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.

Obviously, it does not include station two since they don't have a response capability.

The smaller number to the right is the numbers from last year.

So you can take a look and see where the call volume is increasing and what that's going to do.

So station one has and will remain to be our busiest district, uh, doing 8,557 calls last year.

Extremely busy.

Uh goes basically from the south of the interstate up to the top of Star Village Hill and encompasses all the way over past West Boulevard and East about right in the St.

Patrick area.

Most of the other stations, other than Station 7 and Station 6 saw a reduction, at least a mild reduction in their call volume last year.

Station 6 is one that we're going to watch from year to year.

Very low call volume, but also that area is expanding very quickly.

That is one of the stations right now that we have four individuals that operate on the fire apparatus, and they do what's called cross-staffing.

So they'll be both on the fire apparatus, and if a medical call comes in, two of them will get off, get on the ambulance and respond to that call.

At some point, we will have to make a transition from that and start moving to a fully staffed station up there.

But that's a little bit away at this point.

2623 calls outside of the city of Rapid City.

You can see the biggest one is Box Elder with Rapid Valley coming in a distant second.

So these are total calls for service.

This includes fire and ambulance.

We provide mutual aid or automatic aid to the nine fire departments, the volunteer fire departments that ring around our great city.

So that means if they have a structure fire, we will automatically send one apparatus out there and a battalion chief.

So that includes those numbers right there.

Most of these calls obviously will be medical calls in those districts, and hence why we're talking about some of the things we are about counting and ambulance response.

So one thing that I brought up last year that we'll want to bring up this year again is how do we compare against other municipal fire departments?

It's very important to understand how busy our folks are.

Things have not changed in a great amount of time.

The last station we built was that we added staff with station six, and that was in 2003.

Station seven's been built since then, but they took the staff and moved them out to that district.

So we've stayed the same basics response as far as fire response staffing since 2003.

So as you can look in all categories, and I tried to do a blend across a couple different departments, including Sioux Falls.26 calls per citizen, where you go anywhere from 0.13 up to down to 0.074 calls per citizen in Sioux Falls.

So we do more calls per citizen, more calls per firefighter, and we average 3,000 plus calls per station.

That 3,227 is significant.

Several studies we've had done, and the most recent, one of the most recent ones calls out 3,000 calls for service.

They become unreliable for the next call in that district.

So once we crest over that, they become unreliable to be able to respond to that next call within their district.

So that's extremely important to look at and a number to look at.

Our folks are busy.

So Lawrence and Douglas County, Kansas, and the Rogers, Arkansas, those are highlighted with a red asterisk because they do uh transport EMS also.

So it's interesting to take a look and look at that data as far as it pertains to them with a same same type look.

So we'll jump right into the budget.

Um hazard.

I want to start with the hazard mitigation.

So this is an extremely, extremely successful program.

This is vastly the vast majority of this budget is grant funded, but it is a separate cost center, and we would like it to keep it that way.

What I'm asking of you is to raise the city matching funds from 200,000 last year to 250,000 in matching funds.

The reason being is we're gonna start adding a few more mitigation crew members to our service.

So we're able to respond and do more mitigation throughout the community.

Thinks it's extremely important.

As this community becomes more drought-ridden, dry, and more dense, we need to ensure that we have mitigation done.

So to be clear, all those employees within that budget are 100% grant funded, including those that are our part-time folks.

What's really really cool about this program is this a veterans crew.

So it includes them.

So those folks that are transitioning out of the military and we're coming into the workforce, we'll bring them in.

We can hire them, they can go to work, start doing some work here, and then move on and into the to the working world.

Now, whether that means in the fire service does not necessarily mean that, but some have landed and gone onto the Forest Service and Statewildland and have worked for us.

So it's a great program.

I hope you find that you'll fund it.

Again, that $792,000 is a big number, but it is truly most of that's going to be grant funded.

Um, half a million dollars of that is so let's get into the overall the three budgets.

Um I guess I got our slides out of the order there.

Sorry about that.

Um, our 2026 budget is 29,974,052 according to those numbers that we've been providing.

Big money, big dollars, um, put it in perspective.

Sioux Falls's budget is 50 million dollars for their fire department, and they do about 6,000 calls less, calls for service less than we do, and they have um five more stations and a large, large number more of people.

So let's go over 202, the fire budget.

Relatively, it's flat from year to year.

Why?

Truthfully, we have about 2.6 million dollars in operational budget dollars that we have to work with this last year.

One thing I guess I do need to point out that last year, if you're trying to compare to last year's budget, we did roll all of the stations up into one budget into the admin budget.

So it's not broken out between station one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, and eight.

These will all be into now up into one budget into our admin budget.

So we didn't feel there was any need to break out.

We did that many years ago with the priority-based budgeting.

We track it a different way.

It was becoming more difficult for our admin staff to break that out and determine where that those dollars amounts went.

So operationally, we saw, like I said, $2.6 million, which is realistically a 0.81% increase over last year.

The vast majority of that's gonna be your utilities.

Black Hills Power had a large rate increase.

That saw our largest increase in a bunch of our line items.

So that operational budget dollar uh includes the overtime that we have, which then has some resultant changes that happen in all of the other uh salary and wages pieces.

Um, and it also includes fuel and our lease uh at the uh our maintenance facility out on Creek Drive.

We're seeing some increases in repairs.

Uh our stations are starting to age out, they're starting to get older, they need some work being done.

Some of our vehicles need some more work because we run them a lot.

Typical lifespan is 10 to 15 years on a fire apparatus, an engine, uh, 15 to 20 on a ladder truck, and we're starting to push, and that's usually on a normal uh mileage rate.

We drive them much more because we're much busier, um, and so it they age out much faster.

So, otherwise, besides the fuel and some of those pieces, it's really operationally a fairly minimal but change in our budget.

They are the things that we need in order to provide the service that we do.

So, we're talking about just fixing the things that we have.

We will next year um just uh do some foreshadowing.

We will have some requests that will need to be done for our uh self-contained breathing apparatus.

We'll be looking for some CIP funds to help replace all of that.

They will age out.

Much of the things that we do and have as equipment have a lifespan.

Um, they age out, much like our vehicles do.

