The Monroe Public Safety Committee met on Monday, March 9, 2026, at 4:45 PM in Council Chambers. Present were Alders Corinne Wartenweiler, Lynne Kleven, Craig Franke, and Matt Sheaffer. The committee received and discussed the 2025 annual reports from the Fire and Police Departments, with presentations from Chief Rufer and Chief Kelley respectively. The meeting adjourned at 6:05 PM.
Okay, it's Monday, February 20. No, it's not February 23rd. Today is March 9th. And I'd like to call the public safety committee to order. If the clerk will call the role, please. Older Schaefer. Here. Alder Cleveland. Here. Older Wharton Weiler. Yeah. An older Frankie. Here. Okay. We're all present and accounted for. Any correction? Uh to the minutes of February 23rd, 2026. Hearing none, they'll stand as presented. See business presented by the fire and emergency management department. We have our fire department annual report. Good afternoon, Alders. It's that time of year again. Where the sun is out and the weather is warm and the tulips will soon be popping, and we're inside reflecting. These reports are somewhat um tasking or on our time to create, but really provide great value in the sense of an opportunity to reflect on just how much we get done and and where we were and where we've where we've come to. And I know every year I say this, but I'm I'm just amazed at what my staff gets done throughout the year, and and this really gives kind of brings all that to light for me. So provided you an overview in the in the message from the chief if you're uh for a high level view, but digging into the meat and potatoes. Um when you look at the staffing on pages five and six, uh, we list out the staff, and I changed it this year in the past. I had their start date, is what was listed. I I now just list their length of service. I think that saves you time from having to do the math, and it gives you just a little better visual to what we're doing because you'll often hear me talk about areas of weakness in that middle area, that six to twelve year experience area that is really uh disappearing for a lot of fire departments. We're starting to get a little bit of meat back into that. We got some people at six. Actually, if you went year to date, they're probably closer to seven and six. Um we got a handful of people still up there in that 35 plus years. Um that you know, in the past you would say are probably due for retirement, but to be honest, with the tenure of volunteers and the changing in people's lifestyles, anybody could retire at any given time. So I don't take anybody for granted. But it is nice to see the younger ones uh or lesser experienced ones, that's really starting to fill out. And for the first time uh since I took over as interim chief, we've actually had a net positive in the number of volunteers uh joining versus the number that left. We lost two, we gained three. So we had a net one. Um we're going the right direction. We have a very solid culture, um, very positive. And um our recruits are our newest recruits are uh probably about eight to ten weeks from graduating and and actually being able to um be significantly more productive than what they are today. So um interesting fast fact on the people that we've lost. We've had now not all of these have left the department, but we've had um four uh five if you go year to date um firefighters uh take career jobs in fire fighting out of our department in the last 15 months. So our reputation for uh training and developing personnel is pretty outstanding. Strategic plan. I threw a little blurb in here on the strategic plan as you recall that got presented last late last July. We started working on it, we reviewed it in August, started working on it in April. I think we've checked off six or seven of those boxes so far.