Everyone, uh, we're theoretically starting at 12 30.

We bounced that to 1245.

We're gonna compromise at 1243, and the city manager tells me everyone gets 10 minutes.

So, chief.

All right.

Well, let's get started.

As you can uh siege today, we have a lot of guests with us, uh, not only from the community, but Corwell Health, and we're very excited for today's presentation.

So, we're gonna be talking about our EMS program today, uh, emergency medical services and the vital role that the fire department plays in EMS in this community.

As you can see from the pictures, we've been doing this a really really long time.

And I do want to give credit, uh, see Chief Winstram in the back.

Uh, from 1969 to 1989, the police department was the primary first responder in the city and also did a fantastic job.

So, a lot of interesting uh pictures that shows GRFD GRPD has generally held uh patient care in high regard.

Type of calls we respond to.

I know you're gonna say, Chief, I can't see those boxes are too small, the words are cut off.

I get it.

It's simply a visual.

Um, about 17,000 EMS calls a year within the city of Grand Rapids proper.

Now, within that data, I want to point out a few nuggets that I think you'll find interesting.

Almost 14% of those incidents involve repeat 911 callers.

So, this is someone that is calling 911 frequently throughout that year.

Um, we even had 10 or more incidents for 32 people.

So we had people in our community, we had one person that engaged 911, the EMS system, 114 times.

So a hundred and fourteen times, we sent a big red truck, an ambulance showed up, and sometimes a police department.

Obviously, the first hundred and thirteen times, we didn't fix what their problem was.

So that's that should resonate with you.

I do want to walk you briefly through because this has been a lot, there have been a lot of questions about this, so I want you to read my lips on this one.

The hot team is not going away.

This is not the hot team.

So I want to show the org chart up here.

You can see our battalion chief of EMS, Mark Fenkauser, who's with me today.

We have our captain of the hot team, Eric Ryder, who has a lieutenant and network 180 clinicians under them.

Uh, we retooled that this past summer.

It's going very well, had some great feedback on the hot team and the work they're doing.

You're gonna notice a new box here with uh acting Captain Matt Hutter and a Corwell community health worker.

So that is a new program that we are proposing to address these frequent 911 callers.

Let me back up real quick.

I do see the empower on there.

I want to give full credit to Lucas Leverett, one of our community members.

We did not come up with this name.

My uh creativity brought us to medical outreach team, and that name was absolutely horrible.

And everyone kept getting confused with homeless outreach team.

So reached out to Lucas who does marketing.

Thank you, Lucas, and said, Hey, do you have any ideas on this?

And of course, it's a play on words medical priority and wellness response.

Empower.

We want to empower our residents to get the right care, and we're gonna walk alongside of them.

So this is not new.

Uh National Survey in 2023 reported that there are over 400 programs like this in over 40 states.

However, only 4% of those programs are at the basic life support level.

That's what Grand Rapids Fire operates as EMTs.

We're basic life support.

So this is very rare.

The other quite rare thing is that the fire department is partnering with a hospital.

Normally these are ALS type agencies that start a program in-house.

It's a hospital that starts their own program or a fire department that starts their own program.

We did not have the expertise and breadth of resources to do this by ourselves.

And Corwell agreed to partner with us on this.

We are so very thankful.

So the top three services that we're looking at doing, much like the rest of the country, is high emergency room or 911 usage.

Can we get that down?

Can we get people the right type of care rather than always sending the big fire truck?

Readmission prevention.

We don't want people to go back to the ER.

We'd rather have them taking care of at home if possible.

We're gonna be focused in on that.

And finally, care management coordination.

Some people have chronic medical conditions that simply are just difficult to deal with.

Takes a lot of resources, a lot of navigation, a lot of expertise.

Think back to your spouse or your parents and when they have issues and how difficult it can be to get to the right doctor to find the right specialist to get the right medication figured out.

Now, luckily, if you have a family member that can help you, that's normally what happens.

Many times we go on patients that live by themselves and do not have that resource.

Well, we're looking to be that resource.

The new car, new to us car, uh it was a recycled battalion chief car, is parked out on Calder Plaza.

Uh it it looks good out there.

We got it all lettered up, uh, it's ready to go, and we're ready to uh start working in the community.

And this is a public-private partnership for sure.

So the staffing, Captain Hutter from GRFD.

He's a captain of EMS.

Now, in addition to the medical knowledge, we were just talking with Corwell in the back of the room.

The fire department brings with it a high degree of trust for most agency partners.

People let us in their homes at their most vulnerable times, and we respect that trust, we honor it, and we're happy to be a resource for them.

So, Matt is the boots on the ground fire department.

Let us come into your home and see if we can help you out.