So, all of our bunker gear, our helmets, our gloves, boots, you know, SCBAs, their masks, all of that age out.

So that all comes with a significant cost.

So we'll get to the big cost for both budget budgets will be the 15 new employees for the general fund and the six for the enterprise.

So I'll dig a little deeper into that.

So 21 new employees for station nine.

So how did we get to that?

Well, minimum manning.

Right now, our minimum manning is 37.

That's set by us, set by the NFPA and many others.

But so that has four firefighters on every fire apparatus, four on an engine company, and then two and four on a ladder truck and two on an ambulance.

So out there, you need to have 15 total people to operate just the general fund.

So that would be the fire side of it.

So you have four on the um apparatus, which is 12, and then you need one extra per shift to cover for Kelly's vacation, sick leave, etc., in order to minimize the amount of overtime that we will have to expend to do that.

Today we have 45 individuals that work on each shift is our slots, and our minimum manning is 37.

So yeah, we do have more than we would minimum.

Otherwise, if we have the minimum number all the time, we're gonna be overtime all the time.

And I'll get into a little bit of that.

That the new generations they've seen a shift in their priorities.

Um back in my day when we first started, uh, overtime was something you coveted that didn't happen very often.

And so we constantly were fighting over it.

There's rules in our department, there's administrative rules in our department as it pertains to overtime because it was so sought after.

That's not the case anymore.

Um we have some union leadership in the back because they wanted to hear the presentation along with you.

Um that they will tell you, these folks, they're not wanting to do the overtime as much as they used to, and I can't blame them.

It's family first.

They want to be there with their family and do things outside of work.

The job we do is difficult, and so to have that time away to be able to rechat recharge and rest and be able to do the come back and do the job again is extremely important.

So we went to the four-man engine company in 2015.

Uh, we applied for a safer grant back then to push from the three-man engine company to four.

We were successful in that safer grant, and we've been at four since that time.

The reason why we were successful, the safer grant uh NFPA 17 10 is a nationally recognized standard that defines the minimum but deployment staffing and operational requirements for paid firefighters or fire departments.

They have several things in there that you try to follow.

First arriving engine company must be staffed with a minimum of four firefighters and arrive within four minutes of dispatch 90% of the time.

Full complement of 15 to 17 people within 10 minutes and 30 seconds for a single family residential structure.

If we talk about a large uh commercial structure, um, it's gonna be pretty tough for us to make it to that full complement if we have if we truly follow NFPA.

So we've tried our best to do that.

So one of these things we want is make sure to maintain is the four-man engine company.

It's changing that staffing model from four to three will significantly change the operations of this department.

It will require us then to make sure we send another uh full engine to that structure fire, which then will take that away from the rest of the city in order to do any other response beyond that that initial alarm.

Um, you think that what's interesting is that's happening a lot.

We have multiple fires going on at one time.

That's happened multiple times yet this year.

As I was coming down here, uh Chief uh Palvondra, our new deputy chief is not here because our battalion chief is down on a wildland fire, and he went out to a structure fire out um west of town.

So we're busy, and we need those units to be there.

Next thing I'll give you is proof why we need to have maintain that for is the National Institute of Standards or NIST did a study on two three, four, and five-person engine companies, and they found that four-person crews completed critical fire ground tasks 25 to 30 percent faster than a three-person um crew.

The other part is a three-person crew, they get exhausted fast.

You have them four people on the ground, uh, many hands make light work.

It's exactly the concept that we're going for here.

There's a lot to be done on a fire ground, um, lots that needs to be done quick, much faster.

Um rescues happen five percent faster with a four-man engine company.

Uh fire suppression happens 10% faster with a four-man engine company.

So uh my last piece, last two pieces will be the IAFF contract.

Um within that contract, it states the normal complement of personnel on an engine or truck company is four personnel, comprised of one officer and three firefighters, and finally ISO.

Um ISO when we went in 2000 um 15 for the four-man engine company.

One of the reasons we went that route was because of ISO and the number of staff we didn't have in order to continue to provide that level of service and maintain our class two um ISO rating.

Yes, ma'am.

Uh international insurance services office.

They are the ones that set basically set the risk for your community as it relates to insurance.

So we are a class two, highest is a class one.

I think we have a question from Councillor Strowman.

Thank you, Chair.

Um, Chief, do all of these stations currently have sufficient personnel, i.e.

four um personnel per um machine uh the staffing requirement to keep up with the NFPA standards, or we have some that are short or we short answer to that question is yes, we have four on each fire apparatus.

We have two stations that do the cross-staffing piece.

Um there are lower call volume stations, so if they have a medical fire call, all four go as long as the ambulance is not out.

But um if there's a medical call comes in, two of them come off the fire apparatus and we'll go on the ambulance.

It's how we've been able to mitigate some of the issues we've had without being able to get the extra staffing that we've needed.

Okay, and one other can ask one more question.

Uh I will, sir.

How do the current uh what's the status of the current discussions with the county regarding?

I'll get to that later in my presentation.

So I've got all that in there.

So um, yeah.

So additional staffing.

So excuse me, Chief.

Um Counselor Mahara would like to weigh in.

Sure.

Yeah, Chief.

No, I've been contacted by a retired captain about the West Side station only being staffed with four people.

So if an ambulance call comes in and two go out on the ambulance, how then the fire call comes in, you don't have four.

Correct.

And is there is there another station that's put on alert?

Like if a the you the truck may have to come from another station.

Yeah, absolutely.

So that's that's how we operate throughout the city.

Um exactly what I've been stating is the cross-staffing.

So four-man engine company, so if the structure fire, they hopefully can go out as four, unless there's an ambulance call, then two of them are gonna be out.

So those two will respond on the fire apparatus, and then the next due apparatus will come in.

Ideally, yep, we need six more people for each one of those stations to get that to be four strictly on that fire apparatus, and then have two on an ambulance.

So, what happens?

So, I know there's sometimes depending on the nature of the 911 call.

The fire truck goes with the ambil.

Yep.

So, how do you do that?

It just have two people in the truck then correct.

So though in that case, a lot of times station five or six, they'll respond two in the fire apparatus to in an ambulance.

Okay, thank you.

And if they need further assistance with more manpower, they'll request another unit.

