Okay, call our meeting of public safety to order, and uh uh I believe our fire chief is gonna come up first, but I'm not oh okay, not our fire chief.

Uh I'll be here in his place today.

Right on.

Um let me get the presentation up, please.

So let me walk you through the first slide.

Uh let me back up.

Deputy Chief Keith Borson.

Um, let me walk you through this slide as there's a little bit going on here.

The the gold or yellow line across the top is reported structure fires.

You can see that since 2020, that continues to trend upward.

This is calendar year reported, so we don't have uh data yet uh year to date for the reported because we have to go through and distill that down to make sure the numbers are accurate at the end of the year.

Um then at the bottom where you have the blue line since 2020 uh you will see that the actual fires that we respond to mitigate has remained fairly stagnant.

So, what I'm trying to display here is that even though the incidence of the uh alarm reporting or people calling 911 continues to trend upward, the actual fires that we respond to are staying the same.

So far, year to date, 112 actual fires within the city of Grand Rapids.

Uh the reason that those numbers are staying stagnant of the actual fires we respond to is why we're here today, and that is to touch on the efforts of the fire prevention division.

So everybody's aware, everybody sees the uh flashing lights, the siren, the big red truck responding to the emergency.

What you don't see is what goes on in the background.

And with me, I have Captain Royal Le Grone.

He is the captain of our 40-hour fire prevention inspector staff, and then Ruth Yochum, and she is our community fire prevention educator.

Um second grade presentations and many other things.

So far this year, the fire prevention division has performed 589 operational permit inspections on businesses.

In conjunction with the building department, inspectors have completed 326 construction plan reviews and over 20 250 rough in and final building inspections.

Uh, along with um the Office of Special Events, that special events take place in the city are done in a safe manner.

So if there's cooking taking place, tents, large gatherings, more than 500 people, um, fireworks or cold spark uh oftentimes in the morning, usually almost every commission meeting in the morning.

We will have a fireworks permit that comes through for commission approval as an example.

Uh the result of that is the safety and the lack of problems that you hear about at these special events.

Another component of the fire department uh is our residential safety program.

That is where we go out and to individual homes, owner occupied homes, and provide education, and install carbon monoxide detectors and uh smoke alarms.

And you'll see that so far to date, we have installed almost 5,000 smoke alarms and over 1,900 carbon monoxide alarms.

That is getting into over 800 owner-occupied homes within the city.

Since the inception, that's 88,700 smoke alarms, 20,800 CO detectors, and over 16,000 homes that we have visited.

And again, there's also a fire and life safety education component to these visits to these homes.

So that's about getting out into the community, interacting with the community, providing fire safety education.

Over 100 events so far this year, uh, such as the shoes event in the image across the street, handing out shoes.

We were there every day of that event uh with our smokehouse with Smoky, the stuffed fire dog, not smoky, the or Sparky, the stuffed fire dog, not smoky, the one that you see running around with the chief.

Um engaging with kids and their families about fire safety education.

And I'd like to note that coming in October of this year, we're kicking off fire safety week, and this year's message charge into fire safety.

The messages around lithium ion batteries, the safe storage, purchase, maintenance, and proper disposal.

That is all I have.

Any questions?

I have a couple, Chief.

I mean, I guess the first is I think you're being too modest.

Um 263 minus 238.

That's a delta, that's actually a downward drop in the last four years of about 10 percent.

And I think you know, if you were pushing hard enough, you'd you'd be able to argue statistical uh significance there.

I mean, that's a real drop in numbers.

Um it's a it's a consistent downward plot.

So um I think that's I think that's great.

Um the question I had.

Well, okay, I I guess that's my that's my first comment.

Anyone else have anything they want to say?

Just for clarification, Chief.

Uh how much do we spend a year on the smoke uh detectors?

Smoke detectors.

Off the top of my head, I want to say that the number approaches three hundred thousand dollars out of the fire department's general operating fund.

We in the past did receive and we continue to seek and write for federal grants to help fund those.

And is the um is the are we keeping up with the demand for the detectors?

Are we uh are there people who have been turned away at the end of the year because we've no sir.

Okay, no, sir.

And I actually uh Ruth recently was uh one of the RSP installers until she took over the education component.