Corwell is providing expertise in navigating a lot of different wraparound services.

We just don't have that expertise.

So they are looking at social determinants of health.

How can we schedule?

How can we get transportation?

How can we get access to food?

How can we get access to medication?

And I think together, what we've created is a pretty dynamic duo uh to run this pilot program.

Now the next steps.

I'm gonna have uh Kaylee from Corwell come on up and I'll walk you through the next steps on this process, and then certainly we want to hear from our partner.

Uh we're gonna finalize cross training.

We are spending time in the ER, they are spending time on the fire truck.

We are gonna be sending our team out to conduct a site visit, hopefully someplace warm, I told them this time of year, uh, to find a mobile integrated health program somewhere in the country that is doing really well.

We want to spend a couple days shadowing them.

We want to we already have a list of participants that uh would be ripe for this program, so we're gonna narrow that down.

And early in January, we are going to start conducting site visits.

That red car pack uh parked out on Calder Plaza is gonna start going out to homes and apartments, condos, what have you in the city of Grand Rapids, making contact, enrolling people in this program.

Of course, we're gonna attract data and metrics.

We're this is a six-month pilot.

We're gonna see how it goes.

If it goes how I think it's gonna go, you're gonna see this thing keep keep going uh in in the future.

And then, of course, we'd like to come back after that pilot program and report back on any successes or challenges uh that we faced.

With that, I'd like to turn it over to Corwell.

Hello, good afternoon.

My name is Kayleigh Peterson, and I serve as uh senior director for healthier communities here at Corwell Health West, Michigan.

Um, I just want to share that we're really thrilled about this.

You know, we talk a lot about what it means to serve in community, and this really is an example of that.

We know that we cannot do or be all to all, and we really need these partnerships and have been so thrilled with just how collaborative this has been, um, truly dedicated around a shared why and have every confidence this really will be a success.

Um, to the comments made already, we're really gonna pay attention to what we learn as we first launch.

I think we're gonna um really kind of understand what our community is experiencing, and we're gonna pivot accordingly to make sure that we're really addressing these root causes.

Um so I just want to also give a shout out to my team here to the Corwell Health uh colleagues that join me today.

Um, Will Moyer, um excuse me, Will Barasley Moyer, uh Mickey, and Will.

Um, this is very much a team effort and a collaborative.

Um, without that shared effort, we we wouldn't be here today.

So just very appreciative of the time of the partnership and excited to see what we can accomplish together.

Thanks.

And uh I'll just lead off.

Thanks, Chief.

Um, thanks for identifying an area where we can clearly improve.

Um, this is obviously, I mean, everybody in the room probably knows this is completely compatible with lots of other analysis and lots of other uh uh movement in the housing space and all kinds of uh great work that's being done in the community and getting those uh frequent flyers let's uh into getting better uh get having their needs met better is obviously a huge opportunity here.

Um my son uh had somebody on his block.

Uh he lives in Hamilton, Ontario, so this is not about you guys.

Um, but you know, the ambulance showed up, and he's like, Oh, yeah, Tony calls an ambulance every day around three o'clock.

Um so yeah, we know that there are those high high use folks out there, and they're not they're not enjoying it, right?

They're not enjoying how how broken their relationship is with services.

Um so I'm really excited about the opportunity to do better.

Any colleague comments?

Uh Commissioner Brown, or committee member.

Thank you.

Um, real quick.

Um, just slide number three.

I see that we guys have it said it went from 5,000 to 17,000.

Yes.

And then I love this breakdown.

Do we have, and I and we may not have, but just curious if we had the breakdown back in 20, excuse me, 1990 versus 24.

You're lucky I found the number 5,000 from 1990.

So, no, I I do not have the specific breakdown.

I could go back about 10 years with a with a good breakdown uh to see if there were any trends that cropped up with types of calls.

But I can, you know, Mark, I don't know if you want to pop up and and add some insight on that, but typically uh breathing problems, decreased LOC, chest pain, falls, though those are things that we typically see.

Yes.

Uh it would be very difficult to pull that data.

I could I can attempt to, but it would be very difficult.

But typically, yes, breathing problems, chest pains would be that the typical moniker as to what would be diagnosed at that time from a dispatch note.

Great.

Yeah, no need to go back.

Just was curious if we had.

All right.

If if we could go back 35 years, that'd be great.

Uh but looking at uh looking at the program, can you actually tell us what cities also modeled a similar program and then what are the uh anticipated costs associated with this?

Yeah, so so there are none in Michigan uh with a fire department doing this.

We are we are going to be the first.

Uh I've been pointing out Albuquerque, New Mexico to a lot of people, and I reference them.