Continue, sir.

Okay.

So some more justification on why the 15.

Um, the 15 out of station nine will decrease the response time, making faster care, more units available as our community continues to grow.

We're positioned well for the future growth towards the airport.

Um, also we'll, as you saw, station one and four and seven are second or one, two, and three highest um call volume locations.

So station nine will start breaking that apart.

That station nine will redistrict both seven and four and one's district in order to take some of that call volume away from there.

Um I remember I talked about the 3,000 calls for service and on reliability.

It's interesting is using our 2025 um numbers, call for service numbers by adding station nine that drops this down to 110 calls per firefighter and then drops per station down to 2824 calls per station.

So gets us below that 3,000 call limit that we shoot for.

Any questions on that portion of the staffing before I move on to amulets?

I will move to Laura Armstrong.

Thank you.

Um Chief, could you define what cross staffing is like specifically?

I think we get a concept of that, but if for the people watching those returning to council, if you could refresh our memories and educate us on that, that would be beneficial.

Yeah, the the definition isn't as how it approaches.

So every member on our department is what's called.

I'm gonna really can try not to confuse you.

So everybody's cross-trained.

So everybody other than our peak load ambulances and our mobile integrated health care program, all of those that operate 24 hours a day are cross-trained.

So they're both a firefighter and an EMS provider.

So at a minimum of an EMT, an advanced EMT is the next, or a paramedic.

So the couple of three years ago, we made the change where everybody will eventually have to be an advanced EMT within their first four years of working here, so an advanced provider, regardless.

So they're cross-trained.

So cross-staffing is you are um to staff the vehicles that are in your house with the existing people, personnel.

So personnel on an engine, whatever apparatus are in there, that's what you're going to staff all of those vehicles, an ambulance or a wildland truck.

Every station has at a minimum those.

So they will have so if a wildland fire comes out, two will come off the engine and go on that wildland rig.

Also at a minimum.

Depends on which apparatus we have at that house, too.

So that's the cross staffing.

I can get you a better Webster type definition, but I'm don't have that right off the top of my head.

Should be good about here.

You're good.

Oh, I am good.

Do you feel that you are that we are fully staffed?

You keep mentioning how busy we are.

Um pun intended, uh there's burnout.

That could be a very real uh correct thing.

How do we how do we navigate this?

This is what we'll have to now.

We've been trying to navigate for years.

Um that is the constant balance of adding staff members to locations that we need them.

Uh five and six have always been one of those.

Eventually, we'll have to get to that point.

It's worked out well, it's starting not to.

Um, so we will have to start having those conversations about adding basically 12 more people in order to fill up those two stations.

Um are we at the national standards where we should be?

Because you mentioned that there are other cities that are doing more, they have more.

So loaded question.

It depends on which you're talking.

There are many departments that do provide cross-staffing, like we do, um, and we've done that historically for many years.

Station down at station one, we cross-staff.

Um, depends on which apparatus again.

Um, but that's the risk management piece that we're trying to juggle as we move along.

Um, that's gonna get a little more difficult to juggle that as we continue to grow and continue to be more busy.

Fortunately, we've had to basically put all of our eggs downtown, meaning everything and our because the call volume has gone through the roof there, and we're trying to stay ahead of just pockets of call volume versus staying within some response capabilities on the outside fringes.

So it seems like this is a practical solution.

Is it working in reality?

It's working in reality for now today.

Okay, it won't be for long.

I just want to make sure I'm understanding that.

So I'm this will be conversations that we we we have to do the juggle between having a response capability out on the east side of town.

Um, I mean, realistically, if you look at our data, which I'll talk about a little bit about the cost of what our data says we should be doing is high.

I mean, it just flat out is.

Um, we we should have had three more stations by now in conjunction with our call volume and our response time requirements.

Um we have 12 minute response times at the Red Rocks, so it's it's difficult to get out there.

The only way you change that is putting a station out there.

Great.

All right, and right now we don't have that ready.

Perfect, thank you.

Chair recognizes counselor Secrets.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair, and thank you, Chief, for the information.

Um you were just my this is not my question, but when you were talking about cross-trained, um are we still training each of our firefighters as the ambulance response and and vice versa?

So they're both trained in the um not just they are not just single roll if we're not just EMT but also paramedic, or is that completely separate?

We're doing all of that.

We have our own internal paramedic program.

Oh, okay.

So that's kind of in response to the WDT loss of of their program.

Yeah, we've that that goes back to 2013.

We were having some issues with them being able to provide that level of um education.

So we started our own paramedic program, and we're accredited through CoAMS P and KH.

So in addition to all of our firefighters being trained as EMTs, they're also being trained as a paramedic.

They sure can be.

We we don't make the paramedics not mandatory, but the advanced EMT is.

So all of our folks will become an advanced EMT sometime within their first four years of working here.

And so out of the 184 positions, how many of those are our active firefighters and EMTs?

Yeah, you're you're really gonna make me work for that.

Um I'd have to subtract out.

I'd I'll have to get you the exact number.

We have about 25 admin staff.

Well, that's not even true.

We've got realistically, um I gotta go through this every time.

Because here's the problem.

You asked that question, but our mobile medics are all paramedics, are um and you can count those.

I mean, yes, yeah.

So that's why I gotta go through it's like so.

Basically, our two um admin staff or our secretaries, two billing, and then six CHWs, but some of those are so subtract 11 out of that, the rest of those will be gonna be certified.

With that being said, some of our CHWs hold a paramedic and or a community paramedic, which is a higher, and our EMTs also.

And so does that number include fire and um right now for the most part, yes.

We probably have four, I suppose, that are not don't have never had any fire training whatsoever.

How many say that that's there that haven't been a firefighter also for our department?

Okay, thank you.

How often are we sending um an engine out with an ambulance per call?

That I don't have the exact data for, but significantly less than ever before.

We have what's called priority dispatch.

So when you call 911, you give them what the problem is, they ask you a bunch of questions in order to get down to determine what level of service you need to be provided.

Um, and then they deter we've went through on the back side and built that protocol out on who goes.

So it depends.

Um that's great.

I think both when both of those go, it's usually bad, or they need a lot of resources like a cardiac arrest.

