going to help to guide us as we move forward with uh the kind of the the fire department planning on on how do we want the Staffing to look how much Staffing should we have uh what are we going to do exactly with those fire stations that's going to that's going to help dictate that so we'll we'll be looking to get that to you later this year um our refined equipment replacement plan we want to want to get that wrapped up and get kind of a long-term plan put in place for our our Fleet replacement um we'll be conducting a large scale Emergency Management exercise this year uh assistant chief Aaron Morris will be conducting that with City staff and and uh Council will be involved and it's uh not something we've done for a number of years and um it's one of those lowf frequency high-risk situations when those come about and and when the the time does eventually come that we have to fire up our Emergency Operations Center and bring people in if nobody's done it for a while um that's not the time to to try to get refreshed on it so we want to do a a large scale exercise this year and then continue ongoing training with that so we can keep all the city staff fresh uh the fire station analysis will uh happen this year with W Architects we've engaged with them they're the The Architects that designed our Central fire station so they're going to assist us with uh doing a analysis on our our our stations to look at you know what's the best way that we're going to be able to get to where we need to be for accommodation of 24-hour Staffing in some cases you know maybe it'll just be a remodel maybe an addition uh we're not sure where that's going to go but we'll uh we'll know more later this summer uh we're going to implement a new records management system this year that was uh we were kind of forced into that as our current vendor uh decided they were going to they were going to sell out to another company and then the other company just decided they're going to uh flip the switch on this later uh probably well early next year and it'll no longer be a valid system so we've been kind of forced to move which has actually worked out pretty well for us because the new system we're going to is going to serve us a little better um it's what a lot of the Departments around us are moving to so we have some inner some abilities to share information now with this system and it's going to give us a lot of more lot better Data Tracking through this so uh we're going to be able to look at our Trends there's a lot with our current system that uh we can't pull reporting on and look at Trends and and kind of what's happening so we're we're pulling data from from different areas and it's quite cumbersome so this system's going going to going to streamline that and it gives us uh some live capabilities so it will permit our crews when they're out on a call a live when when uh our County dispatch pushes the call out this will pop up in the truck and they will bu able to build live documents about the building uh fire service features things like that we call them pre-plans um that they can work on and then it'll stay with that building so every time we respond people can ask to it and build upon it and so it gives our firefighters and our crews information when they're responding to the to the buildings and maybe it's a building they have not been to a long time for a long time they'll have all that information on hand so and then uh we're going to continue to do a broader focus on Specialized skills within the fire department now that we're adding more full-time staff that are here 24 hours a day um things like specialized rescues hazardous materials things like that in the past we've kind of trained unilaterally at an operational level but now that we have uh Personnel that are here more regularly and that this is their full-time job we're going to start looking at specializing in certain areas and training some of our Personnel up to either technician or uh specialized levels uh anything from rope rescue to confined space rescue to vehicle extrication things like that and that's what I have questions all right thank youim KY I have a question in regards to um I know there's an increase in firefighters that's needed how do you determine how many firefighters that's needed it based on um the amount of calls or is it based on amount of residence that's a good question um so traditionally we've kind of had a a Target spot where where when we were primarily paid on call um I I don't know exactly where the number came from but it's kind of a guesstimation about so we used to be authorized for around 80 firefighters and it was kind of based on the guess that if we have a major incident and this was back before we we had full-time Staffing where we would call people from home and they would they would come in we would figure if we need kind of 25 to 30 people for a structure fire if we have 80 time paid on call on the books when a big fire comes out we're hoping that 25 of the 80 are available to come in and sometimes it works sometimes it doesn't that's why we have we run Mutual Aid uh with our neighbors but now once we had our study done last year and we'll uh continue to refine that as we move forward uh the data shows now kind of what is What's called the it's called the effect Ive response force and it shows what is needed to handle certain incidents so it says for instance on a major fire or a multi-patient u incident you need say it's 12 to 19 firefighters have to be there within a certain amount of time 90% of the time so now that we have those numbers coming through that kind of helps dictate uh what we need for personnel okay I have one more question I can't remember like how many firefighters did we hire for last year for 20 we hired three last year three and so you're asking for nine more for 2025 yes okay I'm just um it would be interesting to know like if there's like a concrete number cuz I know that we're increasing in calls and I'm also thinking about how I know we've been increasing over time in residents too but like like um I was telling Mike like wow it seems like a lot and I was just thinking like when is it going to be at a stopping point or is it going to constantly continue to grow up because I'm thinking if it's going to continue to grow up um what is the expectation of of how many firefighters are you thinking you're going to need Can you estimate that yeah so the the study that we had done last year recommended a total of 21 uh to get us to a point where we can meet our effective response force and meet our response times so with a lot of these calls whether it's one unit or the or the the larger calls that require more units it's it says that you need to have the first arriving truck for instance on a medical or a small incident needs to be there within 8 and 1 half minutes of the time that the 911 call is received and so with the addition of these personnel our overall goal is to staff the stations to a point that we can get as close to that uh response time as possible and so um they're saying 21 will will that's the the bare minimum we need to build to start making those numbers and and that's one of the things the city council is going to be asked to adopt in that standards to cover is is that the the realistic goal that you want you know you're gonna you're going to be able to kind of dictate what is that level of response that we want okay thank you I assume within that we'll have kind of like what our Pure cities are doing when we get that okay um and also could you just answer a question um first of all a great study and um you know Well Done uh for you know looking at that and analyzing it and seeing that what we need to do um I noticed that an overwhelming number of our calls now seem to be medical related um so I saw that less than well basically just a little more than one per month fire um so my question is is regarding um Health uh calls medical calls are engines going out for those or are there other vehicles that are going out for those uh in some cases many cases yes an engine goes out uh in some cases we have a smaller rescue truck okay that that handles them but that's if that truck is staffed at the moment and you know we get that question a lot and the easiest explanation is we have to keep the firefighters with the tools and equipment for when the low frequency highrisk calls come out which is our structure fires cuz um they're out almost all day you know at 5700 calls a year they're not in quarters very often right so if they're out on a medical and a fire and they're getting ready to clear and a fire comes in we don't have the luxury of sending them back to the station to get the equipment for the structure fire and then responding out to the structure fire so we really have to keep the equipment with the personnel and even with our light duty rescue um it's not uncommon for them to be out on a call and a fire will come in and they'll respond to the fire but they get there first but they don't have water on the truck they don't have hose on the truck they have some basic equipment but they have to wait until the the pumper gets there so it's really about keeping the equipment with the fire fir Fighters and get it being able to get to those lower RIS lower frequency higher risk calls uh quicker okay thank you other questions on that Paula um because because in the police study the Citywide study it says that the police are responding more now because the fire the fire trucks aren't like like there's so many calls at the police so and we'll we'll touch on that a little bit um you're right so there's a number of call types right now on the medical side that the police department is still handling um our goal is once we get to a a certain Staffing level here that we're going to assume responsibility for those calls but but PD still responds on a lot of EMS calls with us and part of it is because they might be closest because they're out on the road and another part of it really is for security purposes cuz uh as you've seen recently it's getting riskier and riskier for us we're going into strangers homes every day all day long and um we don't always have the luxury of of being able to see what's going on and and law enforcement a lot of times is is there to you know not only assist with the medical but to have our back on on those calls to make sure our people are safe I just have um two related questions one is remind me