This budget meeting, held on Wednesday, April 8, 2026, from 1:00 PM to 4:49 PM, focused on the FY2027 proposed budgets for public safety departments. No public comments were received. The meeting included presentations on Police, Communications, Electronics, Emergency Management, Beach Patrol, Volunteer Fire, EMS, and Fire Marshal budgets.
Good afternoon, everyone. Welcome to this budget meeting. Today's Wednesday, April 8th, just after 1 p.m. Today's been named Public Safety Day. So I'll go ahead and turn it over to Jenny. Actually, I'm sorry, I have comments from the public first, in case anybody wants to speak. Any person who may wish to speak on Amendment Kindle for discussion on the budget meeting agenda may be heard during comments from the public for a period of three minutes at such time as may be deemed appropriate by the council president. Anyone from the public today? Seeing none. Now I'll turn it over to Jenny. Okay. Today we're going to be in section three of your budget book, which is for public safety. We're going to start on page 13 with communications, uh electronics, emergency management, and speech responsibility. Good afternoon, uh Mr. Mayor, Council President, members of Council. Thank you for having the time to speak to you again annually. And I'm going to give you the budget for emergency services. And please ask any question you may have as we go by. Next slide. As you can see, the overall budget has increased from 2026. Magic touch. Okay. As you can see, there has been an increase in the FY27 from FY26. It's approximately 1.4 million dollars across the divisions. And we will do electronic services first. The big changes in electronic services are the addition to an apprentice technician's position. It's critical at this point that we have somebody else trained. It takes a few years to get that person up to speed. And after discussions, we thought an apprentice program would be a good way to proceed. Find the right person, start your training, and see if they will eventually transition over, you know, to a full-time position. So I'm thankful for that. Benefit costs have gone up. The other big item within it is a microwave link for 911. This is half the cost of the link tying it into the county. Last year, unfortunately, there was a day we lost 911 on both ends. That's a problem. We want to make sure that we have the redundant link in the future that we don't have to do that again. An intergovernmental is up slightly also. So the overall increase in electronic services is approximately 210,000. And that's the new one for this year. Any questions on electronic services? Nope. Thank you. We'll go to communications next. Communications has some increases. It's an additional five new employees. Four for four PCO1s for City Watch, 24-7, as well as one supervisor trainer. There's also additional reasons we're asking for this. In the supervisory position, it will free up man hours and records at this point because we're kind of sharing responsibilities with both records in PD and ourselves. We have warrant coordination responsibilities that were prelude previously overseen by the county that we now have to accept and take control of.