Uh they're an accredited fire department.

They also run a third service.

It's police, fire, and then they have a third department that's doing a lot of homeless outreach, empower, uh mental health co-response type work.

We're simply doing that with police and fire here without that third department.

And to me, this really does round out the tri-efecta of some gaps that we've identified between police and fire.

So it's we're we're aligning with those best practices.

Any large fire department likely has something like this in place.

And the and the anticipated cost.

Uh the cost is we reallocated an EMS captain and and an old vehicle.

So we did not add staffing.

Uh we reallocated a third member of the hot team over to start this program.

No, Corwell did burden some cost.

Yes.

Yeah, I was just gonna say we are investing um in our personnel just because we know that this is uh a community need and we're committed to it.

Great.

All right.

Well, thanks.

Um keeping with my we're we're three minutes over our 10 minute budget.

So thank you.

It was worth it though.

Yeah, it was.

Thank you.

This is this is great.

It's exciting.

And thanks for pointing out for all the listeners at home, hot's not going away.

Hots not going away.

Yep.

Okay.

Uh sorry, I don't have my agenda in front of me.

What's my next one?

Emergency man is really uh emergency management.

And and I'm starting the clock now.

Applause to our new head of emergency management's coming up.

Mr.

Rance.

Welcome.

Glad you're here.

Thank you very much.

And I'll cut mine short by three minutes, so don't worry, we were not gonna be running over.

So we're okay.

Uh thank you.

I appreciate the opportunity to speak to everybody.

Um, as you mentioned, uh, I have the privilege of serving as your emergency management administrator.

I started in August, so I believe this is my first time in front of the commission.

So thank you uh for taking the time to be here this afternoon.

Um yeah, go ahead, Assante.

Okay, good call.

Thank you.

Uh so just wanted to share a little bit about myself and then what we've done for winter preparedness so far.

It's it is kind of weird saying winter preparedness, looking outside and knowing the weather we've had the past month, so I'm well aware of that.

So this is winter preparedness slash current operations that we're doing.

So definitely well well aware of that.

Um just a little bit of background about myself.

I'm from West Michigan, born and raised in Grand Haven, so um very familiar with the area.

Served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Honduras.

Uh that helped me do two things.

One, learn Spanish, uh, which is great.

Um, and then also kind of really solidify a dedication to altruism and public service.

Everybody who is here in this room, everybody who has made this meeting happen, our dedicated city staff, we kind of demonstrate this every day.

And I think it's something that really drives us all to provide the best city services that we can to our residents and our visitors that come here to Grand Rapids.

So uh prior to this job, I worked for FEMA as a community resilience technical assistance program manager.

And then both of those experiences kind of really helped me um kind of solidify my vision towards emergency management, which is really building community resilience through um community outreach and education.

So uh kind of focusing on our winter preparedness, uh just a little bit into the outlook.

As we're all well aware, you know, one of the most um I would say impactful events that we have going into the the winter season are um is our lake effect snow and hazardous road conditions.

Um I think anybody who's driven in West Michigan would be well aware of this.

So just continuing to monitor um some of these changing conditions and what our forecast looks like uh for this next winter.

Speaking of the forecast, we do have um really good relationship with our friends over at the National Weather Service, and then provide us with this forecast.

So if we're looking at temperature, um, as of right now, it we're probably about equal chances of being slightly warmer or slightly colder.

I have to say so far we've been slightly colder, um, especially we've had two code blues that have been issued so far, including this you know, this recent weekend.

So just ensuring that we're always working with our partners to understand what the needs are that they have and ensuring that our unsheltered population is taken care of when we have those those conditions.

So up to this point it's probably been a little bit colder than normal.

And then if we look at precipitation, you can see that we are projected to have an above average precipitation this year.

Obviously, uh you can see looking at outside that we are meeting that expectation.

Um all of this leads to our snowfall forecast.

Again, not a specific exact number, although I keep asking them to provide me with one, and they tell me they can't.

Um so uh for the area uh we're gonna have near normal snowfall, uh really no significant impact to our operations.

I think you know, doing this over the past few years, we've had a really good opportunity to get our strategy down, get our operations ready for all this preparedness for for winter, and and we're right where we need to be.

And what does that look like?

Uh we've coordinated with a number of different city departments.

Um they're not all listed on here, but just the ones that I have updates for are gonna we're gonna go through those a little bit.

And this is really a citywide operation.

You can tell we have a number of different departments, including the fire department working very closely with Chief Brown in our operations uh to make sure they're fully staffed, ready to respond to any calls.

Um, even things you might not think of as traditional fire department activities, you can see the picture right there, you know, ensuring that our fire hydrants and our you know critical infrastructure are prepared and ready in the event that we do need them.