again how what the kind of full-time versus paid on call equivalent is is it two to one yes that's so for uh the insurance services office that does evaluations for cities that's what they have it rated as so um for every one full-time firefighter it's the equivalent of two paid on call so we're bringing those numbers down every time we hire a full-time our number of necessary paid on call goes down by two yes which is why well we've reduced down to 70 so far and then as we bring more full-time on we'll continue to evaluate that number and adjust it as necessary so then my follow-up question is that's all happened by attrition we haven't had to ask people to leave at all right okay was I did have a question um so and talking with with Mike Funk earlier um I have some questions about the are our EMT services and and the the problems with our ambulance response times so mik say so all of our firefighters are EMTs correct um can you tell me like what's the difference between an EMT and a paramedic and like what are the like do do our do they carry like aeds because I saw like the thing you know like the longer it takes to get defibrillation the the obviously the the more at risk the patient is but also if someone's in need of defibrillation they're in need of hospital they need to get to the hospital so if they still have to wait for 15 20 minutes for an ambulance to show up that's not great either so I'm just yeah so the the easiest way to explain the difference between an EMT and a paramedic is right now paramedics can deliver narcotics and EMTs cannot there's a lot of things we at the Mt level that we never used to be able to do that only paramedics can do we do Advanced Airways we're able to do uh give glucose Nitro uh epinephrine um do uh EKGs we can we can do all that so really that differentiation now really comes down to being able to deliver narcotics on scene uh for whether it's it's a cardiac related event or uh something like or an overdose something like that where they they need IVs need stuck and so like Naran would that we can give Naran yeah cuz that's not u considered a narcotic for treatment so other questions Paula um just if I'm understanding if you can just confirm the reason that a lot of this has gone over to the fire department though is because as uh issues with recruiting um police uh who are EMT certified is that correct or is that incorrect my reading we have um we have some that are EMTs okay and we carry aeds in all cars and Ouran so we'll get in there there's there's definitely an overlap with not only Medical Response but mental health response with fire as they start to add to this Staffing and I'll cover that a bit more detail yeah but you know for instance a a cardiac arrest event uh takes about eight people to manage so you know between police and fire sending personnel and then the paramedics showing up it's pretty intensive on how many people it takes to to run those events so good questions other questions all right Chief thank you very much good presentation and so last but not least we've got our our Police Department so uh Chief borom and uh and your Command Staff they are here good to see you all um and so I I heard a lot what was talked about and actually I think we're going to cover most of it I'll do this this is more of an over View and then our next um PowerPoint is getting into more the the numbers the requests and what that looks like and so for our organizational chart uh we have technically three divisions one is uh led by our deputy chief Jason Tate and he oversees all of our our training our hiring anything to do with Professional Standards we have a lot of policy adherence State statutes our post board who licens us there's there's just a lot that goes into that uh if we get a complaint on any of our staff uh he'll he'll manage that along with uh Miranda's team and HR and then our Patrol Division is our largest division in in in the police department and that's led by Rachel Mian that are the officers who are wearing a uniform alt their 247 responding to calls for service it's our Animal Control folks our uh Cadet program and we have a a variety of volunteers like our our Police Explorers which are young high school kids that maybe are interested in law enforcement and then our police reserves which are also a volunteer group and then uh Captain Andy Gardner uh who is going to retire in a month this may be his last uh well he'll come for recognition but his last official working uh study session leads our investigative investigations and support services our support services are our records folks who uh meet people at the front door uh gather uh reports for data request and our detectives uh you know we in in in any agency in hanpen county for that matter we handle everything from uh somebody vandalized or stole my bicycle out of a car all the way up to a homicide we handle it all here our our uh detectives are cross trained we do have some specialty uh investigators we have one that's assigned to the Southwest henpen drug task force they work with several other agencies and the county primarily dealing dealing with highlevel uh drug use and lately it's been around opioids uh fentanyl um we have two SRO and then we have two officers or two detectives at Ridgedale we actually have a substation at Ridgedale and then we also have an detective who's assigned to a uh electronic crimes workg group that's led by the Secret Service we deal with a lot of uh Equipment Technology computers cell phones and to have software to be able to uh review that evidence is very costly so being a partner with the federal government we actually uh benefit from um the training he gets for free and then all the equipment equipment that comes along with that all said and done we have 64 sworn officers when I me my sworn those are us of that are licensed by the state of Minnesota to be a police officer it's including myself um and any other officer who is wearing the dark uniform and then we have about 14 support staff that's our rec Recs our Cadets and our uh animal control community service officers when I look at highlights you know I'm very proud to say we responded over 43,000 calls for service last year that's a lot of interacting and we've had great interaction and and we do a lot of good work um but I'm going to point out some things that we're very proud of uh Beyond just our normal um you know Duty and Mission to go out and Serve and Protect uh our transparency dashboard uh we have we have a couple new council members uh uh here today um if you didn't know uh on our website there is a data portal and there's a lot of uh interactive uh things you can look at um you can see uh our our call for service we've added this in the last year you can you can look up in real time uh any call for service you can see the map of the city you can see the location you can look at crime if you want to look and say how many burglaries occurred between January 1st and June 1st you can look at all the bories uh we have that available to you we now track all use of force anytime an officer uses Force we track uh demographic information what type of force was applied um there's a lot of information there we also track we have license plate readers that's technology that we use we track all the results of our uh lprs we have roughly 13 is that correct 13 lprs in the city we've been able to recover a lot of stolen vehicles in fact the state of Minnesota has given us grant money because of the success we've have we have with our lprs and then mental health uh we track all our mental health calls we had roughly 467 last year we track uh was was a referral to our social worker what was the what was the reason for the call was it substance abuse homelessness you know um a variety of issues we track all of that and I'm going to talk a little bit more about mental health uh when I get down into one of our some of our challenges and so there's there's other things on our dashboard that you can see that are uh very interactive um our goal is to be transparent we got nothing to hide um other highlights for last year is we received several uh grants uh to help absorb some of these costs one is has been mentioned as our DWI uh traffic enforcement officer uh if you looked in our study there was a recommendation to add two traffic officers and by uh receiving this grant we were able to fulfill that requirement I shouldn't say requirement that that that kind of that need um and that that Grant covers the full salary of that traffic enforcement officer they're primarily responsible for uh DWI enforcement uh drug enforce drug uh impairment um and so that that is a annual Grant but I I think that our experience is that if you are doing good work and you're showing results you will continue to recover that we also received an auto theft uh Grant we took one of our existing uh detectives and and we were already dealing with a lot of theft investigations and so we were a able to offset that salary by about $100,000 per year and that's a three-year Grant and then we had a a request in the CIP for a camera trailer about $60,000 that we also uh received so um that was uh nice to be able to take that out of the CIP we worked with Julie's team on a homelessness response and really that just uh enhances our uh response to homelessness by coordinating it used to be you know they may get something we get something we don't connect the dots so this way it's a it's a really interactive way we track it by mapping and then uh utilizing his house it's been um very successful and then our new Americans academy uh we hosted that last year it's a six- week program it's really geared towards uh uh new folks that come here to the United States uh oftentimes we think you know we people had bad experience with policing and so our goal is to just have a good interaction in fact I can I think it was a couple weeks ago we had a we had we tried to stop a car and the car just kept going and we come to realize that this person is not comfortable with police came from a different country and was really reluctant to stop so anything we can do to have great positive interactions we we we certainly uh want to do that uh some challenges recruitment it's already been mentioned um some numbers for our our our data folks and so like I mentioned we're about uh 64 authorized and in Patrol which is Rachel's division there's about 37 all right in the last two years we've hired 14 