You need many hands to be able to to perform a cardiac arrest.

Makes sense.

I think that's great that that's been um changed and not just every single time.

That was probably 2007, eight when we started doing a bunch of that, and it's just improved over time.

Okay, thank I knew at some point in time we were sending an engine per every ambulance call and um just for the safety of our firefighters, and I understand that, but good job and and assessing that um strategy there.

Um I was curious when you do send out an engine and an ambulance, does that count as two calls for service then?

Because you have a call per both, or is that that's just one call for the case?

That's why you saw the difference.

Call for service versus a unit dispatched.

So a call for service is a no matter how many apparatus go on that call, um, that's just one call for service, and then the units dispatched will take into account all those units that were sent on that individual call.

Thanks.

Thank you so much.

Appreciate the information.

Okay.

So let's get into the ambulance.

That's gonna be six folks that are gonna we're requesting there.

Um again, just like the fire portion, all of the stations were rolled up into that one admin budget in order to make the budgeting a little easier for us.

Um to be clear, the enterprise fund, which it ambulance is an enterprise fund, so fee for service is what pays for that today.

Um that pays for 33% of everything that happens at that station.

So a door breaks, 33% of the cost to fix that door will be borne by the enterprise fund.

It's what we set up many years ago in order to try to make it a little more equitable across the enterprise fund into the general fund.

They don't pay rent, so felt it important that we pay the utilities and some of the repair.

The ambulance basically, other than the wages and benefits and the associated costs that we have with the addition in station nine and the folks there.

Um we're gonna have increased disposable supplies, um, increased uh due to the call volume and just adding another unit.

So we've added in there there's a fair jump in that budget, but we added in an ambulance in order to try to purchase that.

But let's be clear with the enterprise fund, it's just like your checking account at the end of the year.

You don't have the revenue in order to support that purchase of a hundred and fifty thousand dollar ambulance or whatever, we aren't gonna get it.

So we'll have to find different ways of doing that and purchasing that equipment.

Um, we're also looking at some different ways of new revenue to deal with some of the rising costs, as you all know.

Um, the conversations with the county, which I'll get into next.

Um, before I do that, the revenue side of that, there's needs to at some point we're gonna have to have a conversation about the and not about the revenue, but about the call volume for our fire apparatus.

We do live what's called a lift assist, um, and we're going to um nursing homes or assisted living centers where they have a no-lift policy, and our firefighters are having to go in there to pick folks up off the ground to assist them.

It's becoming more and more of a problem that we're probably gonna have to talk about a fee in order to do that level of service at a location.

So just something to keep in the back of your mind as we talk about revenue.

So outside city limits response.

I came to you guys uh late last year uh discussing the letter I was sending to all of our folks that we respond to outside of the city limits.

Um, and we've been working on that since that time.

Custer County, um, I am glad and happy to report that Custer County had a vote this last year in June or just in June to uh set up their ambulance taxing district, and that was successful by 82% of the voting population down there.

So they are in the midst of setting up their ambulance taxing district.

Custer County was one of those that we did have a contract with in the past, it was only for $2,000 that they paid us from 2007 until today in order to respond all the way down to Buffalo Gap basically and over to Redshirt Table.

So it was a wide swath.

So we're excited about that.

I think we'll get in a good place with them.

Um I'll just go down the line.

Mead county.

The had some great conversations with them and the mead county commissioners, they're a little bit behind everybody else at this point.

They're looking at doing some different things.

Um, quite honestly, I'm not sure which way Meade County is gonna go.

They may elect to go with another ambulance service at some point, which is wholly fine.

Um, that they can find service.

Piedmont Ambulance operates up there and they operate on minimal funds.

So if they can get their uh district a little larger and either add funding so they can pay more than 14 dollars an hour for a highly qualified paramedic or EMT, um, that would be great, and their level of service should go up significantly.

Somerset, I just got requested to renew the contract at the new contract price for next year, um, just this last Friday, um, which I have agreed to, so that contract will be coming forward, but I believe they'll probably move forward with Piedmont after that.

They're trying to wait for Mead County and what they're going to do.

Mead County's discussed about putting together uh uh countywide ambulance taxing district, which may just happen, um, but we'll see.

And they may end up contracting with us.

Box Elder um had some great conversations with their new city manager.

They are fully on board wanting to move forward with a contract with us this next year.

Um we've talked about funding uh at least a portion until they can figure out their taxing district or how they're going to structure it.

They're wanting it to match basically their fire protection district because they're making some changes on that side of it, also.

Growing community, they're having to make some some big changes within their community as it pertains to public safety.

So I foresee some of that moving along pretty quickly.

But in conversations at this point, I feel fairly confident that they'll have something worked out next year.

Um New Underwood, they're the loan holdout ish.

Had a nice meeting.

I did a public forum out there last month, and it went fairly well.

Um surprisingly, I expected it to be much worse.

Um, but they understand.

New Underwood's one of those that had an ambulance in 2011 that they could not provide services anymore, they couldn't get people to volunteer or respond any longer, and we took it over.

So trying to unravel that at this point is where we're at.

And now finally, Pennington County, lots of great conversations with them.

They're trying to decide which direction they're gonna go, but I am very confident that they will come up with something.

So all of this being said, we might have to carry next year with minimal increase, but that's okay.

Um, but really looking at 28.

I honestly I'd to get government to move.

I figured when I sent the letter in December of 20 um 5, thinking that in 26 you could get something accomplished.

I pretty much knew that was not going to happen.

Um some could move fast enough, but it's also not realistic.

I don't think so.

I think we're on a good path at this point that we'll get some funding, or they'll find other ways to get that service provided out in those counties areas.

So one moment, Chief.

We'll recognize uh Laura Armstrong.

So as busy as you are, and as busy as you're projected to be, is it realistic that we can contract with these other entities?

I mean, obviously we want to be good neighbors.

We want to be supportive.

Um Rapid Cities are priority.

I just want to make sure that we're not biting off more than we can chew, and then again, burnout is a real thing.

Yep.

So I appreciate that question.

It brings up the other half of this conversation.

You weren't part of it when I first gave the presentation, so I'm glad you asked that question.