The police department has been uh very communicative and open to working with us.

Um, you know, they're ready to respond to any traffic accidents that we have.

Um I think this was the case in point two weeks ago when we had you know the semi tip over on 131 South.

Very quick response, very complex incident, but we showed that we were able to handle it.

Um in terms of our our water, you know, we maintain the hydrants, uh, we pump them down.

Um we have fully staffed department at the water department, and then for our Lake Michigan filtration plant, you know, we have our backup generators are on site, ready to go, uh no significant impact operations at that location.

Public works, I know I've been working closely with John Gorney.

Uh they have uh trained up their staff working in two different shifts, kind of a day and a night operations.

They have enough training, all of their equipment is ready.

You can see 35 plow and salt trucks, 14 pickup plow trucks, and then they even have two sidewalk plows that they're using.

I hope to see everybody uh later today at the Scribner uh ribbon cutting, which is going to be really great.

Really great facility out there.

Everybody has been moved into those offices.

They have the new SALT Dome, which is uh fully functional right now.

And then we also have collaboration agreements, both with Kent County, the Michigan Department of Transportation, and with the National Weather Service.

So really well prepared.

You know, speaking of the code blue that we mentioned earlier and the dropping temperatures, really focusing on what services we can provide to our unsheltered population.

Here's an updated schedule of the warming centers that we have in Grand Rapids, ensuring that if emergency management needs to support any of these or any of these operations that we're here to do so.

But I really appreciate the community development team for continuing to push those and not only run and and provide those warming centers, but provide that information and make sure everybody knows, you know, what is open and when we work with our yes, sir.

Yeah, just a just a really spitball question.

Um I am old enough that I remember nuclear uh sheltering signs all over the place, and you need water in a gym, and there'd be this like sign, right?

Yes.

Um have you thought about signage for uh things that were officially designating as warm warming shelters?

Um the reason I ask is because I have thought and you know about about the possibility of having some of our fire stations be designated that way.

Um and certainly yeah I notice on the I mean a website's great.

Um if you got a if you got a smartphone.

Absolutely.

Uh it's not so great if you don't.

So um, you know, nothing beats nothing beats signage where you are, as far as I'm concerned.

So I I'd love to I'd love to have some exploration of like like physical identifications of where warming shelters are for folks.

I think that would be great.

And we can, you know, look into like maybe almost mobile signage too.

Seeing as how you know these might be impacted different hours, different days, we can look at what that would be like.

Kind of like voting.

Absolutely today, get warm here today.

Yeah.

Yes, absolutely.

Definitely look into that.

Um and then in terms of mobile GR and just our communications team, you know, continuing to push information out to the public on the odd even parking news release.

We have winter guides that are available, continuing to mention winter preparedness in all of our external publications.

Um then really from the Office of Emergency Management, our role is continuing to push out those emergency alerts, both to the public for severe weather that's coming in and also to city staff uh when there um are adverse weather conditions and there might be significant impacts, so we're making sure that we send those out to a broad network.

Again, I mentioned our uh National Weather Service collaboration.

We work really closely with them, so I appreciate their support.

We're gonna continue to develop and improve those relationships.

Um continuing with social media messaging, and then as I mentioned before, you know, really just a lot of community engagement and education.

Uh I see my role here and our role as the Office of Emergency Management to ensure that the residents and visitors of Grand Rapids have not only the information that they need, but then the guidance of what to do with that information.

Um since I've got a minute and fifty-seven seconds of your time left, um, since you seem to be an ambitious guy.

Um the uh Halifax Nova Scotia put together a uh voluntarily a list you could voluntarily sign up for if you were home borrowed homebound and had mobility issues, uh that you simply you could get called on.

Okay.

Uh so yeah, and I think they may have used volunteers to do the calling, but basically, you know, if there's three feet of snow and you're in a wheelchair um and you can't get to out to your minivan and somebody calls and you're like, yes, I'm out of groceries, I need help.

Um somebody to check in on you proactively if you put yourself on that list, uh something they do about weather emergencies there, like you know no mandates, no, you know, but it does allow you to push the question for help rather than have people have to take a step themselves to ask for help.

So I want to put that in your dream list too.

I like that.

I I love the proactive nature of that too.

And that and I think that's what our office is looking toward, and we have our emergency management specialists here.

We'll be taking notes and we can take that back for research.

And then just on our last slide, as we talk about community engagement and education, you know, we have a number of activities coming up this afternoon.

We have an activity with the Van Annel Institute for um fourth to sixth graders, you know, working on their disaster kind of projects that they've been working on over the past semester, ensuring that they have the information and um the support to kind of continue something if that if that is what they're interested in.