officers that have went into Patrol and of that 37 um so there's it's a very young group that are out there uh on on the streets responding to calls uh 14 new officers in the last year uh two years I'm sorry a little yeah about two years three support staff uh three Cadets and currently we have nine openings for police officer so all said and done when we hire we'll be about 23 new officers in um about two years so that's about a that's a big number um and so that's why it's really important for uh for Jason and the training our training unit to really make sure we have good training um because it's through experience you know you could have a brand new officer that gets a call that they've never experienced before and so we just you don't know what you're going to get any given time uh one thing we we are looking at is because we have nine openings our Cadet program is extremely successful in fact we're getting 60 70 applicants that uh for Cadets those are individuals that maybe are looking to go to school or in school and you know we can kind of grab them and get them in here and then once they graduate they can become police officers we have uh three right now that at one point they'll be moving from the light blue Cadet uniform into our into the dark blue and and so it's very successful so we'll continue to do that and hopefully enhance it with our openings and one thing I want to mention is that we we still have high standards we we we expect good officers we haven't had a need to uh offer hiring bonuses or do anything like that we have a good reputation in the in in in the region we attract a lot of lateral officers officers from other communities who uh you know who hear about minak and so we do we do fairly well but our standards have remained the same and at the end of every interview I sit down with two community members um they've been with me for two years Mary Pat Blake and Deborah finny and we decide if they move on and so I'm very proud that they're involved I'm very excited that they continue to want to be excited about coming and seeing the officers but it does serve a purpose um another is uh organized crime as I mentioned we have two detectives at Ridgedale uh and we we've seen not so much you know one-offs where you know the days of a 16 17 year- old stealing a pair of pants is not what we see anymore we see large groups of people who travel across the United States um and take uh large quantities of clothing several thousands of dollars last year we had a group out of Ireland that was here uh scamming uh homeowners for for roofing repairs if you saw that in the news we've also been dealing with a large scale theft operations that are coming out of South America so we have seen larger um group groups that are coming in and stealing a lot of stuff or uh you know committing more of that um organized crime which are very difficult to um you know to investigate mental health uh and we're going to talk about this not only right I'll talk about briefly right now but we're going to talk about it more in our Public Safety study when I think about mental health um that that's a that's tough because there's there's two things to look at when you talk about mental health one is someone we had about 467 last year and so what it looks like someone calls 911 um someone's in crisis regardless of what time of day it is it's going to come to the police department I mean there's no other um Community organization or anybody else that's able to respond at this given time right now and and we're looking for opportunity with fire and then that's the initial response the followup is we're our social worker and we have a mental health unit that will then try to connect with that person to try to find resources so it's very difficult to remove that initial response by police because we're out there 247 um where we where we actually do a really good job is the followup so our social worker Kelly who was a hen up and County employee will will will meet with that uh you know whoever that is and try to find what resource they need so we do a lot of followup on the back end uh with our mental health uh with our mental health Team uh and talk a little bit more more in the public safety study about how I think there's some opportunity with fire professional development that really is because of all of our new officers we're hiring we're spending a lot of energy around training um and that you know again and that goes out being said is that's probably really that's really important I really appreciate the support in our budget to make sure that happens um and I mention you know you you provided dollars for uh crisis invention training to make sure all our officers are going to receive that this year and 25 has a very similar uh challenges software cost we subscribe to a lot of technology and that technology like it was mentioned with our body warn cameras our LPR everything we have now has a subscription or some sort of a software fee and those costs do not go away and oftentimes we think something is really good to have but it comes with these other costs that you have to factor in and then we are paying attention to the Opus area uh that is another area where we're kind of watching what happens with fire so anything we can do that fire is relocated someplace we can kind of fill in a spot in we don't need our own space is kind of what I mean so we're kind of watching to see what happens there um some uh goals and Innovations as I mentioned um oh one thing I do want to back up real quick uh in our in our middle management Frontline supervisors we have we have 12 sergeants and in two years we'll have replaced eight of them and a captain so um that's the other area of profession development is our middle managers to make sure that they receive the training they need to supervise young officers and so we're working with HR and bringing in some facilitators to help uh with that uh mental health response and so as I kind of mention how we respond and we're really we always look for opportunity to collaborate and work with others but in the in the public safety study there is a recommendation for two additional officers just for mental health and when I get the me when I get to the public safety study you'll see that I push that back because I am optimistic that there's going to be opportunity with with additional fire staff that we can then remove the police maybe on the front end on some of those calls if we Tre as a call and someone's in crisis there's no threat of violence is there really a need for a police officer to respond if not can we have a fight firefighter respond or a group of firefighters you know how can that what does that look like so I think that's where the opportunity is um technology uh I'll talk a little bit about our detectives and and the requests for that we need to do a better job of like managing the case load of how many cases are our detectives are handling what's their solvability what is the outcome um drones we're seeing you know we've always been uh a proponent of mutual Aid and all the cities around us have have a drone program and we have found that often times we'll call whether we have a missing person someone who's flood into a wooded area a variety of reasons the drones are becoming very useful piece of technology and so we're going to be looking at what does that look like for us a communication strategy talked about social media you may have gotten calls about helicopters up in the air and they're wondering what's going on and we often are called you know why aren't we seeing this on on some sort of social media platform why does it take a day and so we're just trying to figure out what does that look like you know how how do we let people know what's going on in a timely manner and so working with the staff with Communications and then ultimately our Public Safety master plan is our is our kind of continuation of that and that's pretty much it and then I know there'll be more in the in the master plan but I'll turn it back over to you mayor and the council thank you Chief uh questions for chief um Kimberly um I do have some questions about the mental health response but I think I'll hold on to that uh so like just from your from your presentation things so the the um the 14 new hires are those mostly due to retirements that you've had have so many young officers now yeah so um we added uh in last year's or this in last this year's budget we added five so that we're at 59 um majority of these are through attrition are through retirements correct and I think if you go back 25 30 years they hired a lot and we're seeing that too we do see the tail in we think going in the next year we're going to see the kind of the back end of it now you have to retain them right and I think we do a pretty good job once you once you actually we we get you here we can kind of hold you and not hostage could you could you hang on to Andy a little longer he already stayed a year longer oh okay well um and I I think this has been asked of you before you've addressed this before but we sometimes um have people concerned about the privacy concerns with the license plate readers and um so could you speak to how that technology is used and what's retained and yeah and someone is going to jump in if I get it wrong so I and when L license plate Readers first came out there was really no control over the data storage and how it was being used you know am I tracking you know Dr Wilburn in your neighborhood for six months and now there's some structure around that I believe our retention what is it 69 days 59 59 so now 59 days so if you were to drive into the ridge jail we have license plate readers what we utilize them for is uh is they call them hot files so if there's a stolen car in person um wanted person as soon as that car goes into the Ridgedale area it automatically alerts all the cars right away that there's a stolen vehicle and then when typically we get there we find the car unoccupied and we try to recover the car and sometimes we catch somebody with that back in the day I think there was concern that people were utilizing the like going to the back end say oh I saw you came here at this certain time and it was Big Brother right tracking me um that's not the use of LPR now could somebody abuse it it like anything else absolutely but you got to have good policy around that and state the Minnesota Bureau of Criminal apprehension they