The Rapid City Council held a special meeting on July 27, 2026, to receive presentations on the proposed 2027 budgets for the Fire Department and Police Department. Both chiefs detailed staffing needs, operational challenges, grant strategies, and performance metrics. No public comments were heard. The agenda was adopted, and the meeting adjourned after the presentations and council questions.
I think I'll put in for a division chief. Welcome to special city council meeting Monday, July twenty-seventh, twenty twenty-six. We will begin with roll call and determination of quorum. Roberts. If you're able and willing, please stand of the United States of America. Next, we will look for adoption of the agenda. Second by Strowman, all in favor. Agenda is adopted. Number one is the twenty twenty-seven fire department budget presentation by Chief Culberson. The floor is yours, sir. Why thank you? Uh first, thanks for the opportunity to be able to present. Um, the one of the things I truly enjoy is talking about our department in this fine great city. Very proud of the folks that work for us and the service that they preside provide, not only to the city of Rapid City, but to the surrounding community as well. So this is the 2027 budget presentation. This is the second year I've been able to give a presentation to the phone to all of you. Um I'm gonna try to be brief enough, but very happy that we have an hour this time. So if you guys all have plenty of questions, I promise I won't take all of that, even though I'm sure I could speak that long. So just like I did last year, I think it's very important to back up and really understand who we are. Um the Rapid City Fire Department. Our mission statement is prepare, prevent, protect. We primarily focus on the efforts of public education and fire prevention and community risk reduction. Um those efforts fail, we are prepared and ready to respond to any and eventual emergency. Those include ambulance transports, structure fire response, wildland fire, hazardous materials response, vehicle extrication, water rescue, both um diving and swift water, high angle rescue, a regional technical rescue, our services, emergency management, and our of course our mobile integrated health care program. This does not include all the other things we do that include the public education and the prevention and investigation pieces that we do. Really something I need to bring out is that we're the only fully paid department on this side of the state. Closest next departments 260 miles away. Um it's either Casper, which is in Wyoming, or Mitchell, um, Billings, uh, which is even farther, Sioux Falls, you name it. But we are it for this side of the state. So again, going back through a year in review for 2025. I think it's important to show what we do and how we do it. So in 2025, we started the year with 184 employees. That's our current staffing level as of today. We do that through eight stations. Seven of those are 24-7 response capable. The other station is station two, which is in which is located up on Maple Avenue in Animosa, and that's where our BLM uh hazard mitigation crew resides. So they don't have a response capability today, but uh sure would like to have that ability to do that someday in the future. Um, last year we did 22,591 calls for service, 32,572 units dispatched, with spending 19,243 hours on those calls. So define these calls for service. They are truly calls for service. Calls that come into 911 and/or calls from places such as Monument Health requesting a transport of a person. These do not our numbers do not include anything but those types of calls. Truly calls for assistance from somebody for us. So out of that 22,591 calls, 16,177 of those were MVA or EMS calls. So those are your medical calls, which constitutes about 71.6% of our total call volume. We ended with about 2.1% increase in call volume at 2025 over 2024, which was significant in that sitting at this meeting last year. So through some of our efforts, which I'll get into with our mobile integrated health care program or CHWs, those types of things, I think you saw a significant reduction in that uh trend. So 2026 as of now is trending at a two and a half percent increase in call volume, and I projected that out to be a 23,156 calls for service. So just to go through, these are the districts within the city limits. Uh station one through eight.