We also have uh an emergency preparedness night arena takeover at the Griffin's game that's coming up on January 2nd.

We'll have fire department, police department staff there.

We will be there.

A lot of great opportunity to not only show what emergency preparedness looks like, get people registered for emergency alerts, but really show the citizens and visitors how many different departments are interacting to ensure that they have a safe and enjoyable time when they're out in the city.

So really excited for that.

You can see our exercises and trainings that we have coming up as well, including a uh possible CERT class in Spanish.

Great.

And then on time, that is where I will wrap it up.

I'm happy to answer any questions if anybody has any.

Right on.

Anyone got any questions?

Doug Commissioner.

Yes.

We are do we have or have we thought of anything such as an emerald alert for missing persons uh by chance?

That has been a phenomenon recently that it seems like we sort of scramble when it happens, and it's been very distressing for many constituents uh who have reached out to me.

I any thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think we would have to see who the responsible authority is for issuing those missing persons.

I know for missing children, I think it's specifically through the Michigan State Police.

So we would have to see where we would fall within um which jurisdiction has uh utility with that.

But we have the alerting network, and so if there's any way we can enhance and amplify that message when we do have a missing persons, we'd be happy to do that.

Our chief is in the room, Chief.

You have anything to add to that's the police issue.

Sure, I think uh Ben is correct in that the it uh goes to the Michigan State Police as far as the Amber Alert uh technically.

We do have obviously our social media capability, the uh the uh uh qualifications to to reach amber alert is a little high for some individuals who uh unfortunately the state sets those rules uh so we can't override it, but there has to be some some uh significant uh indication that there is danger, so um and it has to be substantial.

So we do get uh missing persons reports from individuals that are convinced that Eric Winstrom's in danger.

Uh he's missing, but it doesn't rise to that level that's required by the state police, so we can't put on an amber alert, but we do what we can on our social media and uh uh we I think we do a pretty good job of it.

Great.

You did a good job of uh getting that kid in the shopping mall the other day, and I'm sure that wasn't an amber alert.

It was a kid running around a parking lot, which was a bad idea.

Thanks, Chief.

If any other questions?

No, great, thank you so much.

Thank you.

Uh that brings us up to our urban deer management topic on everyone's mind.

Don't ever try to manage urban turkeys.

I really am fond of the turkey in my neighborhood.

I love our turkey.

It's worthwhile to note that turkeys are great for uh tick control.

All right.

Bad to hit with your car though.

So uh Doug Matthews, assistant city manager.

I believe the last time that you got an update on this, James Hurt was standing behind the podium.

Uh he's since retired, I've received the mantle.

I'm still not sure how I feel about that, but here we are.

Um so uh if you all recall last year, um we had uh taken some efforts to do a pilot hunt uh in an area on the west side of town.

Um ultimately we tabled that uh as a result of some community pushback and decided that we were going to wait until we got results back from Kent County and GVSU on their study.

So this is an update on those findings.

There's no particular action to be taken here.

Uh just wanted you all to be aware and be able to answer any of the questions as best I can.

Um so I mentioned the timeline.

Uh it was uh winter of 24 when we got together with the other urban communities to talk about this issue and really raise the conversation as a regional issue.

Um it was summer of 24 when the county contracted with GVSU with the understanding that if any one community takes action uh because of the migratory nature of the deer herd, it's not going to have any meaningful impact over the long term.

They've been doing those spotlight surveys each season through the fall, uh, and then just about a month ago is when we got the final report and the recommendations from GVSU.

So they were hired to A, understand the public sentiment, um, collect data on the population, analyze those trends, both in terms of concentration, but also on what those migration corridors are, um, and then provide some recommendations based on the data.

Here's their timeline on the study.

Um you may recall last fall they did a big public percept perception study and then set about doing those spotlight surveys.

They checked back in with the community uh this past summer, um, had a series of open house engagements uh to provide updates, and then continued and completed their work.

So the data.

Uh the data shows uh right here you'll see, and this was the the graphic that they provided to us, just to be clear.

Um, that deer killed on the roads uh in 2024 exceeded the number that were harvested by hunters.

You see how those trends have been going in opposite directions since 2021.

Most of the crashes that occur uh ha happen along the interstate corridors, 96, 131, and 44.

Their spotlight surveys show exactly where the concentrations are.

Um and this is what they found out.

Uh it it's not the rural areas, it's not the urban areas, it's actually the suburban areas where the populations are highest and they're most dense.

So that includes Kentwood Cascade, Caledonia, Virgin, uh, Nelson and Plainfield Townships.

When you look at public perception, uh your rural residents are more likely to enjoy having them around, where your urban and suburban residents consider them more of a nuisance.