track all use of lprs so we have to report to them our use of lprs and so I think when they tightened up that time frame so we don't just collect this data indefinitely that alleviated a lot of those concerns and you got to utilize it for like any other piece of technology we have if you use it the wrong way that's what gets us that's that's when people start to ask those questions other other questions um KY I guess my question is going to be similar to asked um fire um Chief um in regards to um it sounds like we hired five new officers in 2024 and we've hired 14 officers in the last two years um well five additional and filled a vacancies okay so really the addition is those five okay um so what is the 14 officers then those are people who have retired and we had a failer spot okay so like when Andy leaves we'll have to promote a captain promote a sergeant and then hire somebody so that would be considered a hire we're not adding not technically adding or you're just filling the spots when corre someone leave okay that's exactly it and then it sounds like you're going to be um hiring you need 23 more officers in about you said two years that'll be in total 23 all said and done okay but not additional officers we're still at that we're still at that five now oh so you're still filling spots between three officers okay we've got three or four retirements this year okay that we anticipate okay so that makes sense okay because I was thinking I thought you were hiring 23 more officers in the next two years no and on the public safety study you'll see our like our our end goal okay um yeah most of the hiring we're doing is through retirements okay so I guess I don't have to ask you that question then because now it makes more sense to me okay other questions you know I'll I'll comment because I think um you know you mentioned that there's 14 new officers we have nine openings so that's the 23 new officers that we have gotten in the last year or two but but I know that you know as I over the last several years I looked at Staffing in our Police Department we are one of the most leanly staffed police departments in the West Metro um we have fewer you know per capita we probably have fewer sworn officers than any other city so we're doing it pretty efficiently and and you know how you look at that data well it's it's great but as needs and issues have Arisen well we could argue well maybe we're a little underp policed and we need some more people and so I've been supportive of adding adding officers because we're still not going to be overstaffed relative to our neighboring communities we're going to be kind of catching up a little bit and um you know as as crime has gotten more sophisticated um you know it's it's a more challenging job as as has been suggested here and I just wanted to thank our Police Department our fire department for the work that they do at the state of the city on Friday I had a friend there and I saw him talking to Captain Mian because this friend of mine has a son who is really struggling with mental health and he's schizophrenic and and I know he is on um I mean I know our officers have been to their house many many times times and you know just how we handle that my friend and his wife are so thankful for the professional treatment that his son who is not an easy human being trust me on that um has uh received from our from our police department so I think that's that's really significant and I'm appreciative of that so thank you and then you know I talked to the chief not too long ago because in my neighborhood there was a there was a Breakin and it was part of these uh professional um um criminals the Chiefs um suggest that it was likely the South Americans that are are coming up and and kind of roving bands across the country and there's a professional hockey player who lives in my neighborhood he's in he he's in New York most of the year and so you know they they just highlight and go after you know they know where they're going they know what they're looking for they didn't steal anything because they were looking for jewelry and there was no jewelry in that house um but our but our police officers knew and and chief met with the neighborhood association because they had some questions what can we do to protect ourselves and I just want to thank the chief for for doing that and you know I mean when crimes happen to you it's very personal and um it happened in our neighborhood and I just wanted to say thank you but I can say and I I brag on our Police Department our fire department a lot we've really got a great professional Public Safety department and uh they're here to help our residents and I'm I'm very appreciative of that so thank you both and thank you all I have one more I had one more comment or question I know you talked about professional development and the calls 467 mental health calls last um year 202 um three I'm wondering are we doing anything to cross train police officers I know we have the one the social worker that works through henin County um in the partnership but what are we doing to cross train are we um I don't know I just think about cross training and giving incentives to police officers to cross train um in mental health yeah that's I mean so la last year so there's this there's a what they a bench like a best practice gold standard training for those responding to those in crisis it's a one-week uh training program through Crisis Intervention training and last year uh I was I received through the budget onetime funding to get all officers to that one week training and part of that training is through scenario based and so really I mean that's probably our most extensive training is a solid one week of training so all of our officers by the end of the year will be Crisis Intervention trained okay and so uh be because of that we there there there will never be a 100% response by you know we always have to be prepared to response respond to somebody in crisis there's just there's no there's no other person that can do that and so and that's the hard part you got to wear that hat in Medicals yeah we can kind of give up some of that but even on a on a crisis it it may be somebody that is armed will fire will not go so then we still have to go so we're just trying to find that perfect balance but to your point KY we definitely cross train um in mental health response and we have a unit that does a little bit more training okay great thanks Chief any other any other questions Council we're getting late I want to be respectful Deb anything for you just we do have more presentation okay all right I I think a lot of it's going to be covered in the study and I'm saving my questions for that okay well let's uh let's let's move on and we'll we'll wrap it up here but um can you tee up that Miranda and so as this is being teed up uh this study that no not only police did but fire did uh concurrently is is is a like a staffing assessment um pretty much looked at everything that we do and the and the reason why we chose the same consultant is because they used a lot of data to guide their recommendations and so fire was actually going with them first and then we kind of jumped on at the same time just because of that we have the same data why are we paying two different Consultants let's use the same consultant so a little bit of an overview because I know we have some two new counil members and this is a five to sevene plan it's very flexible and so when you see these numbers these are the recommendations by the consultant and then police and fire really looked at each of the recommendations and figured out over the next five or seven years how do we prioritize these recommendations and our plan is um is that this came forward last year and we made recommendations for uh our 24 budget we're here tonight to focus on 25 but we also are going to highlight Beyond 25 so you can kind of see what that road map looks like and again this is flexible there we have to be Flex we have to be ready to Pivot um there's a lot of pressure and we we recognize that CU most of the things we're talking about have dollar signs attached to them and some are pretty large so first want to point that out and for really for police I said operations and Staffing assessment they took a look at everything that we do and then provided an analysis based on best practices and uh I'll point out that our Consultants came out of California um both in the fire service and Police Service and they do this work all over the country and so highly respected um Consultants that we utilized they looked at our staffing or supervision management support functions and and many of the recommendations do not cost money or they're low cost but we'll focus in on kind of the high level ones that do cost money um and then one thing that they um identified well take that they did about eight month study um I I let's keep going actually five things five themes emerged from from the assessment um and there you can kind of see them covered in there and if you want me to go in the detail I can't but I'll think I for time I think I'll get to the substance so if there's questions that come up um just to kind of keep it uh keep it flowing here that's the most of this few first first few slides is really just kind of the background um there were 59 key findings and 47 spefic specific action items and so what we did we did is took all 59 put them into a spreadsheet and kind of started to play with them a little bit on seeing where these should fit and um and looking at their recommendations some highlights from 24 is that this is getting to some of the questions that came up we did add four officers and really what that did is allowed us to create a Powers shift what the Consultants uh discovered is like during during typically Monday through Friday from about 10: am to about 800 PM our our ability to respond to calls was diminished because we didn't have enough staff uh working in the streets and so by adding those four officers which are which are part of the nine that we haven't hired yet that would allow us to create an entirely different shift to help take away some of that pressure we added a sergeant to really help with the St Professional Standards um again that's training and and you know accountability things like that the crisis intervention training I already kind of covered I was given $30,000 it's about $1,000 per person we are at the end of the