So the real goal in all of this for the county and to get their money is about 1.5 million dollars out of those agencies outside of the city of Rapid City in order to provide two ambulances.

So we would be able to increase our ambulance coverage by two ambulances.

They will stay within the city of limits.

Yes, we'll get some benefit out of that, obviously, but it also allows us that capacity in order to continue to respond out in those communities.

If none of them go with us, we don't get the two ambulances, but then we need to have a conversation on how we look at in the city subsidy and what's that look like because this is realistically call volumes increasing here within the city.

So all right, so let's talk about revenue for both fire and EMS.

Uh, this will be very specific to fire right at this point.

The first parts.

Current federal grants, we do the wildland, which is the BLM, we do Western states.

So those will uh maintain, they will continue to maintain.

I don't foresee any of that changing whatsoever.

Um I can tell you the BLM is ecstatic about the the work that we're doing with the wildfire mitigation crew.

Um they constantly and have on multiple occasions referenced the city of Rapid City and our program nationally.

Um we actually had the chief come out from BLM and give a presentation and thank us.

So it's a great program, it's a good program.

Uh the second option we have really, we don't have a lot of options for uh grant funding.

AFG is one of them.

Uh that's the second largest option we have, and that's the assistance firefighter grant.

It's funding for equipment for fire and EMS.

So what we applied for this year was the extra equipment for station nine.

So new SCBAs, masks, some other associated equipment from there.

We're hopeful we'll get that.

We always apply for the HLS and the HMEP grant, which is the Homeland Security and the hazardous material.

I just totally drew a blank on P.

But um we always apply, but they're small, um typically less than 20,000.

Um we've gotten some bigger ones here and there.

Uh I believe we'll get some rescue equipment out of this latest round of HLS grant.

But um beyond that, we'll we'll look for some smaller uh training grants out there where we can continue to outfit our training grounds.

Um Chief Harlan applied for a training grant for a door prop where we can practice breaking the door open.

We were successful in that.

$7,000, but it's $7,000.

We don't have to come up with out of our operational cost.

So the last two were really talking.

I will get into a little more detail on both of those, is the Safer Grant and the Rural Health Transformation Grant.

Whoops.

So we're asking for the 15 folks.

The one thing we're gonna do is ask for a safer grant.

We've already applied for it.

Um there was assumptions made between myself, Daniel, and Jamie that if we're gonna ask for 15 individuals that you would want us to apply for this safer grant, and if awarded, you'd probably accept it.

So we went forward with the application.

Um it's the staffing for adequate fire and emergency response.

We're initially gonna ask for 21, but we've been unsuccessful the last couple of times because we have added ambulance folks in there.

They say that that's acceptable, but the previous time we the last two times we've received a safer grant, it was very fire specific and 1710 compliance.

So we requested the the 15 to maintain that compliance.

So what it will provide if we're we're awarded it is new positions for three years, 75% uh each year, one and two, and then 35% year three, allows us to slowly increase that dollar amount over the course of time.

The unfortunate thing is we won't have a decision about it till later this summer, quite honestly.

I don't think we'll find out about it until after you have all ratified the budget.

Um but I'm pretty optimistic we'll receive it.

Um a lot of other services that have had a similar grant request have received the their grant.

So the rural health transformation grant.

I'll try to go quickly because I know I'm running out of time, but um CHWs and mobile medic success.

So we've had a ton and just a bunch of success on our CHWs and mobile medics.

Um the combination of services that we provide have held call volume down for our fire department.

And when I talk about our CHWs and mobile medics, I'm gonna give a shout out to our brothers over here in the PD, the Quality of Life Unit, and also the Park Rangers.

That big combined group to include some of our other co-response folks, Oyate, uh Great Plains Tribal Leaders Health Board, um, VOA and many others journey on has been huge for us.

Um need to give a shout out to them.

So that whole bucket of how we approach this has made a significant impact.

But our rural health transformation grant, we shot big.

One of the big things that they wanted to do is a regionalization of the CHW programs because we've seen some success in it.

So that's what we're trying to do.

We're not trying to take over and make sure we spread this out, but our service that we provide with our CHWs is within the city limits.

But many of these same patients live in Rapid Valley, they live in Boxelder, they live in Blackhawk, they live in Whispering Pines, etc.

So we're trying to take a regional expansion to this.

Much like we do many of our education programs, that's a huge piece of this.

Try to make sure we're able to educate our community health care workers and regionally start educating community health care workers so they can go out and provide the service throughout other communities.

So for us with the big grant request, we're asking for five CHWs and two licensed addiction counselors.

The equipment, the vehicles, the training, everything.

We're and to even to add on a workforce development coordinator in order to provide that CHW training.

And the other half of this is train our existing mobile medics to be community paramedics, and then continue on on that with some of our other paramedics throughout our service.

Why that's important is we can bill for both CHWs, the licensed addiction counselors, and the community paramedics for non-transport work that they do.

So they're able to help provide a level of care and service to individuals where they're at.

So whether they're at home, they're down by the creek, they're at the um here, no matter where, and then if we can bill for some of those services, and that's becoming more prevalent throughout the country, not just with Medicaid, but with other payers also.

We did apply for a second grant, somewhat similar, and we're trying to get one or the other.

We shot big with the regional grant, but we also did a local request for just Rapid City, which included three CHWs and one licensed addiction counselor.

We'll continue to provide our mobile medics.

We'll do the training for mobile medics to community paramedic also because that's we found that we need to do that.

The biggest piece of that is we think we can come close to cost recovery with doing that program.

Um the cost was about 290,000 with a conservative look at reimbursement.

We were sitting at about 240 to 260,000.

So basically, cost recovery and the impact we could have is um I'll show you.

Uh we also we did a DOGA grant to increase our mobile medics, which eventually would be community paramedics.

So this is what we're talking about.

The impact when I talk about the CHWs, there is a significant impact between CHWs, mobile medics, quality of life, and those folks that are hitting it right here, right now.

So super utilizers, patients that we see 10 plus times or greater.

Um we had a high of 80 people that saw we saw eight 10 times or more with the highest number, one gentleman we saw 80 times.

So in that 2020 2022 to 2025, we saw a 63% reduction in that superutilizer usage.

I will tell you that was one of the main goals back when I started the mobile medic program in 2013.

