The Public Safety and Parks Committee of the Jackson City Council convened on December 19, 2025, to address critical infrastructure and safety concerns across the city's park system, law enforcement staffing, and municipal building security. The meeting focused on the urgent removal of hazardous dead trees, the operational limitations of the park ranger program, the need for enhanced security at City Hall, and the status of the city's camera surveillance system. Council members and administration officials discussed resource allocation challenges, the potential for public-private partnerships, and the necessity of aligning police programming hours with community needs.
Call into order the public safety and parks committee meeting for the Jackson City Council. The time is approximately 1128. I don't like started meetings late, but I know we had a pretty full morning, colleagues, and I really appreciate your patience and your diligence. Colleagues, um, we have five discussion items, and this is gonna be a pretty casual thing, so you don't have to raise your hand, wait to be recognized, just kind of jump in, chime in as you feel. Um if someone could please close that door, I really appreciate it. All right, thank you. Uh we're gonna uh and you know, colleagues, you know, this is not just my agenda. I've asked for input and asked you all to submit things that you would like to cover today. I see Mrs. Parkinson out there, hey Stephanie, and the little Parkinsons. All right, school is out. All right, so we're gonna go ahead and start with discussion one, uh park safety. Park safety. Whose item was this? I'm not sure whose item it is, but I'll I'll share uh quickly. And I I know most of what we'll talk about with park safety, I imagine will be um physical safety, uh, lighting, cameras, all that good stuff. But um, one note that I will make we have a lot of dead trees in a lot of our parks, and the reason I'm bringing it up here is because in some of these parks, like I'm thinking specifically of Jamie Fowler Boiler Park, the dead trees are not merely a matter of aesthetics, and it clearly looks terrible, but they are so dead, and there are so many of them that on multiple fronts, I'm actually very concerned on a safety perspective. Trees can fall on people and can hurt or kill them. That's one. Two is it can block access. There's a um senior citizen community and some apartment complexes that if a tree falls there, it will block road access to them. And the third reason that I think it's a safety issue is because um the the uh power line along Lakeland, and if a tree takes out that power line, we've got in touch with energy, and that power line uh supports power to 10,000 people, including the fire station that's right there. So uh we are in desperate, desperate, desperate need of addressing these dead trees, not only from a uh cosmetic perspective, and you want your your tree, you want your parks to look real beautiful, but also from a safety perspective. Um Steve Hutton and Peter to Wison have done uh Herculean work to kind of get us ready for that. Um, but I hope we can cross that finish line. I'm thankful for everything they've done for that in other parks. But uh this is this is of paramount importance, and and I hope that that work can be prioritized, and we can knock those trees down immediately, if not sooner. Now, where are these trees? So Jamie Fowler Boiler Park is off Lakeland, uh right by a fire station. And initially, the initial estimate to remove the dead trees in that one park alone with a quarter million dollars. That's how many dead trees were in that one single park. Now, uh Steve and Peter have done amazing work to try to find creative solutions. For example, I believe they found someone that can chip the trees on site because the most of the cost was logging the trees out of there. And um, and they were able to find a vendor that can knock them down, and there's a corner of the park, so it's not gonna be ugly, it's not gonna be whatever, but we can put them right through that chipper, and it took the cost from about a quarter million dollars to I mean about 75,000 or maybe even less. And so um they've done tremendous, tremendous work. But that's an example where the single park had so many dead trees that that's where it was at. And this is the park off Lakeland. And in fact, this particular park used to host Wells Fest, if you're familiar with Wells Fest, but Wells Fest was not had that held this year because they they were legitimately concerned that a tree would fall on people during the middle of the the festival. That's how bad the trees were there. Also, I know before you were elected, uh, there was an effort to uh get some of the trees down in Battlefield Park. Yes, seven or five. That that's seven. That's seven. Yeah, that's another one. That's another one that's in um that's in strong. I I personally participated in cleanup efforts there to help remove natural debris and bag it up. So that's that's an important one as well. I mean, there's there's numerous ones. Uh so that work has not been completed. Uh the they've done routine maintenance there.