year we'll have every officer trained in CIT and then we have a a mental health data collection in on our website on one of our data portals that's where you can go and see how many calls we responded to what was the nature of the of the uh of the call um like I mentioned homelessness uh was it uh chemical dependency Mental Health iety of different things that are tracked uh that's Kelly she's a henen county social worker that we contract with she works full-time in the police department and so she's here every day and then uh some new technologies our camera trailer um our license plate readers and then we have a um we won't get into detail but we we spend a lot of time uh in briefings twice a week where we have intelligence driven directed Patrol so our analysts will say hey officers this is where things are happening you need to be in those areas at this time and this day instead of just driving around waiting for something it really focuses our resour resources in certain areas um and so for 2025 uh based on the recommendation um there is a request or will be a request to add one case detective and as I mentioned earlier in in the other presid ation our detectives cover a variety of of Investigations from Death investigations burglary theft assault and criminal damage to property in 22 you'll see that there was a spike and now we've kind of leveled off a little bit which is good news but in 22 if you recall we also had an incident involving somebody breaking windows that that there was about 85 of those calls were came from that case and so you can see all these things can kind of go up and down so you really got to look at over several years but we do notice that uh cases are going up and the complexity of those cases is what we're paying attention to and what I mean by that is um most cases we deal with have a cell phone or a laptop or some other U technology that we have to get search warrants for so our detectives are spending a lot more time on individual cases I have an example of we had a theft by swindle case involving a home builder took over 7 months to investigate it and it was involving a theft of over $500,000 to a resident here in minaka and um so just a lot of work that goes into these individual cases um mentioned that what we call The Travelers people had travel all over the country we end up um working with our state officials our federal officials and things just take a a lot longer because these cases are are more um more complex um and we looked at some studies and saw like an average death investigation and you may think okay how many death investigations do we have but we have folks that passed away from natural causes that are unwitnessed uh suicide and in last year we had 62 so if it's unwitnessed death or a suicide our detectives will respond and investigate that and there's studies that show that takes about 14 hours uh per death in investigation and for a homicide which we didn't have what I would call a homicide last year but we had three overdoses last year that resulted in a death and we treat every overdose death as a homicide because we want to be able to hopefully track down you know maybe there was a supplier that provided the drug that caused the death and so those can take over 146 hours to uh to investigate and then the kind of the ones that kind of the runof-the-mill a typical burglar investigation is over 12 hours and then a credit credit card fraud is about 17 hours and so we just have seen over the years the complexity of these cases has become much greater and um you know we want to make sure our detectives have the time to put in a thorough investigation and hopefully bring some some sort of resolution to that to that case and so that is a request for the police department uh for next year and there's some other uh what I would call I don't call them no cost because they do come with a cost but it's low is uh I mentioned this is more of a a platform to really track the work that detectives do the case load solvability how many cases are we solving how many are we submitting into the attorney things like that we want to be able to uh have a system that does a better job than our current system to do that and then facilities that's really just really taking a look at um what opportunity we have with either fire or a developer and and putting U some sort of a um a substation or a storefront because with all the with the trail system and and and Opus it's just on the corner of our city and we want to be able we have we have bike Patrol and so I want to have a have the ability to have our officers park there and go into the into the uh area on bike and I mean just uh just to uh just to be present so we're g to we're going to kind of see what happens with the fire studies and in in the future of Opus um and then this is going Beyond uh 25 so we'll we'll be back next year to talk about you know kind of 26 and Beyond but we we recognize Ridgedale uh is is a large um you know presence in our city uh there's a lot of activity at Ridgedale and so the recommendation is to take a look and adding two more detectives to that area and while they're stationed at Ridgedale they're also responsible for all retail crime in minaka so if there's an incident at the target at 7 and 101 the detectives will be responsible for that even though they work out of Ridgedale we are looking at um maybe trying to approach ridgel to see what kind of partnership we can have one of the things we're we're you know obviously paying attention to is that they they pay taxes they expect you know safety at the at the mall and uh you know we want safety because it brings in a lot of visitors every month and so what is Our obligation but yet we're actually in the mall and we provide a service to the mall and so we're really going to kind of look at that over the next year what that what could look like one thing is we have an office up there that's very inadequate that I think at the at at the very minimum we should be able to approach them to see if they could you know maybe make it a little bit nicer for us um and that was a case our our our detective in the middle Heather it was a employee theft uh that was stealing over a million dollars in uh merchandise from Nordstroms and sell and selling it on like eBay and so they're very active up there and again they're not dealing with you know someone stealing a pair of pants it's it's large scale uh theft operations worth thousands and in this case it was over a million dollars in merchandise um 27 and 28 I'll just kind of go over this again because we'll be back to visit next year uh recommendation was to add four tra have or add two officers making it a four officer Traffic Unit we've added one with this with this DWI Grant we'll evaluate that and see how how how well it perform forms and and obviously report back and but that is a recommendation and then um there's some there's some minimal no costs in there and I I won't get into that and then upper right hand corner is I I know I put it all to 2028 and you're I know the question would be well that's really important why are we waiting because the recommendation is to add two officers that would that would perform this function and I think before we add two people let's figure out how we can partner with fire and maybe not add two officers and reallocate those dollars someplace else so that that's why that is there and and then that part-time that actually has been already uh ignore that one because I'm going to point out something here that was a recommendation that add somebody to help out in our property room these are some grants I kind of covered already to help you know kind of cover the cost and some are going to continue on into next uh in the next two years but we continue to look for grant opportunities because we know this is really expensive and then um this is kind of our this is this is the snapshot on on total increase to police over the next 5 to seven years we've already accomplished the 2024 numbers the community engagement officer you know that was one of the uh that wasn't that was a position I brought in 2016 with a focus on really it was one person that really enhanced our Outreach efforts it worked very well and uh and and and what we did is we looked at it and said you know it's one officer it should be more than one officer so we actually solicited input from officers who had an interest in doing like this work and they're doing it in addition to their normal job so instead of having one person do it we're a department of 64 we have about I don't know six or seven officers that want to do this work on our behalf and so then we were able to take that position and and then use it in one of the patrol officers we didn't have to hire so we just kind of re kind of reallocated that position so still kind of working progress but I I I think the outcome will be will be good uh the G so that we're not asking for a community engagement officer this year and you won't see that in the future uh the detective uh retail detectives there um the traffic officer and again I the 2028 mental health I I I hope that we will find a different U approach to that and I I'm pretty optimistic about that and then our our records manager uh took a look at our request there for property room specialist and she actually said you know what I think I can do that she's already a full-time employee she goes I can I can I can do that 05 work for you without adding a person so that's why that that was changed in 2028 so I think it turn over to Fire and then at the end I think we can answer questions if that works that works great thanks Chief okay get my cheaters on here so uh the citygate study that was conducted was a review of our fire department deployment and overall organization um they found the department that was it was well organized and was well supported with managerial infrastructure so the recommendations that we're presenting are again a kind of a 5 toe 5 to sevene plan uh but remain highly flexible um the most significant issues that are facing our department is going to be our response performance and our staffing Capac capity and our fire station physical limitations so overall the study found uh they had 21 key findings and five actionable recommendations um with again similar to PD uh the costs with most of the costs are going to be with personnel and the fire stations um overall they recommended uh 21 additional full-time