It was a program trying to reduce that super utilizer, our frequent flyers, our reward zone members, whatever you want to call them, there are folks that use that service multiple, multiple, multiple times, and now we have some tools in order to take care of that.

Where you see that big jump and that big drop, what'd we add?

Community health along with the mobile medics, community health care workers, and journey on huge change and a huge drop in that utilization.

So I can go through challenges and all that stuff, but I know you guys we've talked about some of this stuff.

I do bring up many of those about cross-staffing and bringing back in those folks.

So we haven't added until hopefully station nine.

If you guys approve that, we haven't added a 24-hour ambulance since 2009.

Um we have no new stations additional with additional staffing since 2003.

Um station nine is going to help on many, many, many fronts.

Recruitment's becoming more and more difficult.

Um, changing work life, changing how people approach their job and what they do.

So I did bring up some of this, but the cost of implementation of what our data shows.

I can show you a lot of data, just a lot of times we don't want to hear it because it's gonna cost it's there's a significant amount of money that's uh spent, especially on some of our prevention programs.

So I bring up uh opening station two, stopping cross-staffing of five and six, and then eventually we're gonna have to really have conversations about 10 and 11.

We already own the property on the north side on Kimberly Drive.

As that continues to grow there, we're gonna have to have a station out there.

So in my perfect world, I'd like to be able to plan for stations and staffing like we plan for our large vehicles.

It's there, it's in CAP.

I know it's coming.

Um, I'm very jealous of Sioux Falls.

He knows exactly when his next station two stations are coming.

They're already in works to do station 13, and you already saw what they do as far as call volume.

So very jealous of them.

But we have a piece of this puzzle.

We need to start teaching folks proper use of 911.

It's not just to utilize it for your primary care provider, it needs to be an emergency unit, period.

So go over some things that we, if we had to cut, but I can talk about those if you have questions.

So thank you, Chief.

Any questions from the council?

I will say one thing that I want to kind of leave you with.

Our department is efficient, it's lean, it's high functioning.

We do a great job.

I think we give a great value to this community.

And even providing and adding station nine, that value is still there.

It actually increases and makes it better.

And as we continue to provide the high level of service we do, it's one thing you're probably not going to hear too much of.

So that you chief, and thank you for everything you and everyone in the audience does.

Any opposed?

Okay, we are in recess for five minutes.

So that's one of the key more.

Thank you.

Oh yeah, yeah.

I'll tell you straight up.

Twenty percent terrorist, but it's a smell terrible.

Okay.

Okay.

The meeting will come to order, and with that we will move on to item number two, the twenty twenty-seven police department budget presentation by Chief Hedrick.

Sir, the floor is yours.

And as you can see, they care about our department.

Got a pretty good showing here.

And uh they care about our community.

Pretty challenging work that they do on a daily basis.

It takes not only dedication but courage and integrity, and uh proud of these folks.

So we have our first slide up here.

And I want to briefly before we get into it, just mention a couple trends from the twenty twenty-one era because they still impact some of the work that we're doing and they impact our budget today.

And firstly, I want to mention our response to violence.

Because in 2021 we sort of had to up end the way we responded to violence and change the way we thought.

Change the way we did business.

We had to adjust with the times.

And we had to focus very heavily in some of our primary hotspots.

At times we had to station officers in a particular area.

And on top of that, that heavy resource allocation.

Uh we couldn't just do that by policing alone.

We also had to focus and work with the neighborhood, work with the community.

We also had to focus and work with the neighborhood, work with the community, and it really took a lot of effort with our outreach and engagement with the with the good people living there.

Building neighborhood watch groups, empowering the folks in the neighborhoods to not only build trust but to have that level of comfort where they felt like they could call us.

And you're seeing some of that still today with our Star Village efforts.

And thirdly, working with our elected officials.

Support from the group up here at the DIS pushing on property owners that weren't doing what they need to do to meet the most basic needs of good people in in the neighborhoods that need these places to live.

So this effort of police community elected officials all working together as a team, and we're still utilizing that concept here today.

The other trend that we witnessed back then, and we're sort of coming out of that due to support from folks like you know, we saw officers leaving the profession, and at one point we were 35 officers short.

That's a big number for us.

And I'm pretty happy to say we're in a lot better shape now than what we were.

Essentially, today we'd be very close to fully staffed.

Um, however, last year we applied for a couple grants to get us some more officers, and right now we're in a couple hiring cycles to make sure that we can get those 12 positions filled.

So we're trying to fill those positions for these grant positions right now.

Um as a result, we didn't we didn't opt to request any additional FTEs for this 2027 budget, as we're still trying to fill these grant positions.

However, um as we fill these spots, we're gonna reevaluate for 2028 and see where we're at.

So we have some of our goals up here on the screen, and uh we appreciate the support that we've had for the North Precinct.

Uh we've been working with our city partners, and we're at a spot right now where we're looking to get the remodeling accomplished for that building.

And what you'll see here on the public works agenda, we've got to the point where we're tomorrow.

Tomorrow Tuesday, what day is it?

It's been a it's been a while last week and this weekend was busy.

We're about to advertise for bid.

Uh, it's on the agenda tomorrow where we're gonna put that on for our remodeling process, and with the goal of bringing our training division, um, our current substation we're operating on next door, as well as our outreach teams all under that one roof, and we hope to bring some more accessibility for the Rabbit City Police Department to the North Side neighborhoods with that with that project.

I think it's gonna be great.

Uh I mentioned data-driven policing.

Uh not every police department leans on data to drive their resources.

We feel it's important.

We've had good results from that.

We're constantly monitoring to the point of weekly finding out where our hotspots are because they do shift, putting that information out to our shifts and to our supervisors and to the officers so they know where these hot spots are occurring so we can address them before they get bigger or more of a problem.

And uh for us, it's been a great formula for success.

And uh personal growth, I'm gonna let uh personal growth and leadership assistant chief sitz is gonna talk a little bit more about that later.

Let's see.

All right, real briefly, I just wanted to give you a little bit of a snapshot of how our resources are allocated.

Some of you might know, some of you might not.

We do have three divisions of the police department, and as I talk through this, I just want to give you an acknowledge that you know we have our three different divisions, but we also do as a community, I think we do have our community has a lot of support for our department.

