The Grand Island City Council met on July 7, 2026, at 6 p.m. to review proposed budgets for the Emergency Management and Fire & Ambulance departments for the upcoming fiscal year. Presentations covered operational increases, capital requests, staffing needs, and future infrastructure plans. Council members engaged in detailed discussions on funding, overtime costs, and long-term sustainability.
We'll go ahead and call our meeting to order on July 7th, 2026 at 6 p.m. Welcome to our meeting. This is an open meeting of the Grand Island City Council. The City of Grand Island abides by the Open Meetings Act in conducting business. A copy of the open meeting act is displayed in the back of the room as required by state law. Now I'll proceed with the Pledge of Allegiance. And to the Republic for which it stands. Undergone, indivisible with liberty and justice for all. Councilmember Shearn. Present. Council Member Stelk. Councilmember Conley will be absent. Councilmember Nickerson. Present. Council Member Brown. Present. Council President O'Neill. Present. Councilmember Hazi. Present. Councilmember Mendoza. Present. Councilmember Pollock will be absent. Councilmember Lanfear. Present. And Mayor Still will be absent. The sign-up sheet was available in the lobby for individuals wishing to provide input on any of tonight's agenda items. If you did not sign up to speak an agenda item, please come forward, state your name and agenda topic on which you'll be speaking on. And none have come forward, so we shall proceed. Good evening. For those of you that are on the interlocal committee, this is going to look very familiar. But when looking at the budget uh for the emergency management department, we have uh our department is split into three funds, the general fund, the 215 or the uh landline E901 fund, and then the 216 or the wireless 911 fund, and that is brought in by an allocation annually from the public service commission according to a set formula. We don't have a lot of changes in ours, no new FTEs this year. Um but we do introduce the first year of the ongoing Motorola maintenance contract for the new for the new system, and that's a 222,000 dollar increase in the budget, which is sizable uh nonetheless. Uh what we have currently is all but two of our employees are on the general fund. And for a number of years, we had two uh two of the public safety dispatcher positions funded out of the uh a mix of the two fifteen two sixteen funds. What we find quite frankly is I'm always moving employees off of that fund and then uh newer or other uh other employees onto that fund because as wages increase the the the revenue of those two line items don't typically increase. Um so unlike a lot of my um operating expenses that are more predictable and more static. The employee costs that were on that 215, 216 mix tend to um over uh to overgrow uh and then we'd move them to the general fund and find two lower cost employees uh to put on there. For a number of years we've been looking at the right time to reshuffle the cards in and the expenses and bring all the employees into the general fund and push uh a number of my uh typical and annual expenses to the special revenue funds, and so this was the year we decided to do it. So what we did is um uh we moved about uh I'd say a hundred thousand dollars or more over uh from the two fifteen funds and two sixteen fund, and then we replaced it with uh allowable expenses in those in those two special revenue funds. And by doing so, it allows us to align uh cost like employees that grow with the general fund that has a greater capacity for growth than the landline or the wireless fund. Uh the wireless fund is a set construct, and our landline 901 funds haven't really gone up much over the last 10 years. Not a lot of new landlines are being installed in a community. So we're fortunate now that we have what we have, but we don't anticipate that really growing in any great measure. Uh personnel uh increases for the department are up uh 11%. But again, a lot of that is because I brought in two new employees into the general fund that we didn't have before. And then uh that includes step and level uh uh step and cost of living increases uh for the staff, and also it estimates changes that might be made for um insurance costs. And uh insurance is one of those things that you we budget in September, and then in J in January, a lot of times we may see elections change, and uh we have sometimes some unanticipated growth because we don't always know what insurance changes we'll make. And I'm kind of a small enough department, it's an interesting phenomenon to see how one or two people changing their insurance uh choice will have a pretty sizable effect marginally on how we operate.