employees um and then other recommendations they made uh include Pol policy decisions that the council will make with our standards of cover um so overall recommendations they recommend we get the standards of cover uh eventually and that's that's a pretty loose term and I'll I'll I'll explain that as as we go here when we talk about the fire stations but uh eventually Staffing all five fire stations uh rebuilding or remodeling of the satellite fire stations uh hire career firefighters for that Baseline Staffing work with our paidon call fir fighters to maximize that capacity and then address the EMS issues that we're we're running up against so I'm I'm not going to get too deep in this but it kind of touches on what I talked about earlier when we talk uh effective response force and what the the best practices are and so what this says and this would be laid out in a standards of cover for the council uh for like a first due unit it's a 8 and a half minute response time and that includes from the time they call 911 with uh and that's 90% of the time is is the standard but uh on a 911 call that equates to a one and a half minute call processing time in the Dispatch Center and then a 2minute turnout time by the firefighters depending on a lot of that has to do with time a day um during the day we're out the door in about 90 seconds or less but at night it's it's a little bit longer so they they go with a two-minute crew turnout time and then a 5 minute travel time and then our uh effective response Force which is for the larger incidents that's where that 13 to 19 Personnel comes in um that number does go up though to 11 and A2 minutes 90% of the time because they understand more Personnel are coming from from different locations and and further away um and then same similar with hazardous materials and Technical rescue so I won't dive too deep into that so uh the recommendations that we completed in again in 2023 was we established our expected service life for our Fleet and and put together a a replacement plan um we developed our staffing enhancement plan that includes addition of the full-time firefighters that we added and that we're also going to be asking for um we began Staffing station two during peak hours we currently staff or cross staff a ladder truck out of our station three on the south end of town so that the Personnel down there have an engine and a ladder and then depending on the call type and the need uh they can pull either one of those so that allows us to get that ladder truck um on scene quicker those apparatus are very large and on structure fires if they're not one of the first couple of trucks to arrive we can never get them close enough to be effective at at a at a structure fire so it's important that we get those there as soon as possible so that uh significantly helps and then uh we improved our duty began to improve our duty crew turnout times so our 2023 daily Staffing looked like we had uh one captain and one f fighter technician out of our station one and that's in addition to we have a battalion chief that runs out of there um we also then would attempt to staff three paid on call out of station one and then at station three we would have uh up to one one paidon call and then one full-time lieutenant and one full-time uh firefighter daily so that was an authorized strength of uh 232 full-time employees and then that 70 paid on call and the the graph just kind of shows the distribution of it with that uh station two shifting a truck from Station 1 to Station 2 between 8:00 a.m and 700 p.m. so some of our to-dos for 2024 is get the uh service level policy objectives adopted standards to cover uh we're hiring three full-time firefighters which will on uh begin in July we've actually started the process so all the testing's done interviews are done um we should be able to uh start pre make offers and start pre-employment stuff here probably in May and then uh through backgrounds that'll that'll put them on board by July and then uh we have begun to engage with W Architects on doing our fire station assessment so with the addition to the three of the three firefighters this year that adds one firefighter daily so uh three you know sounds a lot at first it's like wow you got three more people and well that really only gives us one per day because we run the the three shifts so um we will add that and then it begins to uh ensure that we can keep that third truck in service with that additional person cuz then if we're if we're light on paid on call they can back fill that in and that's going to begin to allow us to transfer some of the rest of that uh EMS response from the police department over to the fire department and that would bring our that will bring our uh fulltime to 26.5 with still 70 paid on call in 2025 we're asking for uh nine additional full-time firefighters and that will establish a daily daily minimum of eight full-time firefighters on duty it not it does a couple of things here one is it starts to begin to establish vacancy capacity right now if one of our full-time firefighters is sick or on vacation um we either have to tr attempt to fill it with a paid on call but if we're already short on that end it's tough to get them to fill in or we have to fill it with overtime cost so um helping with that vacancy capacity is going to not only drive down our some of our overtime costs but it's going to begin to allow us to staff that third station uh up on the North End of town 24 hours a day so whereas right now we staff station two uh just during the day those peak hours we would no longer at least for now staff two we'd move them over to our station five which is is just a little further west um still has quick response time to that Ridgedale area but we would be staffed 24 hours a day now and uh that would then bring our fulltime to 35.5 fulltime and still 70 part-time paay on call and then some additional costs with that so the the additional full-time employees is about 1.35 million and then uh the Community Health Alliance is um an organization we're hoping to partner with they're they're used by some other cities around us St Park is one of them um this is an organization that can assist us when we have calls for service that are repeat calls so we have a lot of lot of customers that we go there sometimes multiple times a day multiple times a week what this company can do is they get involved and they help connect them with the resources that they need uh to help reduce the number of calls because and the special thing about this organization is they're licensed and have access to the patients medical records so because of that they can access their records They can they can help them with Medicare stuff and some of these other insurance things and some of these other benefits out there that maybe the customer was unaware of was even available to them um last year St Louis Park with the use of this company was to reduce their call volume by a thousand calls so pretty significant um uh we're looking at potentially around $175,000 for or if we at that point start to begin any type of fire station uh design project so that's an additional 235,000 total I believe if I can see that without my cheaters that's correct okay then we'll move on uh 2026 recommended daily staffen we would look at potentially another six full-time firefighters um this would begin to staff the other satellite stations so potentially Staffing Station 2 uh it works towards our effective response Force goal and would bring the fire uh fulltime to 41.5 and 70 paid on call at about $900,000 in additional costs 2027 very similar we look at six and that would staff are station 4 down on the southwest corner of the city um and then continuing to reduce our response times and that's the point that meets our our effective response Force as laid out by the Consultants bringing our fulltime to 47.5 and uh 70 respectively at 900,000 prior to this point we're going to have to start taking a look though because a lot of this is contingent on where we are with the satellite stations because if these station two and four can't accommodate 24hour a day Staffing we'll have to be to look at do we continue we we have the capacity to bring the people on and and disperse them among the stations that that can accommodate um but it's not going to necessarily put them at this time in the areas that we need them until we can we figure out and get the uh the fire stations uh squared away for that 24-hour Staffing so that's why we're going to have to continue to really remain highly flexible here okay and I kind of just hit on a lot of this so some of the implementation issues the cost of the Personnel uh the station planning and potential construction the time that it's going to take to ready the fire stations for the staffing um we are we haven't completely written it off yet but uh exploring the potential idea of maybe combining our stations on the North two and five into just one station maybe in a more central location um it'll still give us the benefits of the quick response time in that area with having fewer facilities to have to staff so um that's one of the things that the consultant or The Architects are going to look at and we'll kind of evaluate that as we go um what is the future of the paidon call Firefighters you know we've talked about as we had more full-time staff do we at some point start to draw down that and what and where do we have to be before we can start doing that and then with the Recruitment and Retention problems that we're continuing to see um we're a busy fire department we ask a lot of our paid on col uh firefighters and it's a big demand and people are busy these days and it's just it's becoming very difficult for them to do this and when we do exit interviews with people when they leave um you know the big thing is they they leave because they either have a a a major life change or a lot of uh over 35% of them that left in the last two years left for full-time fire jobs and then the others there was that that other percentage that it was just too much for them they they can't keep up with it so um we're going to continue to uh evaluate that and keep a close eye on it as long and continue to recruit as long as we can um changes in the Health Care System uh we didn't talk a whole lot tonight about EMS I could talk for a long time on the the state of EMS uh Nationwide it's it's in a crisis um Minnesota is no