She said someday.

Dang it.

Someday.

Two more.

Two more.

I gotta get this right.

Okay.

Ah, jinx myself by saying next time.

Okay.

Call to order committee of the whole and call to order committee on finance and property.

So welcome everyone this evening.

Thanks for being here.

Tonight on our agenda, we have we have dispatch, which is um with Stephanie Brown.

Um will be presenting that budget.

And then we have North Shore Essex Tech Ag Agricultural.

Um Essex Tech, we have Dr.

Riccio will be uh Rockyo, sorry about that.

Um we'll be pr presenting Ricky.

Riccio, that's it.

Sorry, I'm so sorry.

Um, and then um we'll take a brief break and then we will have um Dr.

Cushing present the um Beverly Public Schools budget.

So that's the order we'll take things in, and um if with that, we are going to get started.

I mean, you could leave.

Okay.

So um Ms.

Brown, would you um mind joining us up front for our budget?

Yeah, oh yeah.

And also with us, there's a few other people from the city staff that I'd like to recognize and elected officials.

We have um Lorinda Visnik, um, who are is our school committee president here in attendance, as well as um Chief O'Connor, um, our fire chief, um Beth Oldmixon, our city solicitor, and Brian Ailes, our finance director, who is up at the podium right now, and as with us as always, um, our budget analyst Jerry Perry.

So with that, I will take it away, Brian.

Great.

Thank you very much, madam chair.

Um, I did want to just take a quick second um just to kind of give a little bit of intro because um the good news is we've got now a full year of operations under our belt, and so we've got some real data to look at when we're moving into FY27 in terms of our civilian dispatch operations.

Uh this is the first full fiscal year.

So when we built last year's fiscal fiscal budget for FY26, um, there were a lot of assumptions built into that, and as you all know, um, we came back uh in mid-year to kind of realign some of the spending in that unit.

And so, based on uh staffing hours, based on uh the needs within that unit in terms of technology and staffing levels, we've built the FY27 budget to properly account for those needs.

So within this budget, there are one thing there's actually a couple things um that you'll probably ask about, but the two uh main things I want to point out is that the equipment line budget um is more appropriate for what uh is required in terms of the equipment upkeep within that department.

Um we did share some of those costs this past year between police, fire, uh, and dispatch, but now we're trying to uh contain it all within the dispatch unit.

And the second piece you'll notice is uh in FY26.

We originally um made the assumptions uh with a staffing model that included 10 FTEs in addition to 10 dispatchers in addition to the supervisor.

Um and we realized uh very quickly into the fiscal year that that was driving overtime beyond a level that we wanted to see.

So for FY27, you see us bring the overtime down, and we added one FTE to more properly account for for the hourly needs um that are required for the dispatch unit.

So I'll stop there.

I just wanted to point those out and kind of lay the framework.

Um, but I'll turn it over to Ms.

Brown now.

Okay, okay, thanks.

Thank you.

Hello, Madam Chair and um Councilman.

I'm Stephanie Brown, the dispatch supervisor for um the Beverly Dispatch Center.

Um nice to meet you all um formally.

Uh so I am just gonna share a little bit about our unit.

Um, of course, we formally combined last year, um February the 6th, and we um became the combined uh civilian dispatch um here in Beverly.

And as Mr.

Ayle said, that we are staffed right now with 10 full timers, myself and we're running with three part-time intermittent individuals.

We are running three people per shift, um, three on the day shift, three on the evening shift, and two on the overnight shift.

And one of the things that we are actually looking to as it's to add, we've asked about adding um one additional dispatcher with this, even though the model what the model that we're running requires 12, we're asking for one additional and the possibility of hiring two additional intermittents to fill the gaps.

When we went into the center initially, the staffing model that was designed was in hopes that we were going to maintain seven of we had seven intermittent um employees that were working at the fire department.

After the design of the structure that we came up with with the 10, so hoping that those seven were going to be there to help us fill the gaps, five of those people left and caused a real shortage, and then it was trying to play catch-up, which is what um drove the overtime because we we learned quickly that the original two, three, two model, which we were going to try to run two dispatchers from two dispatchers from 7 a.m.