Good afternoon, everyone.

It's 304, and we will call to order the Delaware City Finance Committee meeting for August 19th, 2025.

Roll call, please.

Mr.

Hoffman is absent.

Mayor Wrigal?

Yep.

Chair Schaefer.

Item 2 is approval of a motion summary.

Approval of the motion summary from the Finance Committee meeting held on August 13th, 2025 is recorded and transcribed.

All in favor say aye.

Aye.

Any public comment that we received today?

We do not have any emails.

However, do we want to excuse Mr.

Hoffman?

We can, but we'll just be excused.

Which brings us to the capital improvement budget.

And Chief, I think we're starting with you.

Madam Mayor, Mr.

Vice Mayor, thank you for the opportunity to discuss the plans for the upcoming uh several years at the police department and kind of my thoughts on where we would allocate our capital improvement monies.

You will see some of the slides today will look familiar.

We use uh some of the expenses we have is year over year.

Um but I'd like to start out with just talking a little bit about what um we've accomplished this year with uh the 2025 money that was set aside.

Uh first being um we have uh inked a deal with the Motorola Company to upgrade our first generation body worn cameras to their most recent uh technology, the M700s.

Uh and we were also able to uh do that deal in such a way uh that now every single sworn officer at the police department has a body worn camera available to them at all times.

So that deal uh will take us uh over the next four or five years and uh will not be a project that we will be looking to uh address uh any time soon there.

Uh and then also um we were able to uh uh replace and acquire additional tasers.

Uh and again, um we were able to uh get to a situation where all sworn police officers will have a taser issued to them.

That was really helpful.

There are days of the year times where we did not have enough, and so the road patrol might have them, but uh only one officer working special duty would have one, or on Jug Day, certain officers had one and they didn't.

Um what we're doing is we're taking kind of the oldest ones offline, and those will be issued to some of our uh non-primary folks like myself, and we'll have the newest ones uh out to patrol.

The one comment I would make about the tasers, um they're becoming a little bit like the cell phone market.

Part of the reason why we wanted to get this done this year is um this will lock us in with this technology for five to six, seven years.

They've come out with new technology that's double the price and triple the price, but I kind of referred to it like the iPhones.

Explain to me what does the iPhone 15 do that the iPhone 14 doesn't, and you know, oftentimes you will hear, well, the camera is better.

You won't notice it with the naked eye, but it's got a better camera.

We're kind of getting into that a little bit with some of this technology, so um the best bang for our buck was to buy what we have.

And then also there won't be any ancillary costs because every time you change taser models, now you're looking at holsters, you're looking at training.

So it's not just the cost of the item, it's the ancillary costs that go with it.

Also in 2025, um, if you you remember about this time last year, we received the news that uh K9 Tyson had incurable cancer and uh ultimately passed away.

Um so we were able to use funds in 2025 in April to purchase K9 Mallow, um, who is our second uh police dog.

We replaced K9 Ollie with canine Ziva last year, so we have two um brand new recruits uh in the K9 division, and with uh an estimate based on the dog and the use, um, those dogs will last anywhere from seven to ten years service life.

So again, I think we're sitting uh pretty good in that uh regards with the two canines that we have and should not be a future CIP cost in the next five to six years.

One thing that we weren't able to get accomplished in 2020 as of yet was to replace our main uh airframe for our drone program.

We had uh 40,000 budgeted in 2025 CIP plan.

Um we have yet to spend that, and the uh main reason is um a significant tariff has been placed on these items and the cost went up 20 percent.

Um the current airframe we have is flyable but will need to be replaced.

So we are um trying to be good stewards of the taxpayers' dollar there and not overpay for something that the price ultimately will come down.

Um and we're also uh watching technology there in regards to um it this is a rapidly evolving market.

And uh one of the things that uh we're eyeing now is um we bought two smaller drones that go with this bigger drone that were able to fly inside, um, but we're also looking to get a smaller drone that would be able to be deployed by patrol without the drone team coming in because they could just become very, very useful in locating missing folks, uh fugitives.

Uh we've assisted the fire department with hot spots above houses that are on fire, just a variety of different things.

Um the technology is such that you can do almost everything with these drones that you can do with a helicopter other than carry passengers.

So uh for our size agency, it's just been very, very, very helpful.

Chief, do we always have somebody uh on duty or most of the time?

Somebody that can fly this.

Um we we don't um we have um, I believe right now we've had one person leave.

I think we have four licensed pilots uh that are licensed through the FAA to fly it.

Um and then all of the officers have gone through the observer training and are certified observers to fly these line of sight, you have to have a pilot who flies it, and then you have to have an observer because what happens is it's like a video game, the pilot gets so caught up in what they're doing on the screen that the observer stands there and goes, tree, tree, tree, and lets them know they might be getting close to something like that.

Um as we move towards potentially getting technology that would be available to patrol, we would have to um train additional pilots uh and ensure that they've uh got their certification.