different Minnesota has some unique challenges due to how our system was designed in the 80s um the good news is there's some things going on at the state level right now and it's starting to be addressed so we we hope to see some movements but we don't know what that's going to look like in the next 3 to five years and where that's going to land and we're going to have to keep a close eye on it and and be ready to adapt accordingly so and then continue to monitor the standards of cover and service objectives so our summary then and I'm going to touch on one more thing after this our summary uh so 2024 we uh will add that third apparatus 24 hours a day we've applied for uh safer Grant which I'll touch on in a minute uh 2025 we're looking for potentially the nine firefighters to get our station five staffed up uh then uh station two with six in 2026 potentially another six and 20 2027 um and then that math does work out to to 24 additional now this year uh we did apply for a safer Grant it's a staffing for adequate fire and emergency response this is the third year we've actually uh applied for it uh the first year we did have a grant writer that write wrote it for us um it we weren't super pleased with how that turned out uh last year um we got behind cuz they opened the grant process early on us and we weren't able to secure a grant writer so we wrote Our Own and nationally the success rate for this grant when you write your own is 7% we did land uh we took out the big guns this year for grant writers and were able to secure um a company out of Indiana or out of Illinois and uh they wrote our grant their success rate is much higher they're at about 54% success rate so that's good news it's not guarant gued but if we were to get awarded this grant we would be looking at uh hiring 18 firefighters right away um it's a three-year 100% covered Grant so um they would cover the cost for the three years and then in roughly quarter one of 2028 that's when the city would then become financially responsible for those hires um some of the benefits of that is it would give us some tax levy relief over these next next three years and give us an opportunity to kind of prepare and get ready then to assume that financial responsibility and and finance uh Joel Mary was kind enough to kind of put this um together for us down in the in the lower right there and it just shows a breakdown of what those numbers look like over the three years so the total grant that we've applied for is 8.1 million and it's uh starts out in 2025 at at 2.5 goes up to 2.7 and 26 and then 2.8 in 2027 so um if you kind of look at that Trend in in 28 when the city would become responsible you're looking at uh it would be pretty close to probably the 3 million Mark so and I believe question time all right well thank you very much to both of you um um for some of us this is pretty new for some of us we we we have got the the whole we all have the whole report and there's there's a lot in there and uh and it's it's daunting um but you know I'll go back to something I've repeated every you know every year I've been mayor is that you know Public Safety is job one in cities it's the job that we need to deliver to our residents and and you know it's getting more complex it's getting more expensive um it's um and and our city is um getting more demanding so um thanks very much much I mean I believe what's being done here it's not it's kind of like okay it's not that this isn't the right thing it's okay how do we figure out how we get to pay for it because I think that's that's the challenge but questions anyone for um on the report or the presentations can Rel all right I have a few so um start with EMS you mentioned the the number of overlapping calls you have do you have any idea of how much of that is attributed to waiting for hennipen County to show up um I don't off the top of my head I I would guess it's probably pretty low um because we get such a large even though 75% of our calls are ems related we have such a large variety of them that you know at 5700 calls a year we're averaging uh our average is about 13 calls a day um our busiest is 30 calls a day and that's over a 24hour period so um I I couldn't say it's I I think it's fairly low though um and then I I actually have a bunch of questions about the mental health response but I'll I'll I'll pair it down for now um do you anti so two questions do you anticipate if you know if we get the the Staffing increases in the stations and that um fire service would be would have enough Personnel to handle mental the mental health calls yeah I think what we would explore doing is similar to what uh police have done with cross training our firefighters so um we would have a certain people on every shift that are are capable to deal with the these types of calls it might not be the whole crew it might be somebody that can when the call comes out one or two of them maybe can get in a in a pickup truck and respond to these incidents to to deal with that we wouldn't be sending you know necessarily the big truck with with four people on it to to deal with this stuff you and then my last question is around dispatch with um Brooklyn Park has a a pilot going Brooklyn Center was supposed to I'm not sure what's happening with that um Minneapolis has I think for domestic violence a a pilot going on um and like each program is a little bit different so do you worry about since dispatches coming from hinin County um like them knowing who to send I I can maybe maybe someone can back me up on that but so the Brooklyn Park I believe was a pilot based on a grant I think their grant funding is is coming to an end and I don't know if there's any other grant funding but I did hear it was a huge success because what they did for those that don't know when a call came in the dispatch the dispatcher triaged it and sent it to this this community response team that I believe was a paramedic and social social worker which was very that that that would be ideal you're right though working with the County dispatch to get because we're asking well if it's so successful why AR we doing this like tomorrow it's been years in the making so you know we're hoping that's going to happen but in the meantime is there something you know even though a call comes out can we triage it and send the appropriate resources and so that's ultimately our goal is to do something like that but it would be nice if the county would enhance that pilot program and allow all agencies who are on the system to have something set up like that St Paul is one of two have I think there's a lot of uh in throughout the country trying to find an alternative response at the end of the day the police aren't always the right people to respond to crisis right other questions anyone uh go ahead P oh excuse me dab go ahead and then paty thanks sorry I'm really running out of steam here like time so um one thing that we've covered in in you know many meetings including the review of the fire study had to do with the um replacement of fire trucks and you did you know touch on you know the fouryear build time and you know the increasing expense the terrible inflation um and I'm just wondering I know we needed a few really kind of I think it was three really high dollar trucks um and I was just wondering where we are on that and you know looking at page 23 of the study where it says that um recommends you know that that we establish an expected useful service light for each vehicle type my understanding in talking to the former Chief uh chap Vance I mean I had a pretty good grip on you know sort of what the useful life was but I'm just wondering where are we in our vehicle replacement and how close are we to needing that um you know setting that expected uh service live for each of our vehicles yes how are we paying for our trucks good question thank you uh yeah so we have um been working on the extended or expected service life um T historically when on the paidon call model pumper trucks had a 20-year life and ladder trucks had a 30-year life that's no longer relevant because the trucks run a lot more than they than they used to now that um not only are well we're much busier so the the expected life now of a pumper truck is about 10 to 12 years and then our ladders have moved to about 20 years and then we do refurbish them and Spruce them up kind of halfway through their life um so that's kind of what we're looking at now for replacement schedules we have three that we ordered last year um so those are three to about three and a half years out so we ordered them last year we won't see them till 2028 is um we did order one two years ago that we are just now going to start the pre-build on this fall so once we do that that puts us on the clock for about 18 months that we we'll have that vehicle within that 18month period um so hopefully in the next year and a half we'll be getting our our next new vehicle that we ordered two years ago so uh there's not a lot we can do about that um but I think as we move forward through the years here we're going to have to be strategic if those types of build times remain I think we're going to have to be strategic can get creative on how we're going to plan for those Replacements cuz it doesn't do me any good if I need a truck today if I'm going to get it in four years so I think we're going to have to to look at at uh how we're going to do that but I'm I'm hoping these build times don't remain this High um there was kind of a perfect storm of things that happened that between supply chain issues an influx of covid funds that allowed a lot of cities to buy trucks and there was just a lot going on and they've seen record numbers of orders of apparatus um so they're hoping over the next few years that might that pace might slow a little bit but it it's all backlogging because our manufacturer that we use can build uh their C capacity is 1,200 trucks a year and they had an order of 2400 trucks last year so that gives them a surplus of 1,200 trucks that they couldn't build over the orders that were received and that carries on and now if they have a record year this year that adds on and it just continues to to pile up so very challenging C Paula um very quickly just um you were mentioning the St Louis Park Model and uh working with that partnership um with that private company that was here you at all PO on it's because I forgot to clip up uh sorry about that uh working with the St