Your life.

All right.

Well, good afternoon again, and we will now start the work session.

Um we'll start with pets of the week.

Carol.

Good afternoon.

I'm Carol Nelson, Digital Content Specialist with the Animal Services Center of the Messia Valley.

We have really good news this week.

Our dog of the week has actually already been adopted.

We're super happy for Raisin because he was actually recently returned from an adoptive family because it wasn't a good fit.

And so we had someone snatch him up fairly quickly.

So we're super happy for raisin.

And for the time being, we actually won't be having a cat of the week because we're not able to keep cats long enough to be able to promote them for pet of the week.

So also another good problem to have that they're getting adopted so quickly.

And just as a reminder, the longer animals stay at the shelter, it is harder for them to thrive and they start to run into behavioral issues and things of that nature.

So we always want to encourage the community to look at our long-term residents.

Hulu has now been with us 344 days.

Matty, 262 days, and Lily 257 days.

So all really good options for adoption.

And as always, we like to highlight our upcoming events.

So this coming weekend, our adoption events will be at the farmers market.

We'll have our adoptables there from 10 to 1.

So come by and say hi and also bring someone who is ready to find a furry friend.

And we did want to put it on everyone's radar that our we will be having an upcoming drive-thru vaccination clinic.

It will be February 22nd at the Field of Dreams from 9 to 1.

So definitely come out, uh get your pets vaccinated and up to date on everything.

And as always, for more information, feel free to visit our website or follow us on social media.

Thank you.

Thank you, Carol.

Next is the agenda items.

The first one is 2.1 police service aid, PSA ordinance revision.

And we'll have uh City Attorney Brad Douglas and Lieutenant Austin.

Good afternoon, Mayor.

Council.

Just give me a second so I can get this up.

My eyes are getting bad.

I can't see where to turn it into a slideshow.

So you might just have to suffer with me through this.

Christine, the clerk of the year tells me that it's F5.

Thank you, Christine.

All right.

So as the mayor alluded, myself and uh Lieutenant Cody Austin will be making a presentation to you all with some potential amendments to the Las Cruces Municipal Code, uh specifically section uh 2336 as it pertains to police service aides and their duties, roles, and responsibilities.

And so just a short background uh on the topic.

The purpose of police service aids historically has been to promote uh residents and visitors patronizing local businesses by as it says here, regulating, managing, and operating parking meters and or parking spaces or facilities.

Uh patrons of those businesses uh should should expect to have easy access to those businesses.

And so whenever there are parking violations, our police service aides do enforce those parking violations in the Las Cruces Municipal Court already.

Um as part of their evolving role within the department, I believe it was in 2016, maybe 2017.

There was a general order uh enacted at LCPD that allowed our PSAs to assist or to even take primary role uh with regard to the investigative portion of traffic crashes uh resulting in up to minor injury.

So obviously any accident that involved great bodily harm or a death, our PSAs would not be handling those.

Commissioned officers or sworn officers would be handling the more serious traffic accidents within the city.

Although it is conceivable that PSAs might assist even in the more serious accidents.

And so as I just stated, PSAs are currently assisting with traffic crashes, but in the event that a driver is to be issued a citation for a traffic offense.

The current practice is that PSAs have to wait for a commissioned officer to arrive on scene to issue those citations.

And so if if we don't have any available officers, it could lead to an increase in wait time where we have PSAs on scene that could already be if these amendments were adopted, issuing citations for things like no driver's license, no insurance, no proof of registration, possibly due care collision or careless driving.

And so just some quick and dirty statistics for the past three years.

In 2023, there was a total of 3,837 crash reports taken.

Of those crash reports, PSAs took 1,102.

And so the percentage of uh crash reports taken by PSAs in 2023 was approximately, excuse me, uh 28.7 percent.

Then we moved to 2024.

There was a total of 3,755 crash reports taken.