Well, good evening, everyone.

I would like to call the March 17th, Happy St.

Patrick's Day special meeting of the governing body to order and ask the clerk if she would take the role.

Mr.

Escabel.

Mr.

Labourne.

Here.

Mr.

Moody.

Here.

Dr.

Rennie.

Mr.

Seagrape.

Present.

Mr.

White.

Present.

Mr.

Wolf.

Dr.

Aldrich, present.

Mayor Collins.

Present.

Dr.

Emmons.

Present.

Two members are absent.

We do have a quorum.

Would you join me in the Pledge of Allegiance?

Collective labor bargaining with Cheyenne Professional Firefighters, International Association of Firefighters, Local Number 279.

Did you want to start?

Did you have anything?

I've got a short thing to start off with if you're okay with that.

Yep, please.

So tonight I feel like we're stuck debating numbers and that has left us with little meaningful progress.

We came here to negotiate.

We'd like to refocus this process on moving the contract forward in a productive manner.

Right now we're willing to table wages and move forward on to other sections where progress can still be made.

We believe that is the best way to keep make this meeting constructive and keep negotiations moving forward.

And I think what I've come away from is it seems to me that you board's goal is to be the highest paid fire department in the state.

I mean, I think based on what I'm hearing from you guys, I think that's your goal.

And I think when I talk to our governing body, uh our goal is to this to be the best place to work as a firefighter in the state.

And that includes properly compensating firefighters, and we want our firefighters to thrive.

And so if I go back in history when I was elected mayor in and came into office in January of 2021, we had 89 firefighters.

And today that number is 103.

We've invested in staff.

But then we'll be spending about $950,000 a year in the in uh paying for our safer officers.

We've supported accreditation, you know, trying to make sure that the department is evolving and always working on best practices.

We have another one in the queue.

Um, and goals to um uh build one more after that.

Uh we have four new apparatus, three more on order.

Um all the small equipment that a person could ask for, including things like um a second set of bunker gear.

Um really it's important to us, I think firefighter safety.

You know, I read an article in the Cowboy State Daily this last week.

I don't know if you guys read that or not.

Um, there's a firefighter in Casper who has mantle cell lymphoma, stage three.

And um his wife talked about the fact that the uh the physical that they get there uh would not detect that that's different here.

You know, we spend another 40 or 50,000 a year on um physicals so that we don't have that happen so we can catch so we're investing in our firefighters, even our station designs now are designed to keep the carcinogens and the environmental uh challenges in the bay and allow those things to come into the firehouse.