And along with that support, we do there's this expectation of transparency, and we work really hard to ensure we're operating at the highest level, and that means making sure that we have our resources allocated the best we can.

And if you start, I guess it'd be my left on patrol, uh, that that might be what you think of as our uniformed police presence.

Um, the folks that are on immediate emergency response, it's our highest allocated resource division.

And uh these are the folks that are running 247, 365, four shifts, overlapping for the highest uh highest presence during the time frames where it's needed the most.

Um CID criminal investigations.

This is where you would find our detectives, and uh not only our detectives kind of broke up into specialty units, but this also includes the task force that we're a part of, and we leverage those task force with other uh investigative entities.

So, for example, we have um units that are made up of multiple agencies that work together as an efficiency.

So our internet crimes against children, for example, is made up of units from the sheriff's office, state investigators, all working together to be a force multiplier on crimes such as that.

Our drug investigative unit, same type of thing.

And uh, those are partnerships that are really important, partnerships that don't happen in a lot of other places, but we feel like it's important and valuable.

Uh, our school resource officers, our evidence team, they all also fit under our uh criminal investigations division.

Uh support services, a lot of different things packed into this division.

Um kind of our sort of a catch-all of amazing people under there.

Um, training, all of our folks being trained, our records division, our hiring or accreditation, public information officer, safety specialists, crime reduction, a lot of different things.

So some of these other guys are gonna pop in here and speak a little bit, but Captain Christian Siegel's in charge of our patrol division, our assistant chief Scott Sitz in charge of our support services, and Captain Andy Becker is in part in charge of our criminal investigations division.

All right, just uh wanted to mention some of the things that are on our radar right now because they do impact our budget to some degree, and uh some of our higher priority initiatives wanted to mention our downtown foot patrol.

It's something that we've implemented here somewhat recently, but something we also feel it's important to keep going.

Uh, not only because of a lot of the positive feedback that we've received from this initiative, but because of the feeling of safety that it's provided, and um I can tell you that it's gone well.

We've had specific officers that are really taking it upon themselves to make this their mission, and uh it's something we've been able to manage through our traditional staffing to some degree.

Our street crimes units, these are proactive units that are not necessarily tied to the radio, so they don't have a reactive response, they're more proactive in nature.

A lot of these officers are supplemented through grants, and we'll get into that a little bit more later, but the daytime street street crimes units are more focused on being visible in the daytime hours, specifically like the downtown core, bike path, etc.

Our evening street crimes are more focused on the hot spots, um, high crime areas, places where violence is occurring, um, trying to engage in addressing where the guns, drugs, violence, etc.

is occurring.

Uh, you might have heard some news about our parole task force this recent year.

Um, issues with parole have been ongoing over the last few years in particular, but really escalated this last year to the point where we had to do something different.

It wasn't working, it got particularly bad where we saw extreme violence occurring by people that are on parole, um, essentially people that are still designated as being in prison, serving a prison sentence, but out in our community, um, a lot being allowed to serve their sentence out in our community, and we were noticing that they just were not being checked on after hours, so they were out committing more crime, and sometimes crimes of violence, shooting people, etc.

And it really just was not acceptable.

Um we took some pretty drastic measures to the point of uh the sheriff's office and us partnering together to create our own little unit to check on people because it wasn't happening.

And um you know, there are parole agents who are tasked with with doing that, we just felt like it wasn't happening enough.

So we also partnered with parole to make sure that folks that are serving their sentence in our community knew that somebody was gonna go out and check on them after hours.

And in addition to that, we the sheriff and I and the state's attorney and some of our other criminal justice partners, along with our counterparts in Sioux Falls, really engaged heavily on folks that are in charge of parole with the state, and really asked had some specific asks for them to adjust their policies in that moment.

And uh we believe we were heard, and at this point, things are in much better shape than what they were.

We we haven't can't say things are perfect, but we're in a much better spot because of these measures we took.

And um, you know, that's something we're gonna continue to monitor and keep addressing.

Uh CIT or crisis intervention training.

We sort of have a renewed effort on this training.

Um another word for this might be de escalation training.

And uh something that's near and dear to our heart.

Um, us and the sheriff's office were some of the first in the state to to bring this training to law enforcement in South Dakota, sort of putting a facelift on this, and uh we have a CIT training class going on right now, and this renewed effort, we're pretty proud of this, and uh something we're gonna keep going on.

Okay, uh I'll keep going here.

I'm not gonna walk through every one of these bullets because some of this will come up later on in the presentation.

But I wanted to mention our accreditation.

We just kind of went through an accreditation process, and I have to mention um, you know, we are still the only accredited agency, law enforcement agency in the state of South Dakota.

It's a big deal.

It's not always comfortable to have a third party come through and go through all of your policies, practices, procedures.

Um, but it's important, it's a big deal.

It keeps us on the cutting edge, it keeps us on our toes, keeps us accountable, and it keeps us professional.

Uh, it's a lot of extra work, but to us it's worth it.

Um, we've been accredited for over 30 years, and we're proud of that.

Star Village and our community outro outreach, some of this is kind of linked together.

I think what I just wanted to note in addition is there's a lot of opportunities upcoming to get involved if you wanted to um Jamie Kirsh, Jamie is here somewhere.

Um, if you were interested in getting involved in any of that, she sent me a really lengthy list of some of the upcoming events.

Um, I or she or any of us would be happy to send you some of those events if you wanted to pop your head in.

I know it makes a difference to the folks living there when they see uh leaders like yourself pop in, and I know some of you have in the past, um, so thank you for that.

But um just holler if you have interest, or we could just send it anyways for awareness too.

Uh I'll talk about traffic enforcement later.

Excuse me, Chief.

Yes.

Uh Chair recognizes Councillor Armstrong.

Yes, ma'am.

Um, well, you mentioned you're gonna talk about traffic enforcement later, so I'll just I'll pipe in at that time.

Perfect.

Yeah, or yes, I I do have a little bit more I was gonna add on that, and I'll circle back around to you for sure.

Uh I wanted to just touch on, I'm sure the fire chief mentioned this, but our historic new collaboration with the fire department and fire station 9.