So these are the travel corridors.

Um we have a number of clear, when you look at the density of the trees, uh, we have some clear habitat corridors throughout this area.

Most of those are north and east, and you'll see that tracks with where some of the big concentrations are, and where some of the highest concentrations of deer vehicle accidents are occurring.

So you'll see some of those here, uh Walker Kentwood uh and some of the townships southeast of Grand Rapids where you have high quality habitat for concentrations.

So their recommendations, the overall goal, uh we need to reduce uh deer vehicle collections uh collisions generally.

The goal is 1,050 within two years.

Uh the only way to do that uh is to harvest an additional 1900 deer every year across the county.

So there's four areas that they want to look at.

One, maintaining a healthy herd, reducing the safety risk for motorists, limiting property damage and protecting natural ecosystems.

When you talk about management of the population itself, you have a couple of options.

You have urban archery hunting, you have localized deer reduction with a focus on ethical uh utilization of the byproducts, um, and facilitating hunter recruitment and access to land, which is more appropriate in some of the more uh rural areas of the of the county.

Managing the deer habitat.

Increasing the mowing in the rights of way increases visibility and decreases the likelihood that those are the areas where deer are going to choose to cross the road.

Um Native landscaping, deer resistant landscaping.

Um and establishing and enforcing ordinances to ban deer feeding.

This is notable that already in the lower peninsula it's against state law.

Um so we've got to go back and figure out what that means from a municipal standpoint.

Is it enforcing the state law, or there are additional things that we might be able to implement?

Engagement and planning.

Uh continuing to monitor monitor public perceptions, uh, and continuing our strategic planning around this as we continue to monitor and update the data year over year or season over season.

So they've designated uh deer management units, DMU.

Um these are the areas where they feel like there's a distinct characteristics that require certain management approaches.

This is the matrix that they put together.

Um for us, we are in DMU three.

Uh you'll see that their recommendations include urban hunting, local hunts, right-of-way mowing, native planting, uh leaning in on the feeding bands, and then continuing to monitor and to plan.

The biggest thing here is to be effective, it has to occur countywide.

Um so I think one of the notes that we got from the uh Michigan uh National Deer Association, when they were going to do the hunt on the west side of town, they're like, look, we're gonna go out there for three weeks and we might get seven deer.

And the problem is much, as you all know, much larger than that.

So the next steps, the county is currently doing a road show uh with the local municipalities and townships to talk about these results, but also identify uh where they can step in with both operational and financial commitments and develop time lines across the region.

Um we talk about some of those commitments, one of the things that's been been brought up is of course the denser the area becomes, the more dangerous dangerous it is uh to have hunting in those areas.

Uh the airport already has somebody from USDA on contract to help manage their deer population.

And these are sharpshooters.

Um so one of the conversations we're having with the county is there are a way for us to expand that uh to be able to be very targeted in some of the areas where we have particular concerns around individual safety.

Then the last step is to prioritize and begin execution on those recommendations as the resources allow.

Um to note the full reports available, uh Kent County MIGov slash deer.

Um it's worth getting familiarized with.

We're familiarizing ourselves with it, um, but the next conversation will happen at our Metro 6 meeting with the county and the major municipalities in the county to talk about okay, who's in and what are we committing to?

Doug, uh this is mostly not your problem, but you're here, so I'm gonna talk to you.

Um thing that I don't see in any of this analysis is uh question of ag.

And I think that that's really important.

So let me tell you a quick story and tell a group of story.

Um I own a farming a farm in Cannon Township, and my brief experience with considering hunting was that the deer were eating my crops.

And so I figured if they're eating my crops, I should be able to eat them.

Um I called uh uh the ag folks, and the ag folks said, no, you're not allowed to call deer on your farm.

And I'm like, well, they're eating my crops.

And they're like, have you thought about putting up a uh a big wall like Trump wants to do?

Um and that was their response.

So it seems to me that if we could get the ag to like say in Kent County, we don't have any seasonal restrictions on hunting, we don't have any quantity restrictions on hunting uh and uh enable people to hunt on on farmland at will, uh, you could get a lot of deer in a hurry.

And there are, I know there are, I mean there are farms adjacent to Walker.

There's farms all over the county.

And if the you know if the problem is fundamentally not an urban one, but we want to stop these deer from getting into the cities and onto our roads, I think that agricultural practices is a big deal, and that may take some legislative push.

But if we could get the Department of Ag to just say, yeah, sure, you can get you can take out deer on farm, it's open season on farmland all the time.

Uh that might make a big difference.