Louis Park company which would it looks like that would be a 25% decrease if we got similar numbers um from them I mean so I'm I'm assuming that you're kind of thinking about that in terms of potentials one of our goals is to to help drive those repeat calls down and try to try to uh eliminate as best we can those those calls that just keep repeating where they can be solved by really putting them in touch with the with the proper resour so that we can focus on the the calls that are going to continue to rise so right okay so I'm assuming that that's one of the areas of flexibility we need and then the other thing is is that um you mentioned that we'll be up to 47 full-time employees by hopefully 2027 2028 or so and you know you're talking about the different vehicles that were needed and that you need to keep personnel with you know and this all goes into the truck thing uh the the truck needs and the engine needs um with the increased full-time employees would there be and since so many of our calls now are for mental health or medical is there a way like Edina has their own ambulance I know we can't do that currently unless things change at the state level um but is there a way forward or some sort of scenar you might see in the future where we can decrease our wear and tear on large engines and things because we have the full-time enough full-time staff to maybe do these things or something in conjunction with what H what Kimberly was talking about in terms of hennipen County are there I'm assuming these things are all percolating for you guys absolutely yeah so you know once we can ensure that we have the proper number of the trucks that we need to be able to respond to emergencies we would look at uh smaller Vehicles like we like right now we run a a small rescue on a lot of our Medicals and and that takes the brunt of of a lot of wear and tear for those calls um it's cheaper to repair it's cheaper to replace uh we can get them a lot faster they're essentially just pickup with a with a fabricated body put on them so um you know I would not be surprised if at some point we start to down the road start to employ something similar to that again to but right now it's hard because we don't have the Staffing and we need to keep the equipment with the Staffing so if they're out they need to respond to a fire which only happens about 12 times a year but you never know when it's going to happen got it thank you they would just schedule those darn fires yeah D oh boy that'd be easy oh that would be fantastic any other questions um I just had one I read it said that so we talked a little bit about how the police are responding to Medical EMT calls and it said here which I was I underlined because even if not trained to the full emt1 level still must respond Bond how does that work so like so you're called so the police are called I mean and it's it's you know it's so right so right now based on the call type so there are when someone calls in the dispatch if it's a certain call type like uh somebody who's in Cardiac Arrest stroke or some high level some you know major injury because we're mobile our police response is much quicker and all all of our officers have a minimum of EMR training their emergency First Responders they don't aren't EMTs and that just gives you one level but we find one to become an EMT is it's there's a lot of training and for us to get all our new people through it is very difficult because we have fire staff that can come out and really I mean we go on medical calls where someone maybe have like a a tummy a okay we can handle it with one officer we go there maybe provide oxygen we we carry we carry a lot of stuff on in our vehicles and so we can do a lot because we are the primary responder and we're in the field when it comes to someone who's in the cardiac arrest then fire is going to go with us because it involves a lot more um medical treatment yeah and so at some point you may see that if there's enough fire Personnel they become the primary first responder okay and our numbers are a lot lower like we responded to almost 43,600 calls for service of that our Medicals are about 4,000 okay so it you know and so we're kind of in transition right now as they come on board we're going to hopefully offload that that and but we'll still be there for like Cardiac Arrest because you want you know quick response get the defibrillator you you we still need that and because we're mobile we can get there very we can get there very quickly okay I don't know if that answered your question yeah no would you say um oh GL no go ahead I was just going to ask any other other questions I mean I had one related question but go ahead Mike oh I was mention I question for both of our Chiefs I think at least in my experience too in in uh working in government for a few decades when people called 911 rewind the clock 20 years ago when people called 911 it was real life or death kind of situations people call 911 today for tooth aches tummy aches um I mean there's just things that you would never think of calling years ago so that's that's what's driving a lot of our call volum too is just the almost misuse in some ways of 911 that's the pro that's part of the EMS crisis that's developed Nationwide is you know 911 and police and fire have really become the primary care provider for a lot of people um that's just the way it is we are their we're their doctors and you know that's continues to to drive that that call volume up and until something is done and it's going to take people a lot smarter than me to figure that out but until that's done it's going to continue to to be an issue well it's it's a classic thing I mean my question for you Kevin was um What proportion of your Medicals are lift assists I don't have that off the top of my head but it's a lot it's I mean every day yeah I mean if you you're shooting from the hip is it 5% 10% 20% I you know I would say 10 10% or more but yeah uh a lot of those that come in as liasis actually turn out to be more serious because uh what start people are stubborn so sometimes they'll say I just fell and I I need help getting up well we'll get there we find out they hit their head they have a head injury you know there's other problems that that go along with that we had one that we're going to be given an award tomorrow um came out as a lift assist and they got there and our firefighter realized they were in sepsis and sa saved the the patients Life by making sure they got to the hospital instead of just picking them up and being on our way so yeah but yeah that's an that's an important story because I mean obviously again I mean if they if they could schedule the fires and uh and we knew they were just LIF assists you know you could you could you could do it a lot more cheaply right but we don't we don't have that luxury that's the challenge right well um anything else I just closing comment real quick mayor yes mayor I just have just really quickly because I am seriously gonna log off right now go get go for it go get horizontal but um at the National League of cities I did attend a deep dive session with some granting information that I will send to uh Mr Funk and the police chief because there were a lot of Grants out there for some of the things that we're talking about and it it was mostly um mental health and um police Focus but um there's a lot of money floating around and they had some good uh granting sites that maybe we already know about but I'll send it around so I just wanted to State it for the record um thank thanks Deb go get horizontal um you know nobody in this room is going to be very far behind you on that right um Mike go ahead thank you mayor council maybe just to wrap things up tonight a lot of information so thank you Council I know it was a long night uh tonight was intended to begin that Foundation that we're laying for the 2025 budget the presentations that you saw tonight we do put that on our website for residence to see but we'll email that to you as well so you have everything that was presented here uh tonight um again it was important for I think for staff and for myself to really take a look back at 2023 so you got to see that tonight from our directors a look back of 2023 identify those challenges and then give you a sense of what we're looking at moving ahead um I'll say this again a hundred times um but we are a top-notch city I know you know that and there's so much that we can be proud of and I don't want to leave anyone with the impression that the challenges noted tonight don't single anything troubling but really it's a sign of our commitment to continuous improvements it's a it's a sign that we're forward thinking and really looking to make sure that we stay a top city um so again I know you got a good sense of the challenges U we also didn't touch on strategic plan action steps we did that earlier this year so I know there's a you recognize there's a whole body of work um not just what we're talking about here this evening but also with the Strategic plan uh those action steps we do have upcoming as you know in April our strategic plan refresh so all these data points will be brought back in into that budget kickoff meeting in May and so T tonight we'll continue to again lay that Foundation we'll bring a lot more uh data to you at that budget kickoff in May you'll see a lot of this again as we move forward as we again try to tackle uh tackle the challenges and and look forward to positioning the city well into the future so with that turn it back over to you Brad I think the last agenda item if you just want me to jump into that yeah just go ahead just go ahead next next study session is April 15th two big topic items one will be bringing back the zoning diagnostic IC report so Julie and zono will be here for that and then Mr oday will be back on our community facility study so really in-depth conversation two so those two items again I know we try to be done by 9ine I appreciate your time here tonight we knew it'd be a longer meeting but hopefully next time we'll be done by by night all right and I just want to I want to thank I want to thank sta staff and everyone a lot of work goes into all this good stuff and thanks thanks for hanging in here um we I mean we get to be here just as long as you do but um but but anyway thanks very much there's a lot of uh there's there's important stuff on the table so thanks very much thank you appreciate thank you