Was the answer no because it wasn't in season, or was the answer no because they just don't allow it, because I'm not sure that that's they basically they said we have a policy that we don't allow you to call deer unless you can get a special permit, but first you have to prove to us that you've built 30-foot fences around your property.

And I'm like, I'm not gonna do that.

And so that that was as far as the conversation went.

So if they change their policy and had much more liberal uh criteria for deer calling on ag property.

Yeah, and that may be something that we can just work through the regional office.

Yeah, yeah, exactly.

But I think I think how ag interacts with farmers is is a piece of this puzzle.

So anybody else got any farming stories?

Okay.

Um thanks.

And and thanks as the city manager really wanted to uh point out, like this is a regional problem, right?

Grand Rapids can't possibly solve that on its own, nor do we want to try.

I think we're also anticipating conversation with the Grand Valley Metro Council as well in the new year about this topic.

Thank you.

Thanks.

And that brings us to our last briefing.

Uh last but not least, and always with good with uh very positive numbers, uh, police chief to talk about our public safety.

Thank you, Mr.

Mayor.

And uh Commission Commissioner Kilgore, I didn't mean to oversimplify uh our uh response to especially endangered missing individuals.

We recently had a uh uh elderly individual uh go missing.

I filed the um the the progress uh of the investigation and because we are in a more urban environment, we have the uh the officers to be able to do a full a full canvas uh locally.

Obviously, we are blessed with eight uh canines which are trained to detect individuals, and of course we're supported by our drone team.

So we are very good if they go missing in our jurisdiction.

I just uh wanted to point that out because when I mentioned the social media, I just said as an alternative if we can't get it out, you know, one way if we think it's crossing uh if the individuals are in a car, for example.

Yeah, that that's an alternative to that we have, but it is something we take very seriously.

Yeah, thank you.

I was thinking of Detroit's new emerald alert.

Emerald alert.

If we're able to do something like that.

So that was that's an it's not like that.

New or yeah.

Okay.

Thank you though.

Thank you.

Okay.

Good news uh continues in the auto theft um auto theft numbers, as you can see.

Um I hope that this this stories continue and we see that uh number drop um that a year from now and next next to nothing or nothing.

Uh robbery totals is you can see trending in the right direction, lowest in in four years, year to date.

Uh person shot trending in the right direction, but um obviously uh we've had 10 individuals who lost their lives uh by gunfire and that has sent too many.

Um I would rather see the uh decline than an increase person shot uh map, no real stories to tell here other than follows the uh density of uh population generally.

Um and of course we uh it now have lost uh 13 individuals.

We'll say great work that it by the detectives they recently uh made an arrest on uh uh uh the Barry Hodges uh killing, which is one down at uh Kalamazoo and Hall.

So um I believe that leaves four open for this year, and uh we're uh working very hard to get answers for those families.

We talked last uh commission meeting about comparison uh uh some per capita comparisons, and I will say uh credit to my team, uh especially my um uh crime analysts.

Uh we have a very public-facing dashboard.

Anybody can get our our crime data, and we seem to be just about the only ones in the state of Michigan who have that because I uh attempted to get reliable numbers from uh similar sized towns and they're just not out there.

So I would have literally had to pick up the phone and call the chiefs.

I didn't want to call them out like that, so I didn't.

But uh some of our uh uh my friend Bob Tracy, the the chief in St.

Louis, he uh like us publishes uh weekly actually his updates, and you can see uh the per capita numbers kind of paint a different picture uh than just straight up numbers.

It's uh 43.6 per 100,000 if you're in St.

Louis, obviously.

Uh Flint is one of the more dangerous in this in the state of Michigan, uh Chicago, my former jurisdiction there over twice as dangerous as here in 6.5.

6.5 is a number that's too high, and we want to see that number um get down uh as close to zero as possible uh as we move on.

But it does kind of give you a uh uh more uh uh eye-opening um visual here to to see what we're doing.

Clearance rate looking up numbers, we just clear cleared 23 2023 murders, so those numbers have increased.

We want to uh keep on going.

Like I say, we don't have cold cases, we just have old cases, and we are still working on those because we've had a lower number of murders in the past this year and last year, our homicide detectives have been able to really pick up the pace on these older murders, and uh we want to get those answers for the family.

Unfortunately, 15 overdoses uh fatal year to date.

Um a lot of Narcan out there, both by the fire department and the police department.

That number will be so much higher if we didn't very intentionally arm our uh city workers with with that great drug.

Uh 444 now is the amount of illegally possessed guns recovered by our officers.

And I kind of sped through that because I wanted to be respectful of uh of everyone's time.

So uh great numbers, Chief.

Uh and I don't I don't really uh want this included in a stat, but I would like to tease out with you a little bit.

I know that when we talk about um incidents that that result in the death, um one of the things that you're always thinking through is connectivity and and the the story involved, right?

And so um we all know that one of the things that we're trying to work on is stop reprisal actions to for lack of a better way to put it.

Now I probably to do the analysis there, you'd have to cut out, say, domestic violence because those people are always in communication with each other by definition, or they wouldn't be DVs.

And I really applaud you for the work on and the DARE assessment, and which I think everyone up here knows we've got this new criteria.

Chief very clearly identified the number of um DV related murders we have in the city um and trying to drive that number down.

It's it's a non-zero number.

It's not a big number, but it's a non-zero number.

Um, but you know, if if someone if some person who didn't have a deep relationship with somebody else or wasn't trying to commit a reprisal or something, if there's a death there, those are going to be harder things to stop because they're sort of like something happened, right?

Right?

There's no throughput narrative.

And so disrupting the negative narratives is something I know you're very focused on.

But I don't know if you want to speak to like as we drive these homicide numbers down and these shooting numbers down.

Um so I'll tell you as a practical matter, what what we do uh retaliation is something that is at at the top of our mind when we see either fatal or non-fatal uh shooting and we look to see what uh individuals this person is associated with.

Obviously, if they're willing to give us the information that this person has it out for me.

But what we do on a daily twice a day, we have briefings that go out to the whole police department uh that hit the road patrol officers that often have a very detailed information.

Eric Winstrom was shot at today.

Uh he has been in a conflict with this individual.

Please play c play c close attention.

But we have a step up on uh some other jurisdictions in the area because we also have that um uh direct connection with cure violence where we can actually our uh uh captains now of each area are directed to not only go with uh Jeff Fridge way over over it to go direct with with Jeff at Cure Violence, but also go direct with with OPA too.

And so if there's some other way to avoid that retaliation, some way that we don't have the the ability to get to it, we want to make sure that uh we're taking advantage of all those opportunities.

Yeah.

So thank you.

That's I mean, uh I know you're always on top of this, but I thought it was worth pointing out in public, like all of these things are not they have different dynamics, and some of them are some of them with a throughput narrative, there's something you can disrupt with something that just sort of pops out of nowhere.

It's hard to know, like, well, if we had been doing a better job, that wouldn't have happened.

That can't that sometimes that's less true than it is for others.

Right.

Yeah.

Um thanks.

So thanks.

I mean, great great results.

Um I don't know.

D uh going forward, uh you have not implemented community policing yet, or you have.

Could you give us a brief update?

We have, yeah.

We've so we have five now uh trained community officers, one for each service area.

Uh we'd like to see that number get get to at least ten.

They're being very well uh received.

They're sort of warming up and meeting uh everyone, but already they they've hit the ground running, they're working with the uh neighborhood associations are also working with code enforcement, they're working with our homeless outreach team.

Uh so uh well received, but they're also out there doing police work.

They're not um policing from behind the the computer.

Um they are uh going to community uh events and meetings, but they're also actually responding to calls and on the street.

We just have to uh be very uh intentional with giving them that extra carve out time so they're not always tied to the radio with those 911 calls so they can get to those community events and make those positive community interactions.

And and with all due respect to all of our lovely neighborhood associations, um I would love to maybe sometime in the future a briefing on like the criteria you're using for those officers' success.

So like if they're just going out and eating cookies at eight neighborhood events every week, um that's that's good, but it's not uh we also want them to be conflict interrupters in the community and and working on that stuff.

So how you how you quantify that.

I mean, narratives are good, but but yeah, I think having them maybe do a presentation to this body in uh 2025 is a great idea.

Yeah, great.

Or 2026 if you want to wait that long, Pastor Ts.

Mayor.

Uh I want to add that I just uh signed off on another class of police uh recruits to go to the academy.

Um is it nine or so?

How many is it, Chief?

Uh either eight or nine.

Eight or nine.

Right.

So I think that you know, once they graduate, if we get the uh funding from the public safety grant trust, uh next year if that doesn't become a claw back either.

Exactly.

That would help to offset that cost.

But we're we'll hopefully hopefully that will go through.

Great.

So thanks so much, Chief.

But but but one of the items I'm like with it, one of the items um that was impacted was uh for our co-response model.

It's like a quarter million dollars.

And so we'll talk more about that in our legislative uh committee.

Yeah, well, thanks so much, Chief.

And uh, you know, uh obviously you're the only officer in the room, but you know, vicariously thanks to everybody on the force for for doing this work and and you know the results don't just speak for themselves, you also speak for the results.

But you're both great.

Thank you.

Thank you, Mayor.

I think we are adjourned because we have to go break ground on something or ribbon cut on something, something.