Uh, you know, I I suppose in theory the the fire department could make have a building and the police department could have their own separate building, but we all know buildings are expensive.

Um, and for us, it just only makes sense for us to work together.

We have a great working relationship, and for us, having some office space with them only seems to make sense, and this is like history in the making.

It's pretty cool.

For us, we've partnered with the sheriff's office for many, many years, and uh, you know, for all of us here at the table to have a be a part of this historic collaboration.

It's I think it's awesome.

Um, our quality of life unit.

Another opportunity for us to collaborate with the fire department.

Uh, we've recently presented been presented with an opportunity to have some training provided by the fire department potentially here in the future.

Um I don't know, did you go into this at all, fire chief?

A little bit.

Okay, sounding like the fire department is looking to receive the ability to obtain some community health worker training.

Also, then they'd have the ability to train our quality of life unit to have some of this training.

We're working through some of the details here in the future.

Might give us the opportunity to then have that understanding as to what community health workers do, an understanding of all that.

Give our quality of life unit some additional tools in their tool belt.

And thereby could also provide the city with some opportunities to have some Medicaid support there as well on the back end.

So we're looking hard into all of that, and um, you know, only strengthens our ability to collaborate further with the fire department, like we already do with our co-response.

Um we do have a little bit of restructuring that we're looking at here with uh our criminal investigations division, and uh Captain Annu Becker here is gonna give a little brief on that.

Thank you.

Um yeah, so uh as you can tell, uh see UNET supervision that that's the unified narcotic enforcement team.

Uh that is one of the uh groups that is a multi-agency uh task force that we have here uh in Rapid City in Western South Dakota and serve other counties.

Typically, that uh that group has always been supervised by either a Pennington County uh sergeant or Rapid City Police Department Sergeant.

Uh Pennington County has supervised that division now since 2018.

Um in 2022, I know the chief talked about when we were several officers down, uh it was our turn in 2022 to take over supervision of UNET.

However, we were uh really not in a position to be able to do that uh by taking another uh person out of patrol, promoting a sergeant and moving them over to UNET.

So uh at that time, Penny County Sheriff's Office agreed to continue to supervise uh UNET.

Um Thad Mason has done that, done a nice job of doing that.

Uh so good that he's now been promoted to lieutenant for the Pennington County Sheriff's Office, so he will be coming out of uh unit again.

Uh now it is our turn to take over that supervision.

So we're working on a process right now to uh get that sergeant identified to uh go over and lead that division.

Um there's been a few changes too with the sexual assault and child abuse investigations.

Uh currently, the way that is structured is we have two detectives that is their primary uh work is to handle those investigations, and they work under the Pennant County Sheriff's Office.

They're in in-house, they're all on the third floor.

However, a supervisor from the Penkey County Sheriff's Office oversees the sexual assault child abuse investigations.

Uh they're also going through some sort of restructuring of that, and we're going to kind of treat those cases like we do our property and our major cases, our people crimes and our property crimes, where the Penta County uh Sheriff's Office will handle the cases in the county, and the Rab City Police Department will handle all of the Rapid City cases that occur for those.

So, with that addition, because of the type of cases they are, they need you know that oversight, uh, they need direct supervision.

So we will be looking at adding a sergeant who will be the sexual assault child abuse sergeant for the Rhapsody Police Department, and then adding also a couple extra detectives because obviously uh we want to make sure that these crimes do get the attention that they deserve and are investigated properly.

So it'll be basically a team of five in the Rab City Police Department, criminal investigations division for those cases.

Uh Chief, I would like to recognize uh counselor Strowman for a question.

And this is for Chief for Captain Beckard would be appropriate, but um with the move of the county administration office out to concourse.

Will you be assuming some of that building area for um police operations?

And if so, how will that affect your budget if at all?

So we're not moving anybody out to concourse, however, um some of our some of our public-facing offices are moving to the current county or moving over to the building that was their spot over there.

So our records division and compliance would be moving over to that spot.

Then freeing up some of our some of the space that was used for records, for example, would be used for some of our investigative purposes.

And there was some remodel costs that we are able to pay for through our general fund built in.

Thank you.

Yep.

So we we do have some uh crime data here, and uh Captain Siegel's gonna touch on this.

Thank you, Mr.

President, Council.

Uh as Chief said, my name is Christian Siegel.

I'm the commander of our patrol division, and uh we have some very basic uh stats for you to review here.

Kind of shows uh illustrates how much work that our people are doing um over a five-year period.

The top left there, you can see that our calls for service um have uh slowly increased from 114 to 157,000 calls for service.

Now a call for service is anything that uh a police officer does, or not necessarily police officer, but our employees do.

Everything gets a call for service.

Um that would be anything that's proactive, anything that's reactive, um important for you any time that uh constituent calls and asks for police services.

So 157,000 times uh throughout the year, we are sending people to go and respond and resolve people's uh crisis.

Um a 37% increase from uh year to year, well, not year to year, but every five years.

Moving over to cases.

Now, the difference between a call for service and a case, sometimes those calls for service don't require uh an investigation or further documentation.

It may be a simple um uh uh uh I would say a minor crime that doesn't have any uh solvability to it may result in just a call for service.

Um maybe it's a phone call asking for advice, just a call for service.

A case um is something that requires further documentation, it could be an accident, it could be uh anywhere up to a homicide or anything that might require uh investigative work, or there are other requirements that require cases, and you can see that uh that line is kind of strange.

If you look at all the the lines, they gradually increase consistently throughout each year.

This one dipped in 2022, and we don't really have an uh a reason why that occurred.

However, um in the five-year period, you can see that we increased about 700 cases over the five-year period.

So a lot of investigations, a lot of different things that are occurring that require extra work, I shouldn't say extra, but more work than a regular calls for service.

Um that has increased only a few hundred, and I say only, I mean that is uh pretty significant uh knowing the kind of manpower workforce that is required to manage each case.

It is somewhat uh significant.

Um but not a huge amount, I guess.

As far as warnings and citations in Ms.

Armstrong, you had mentioned or some questions about traffic.

This may answer that.

So you look at you can see our proactive enforcement.

This is our efforts going out there to uh influence our motoring public to slow down stop at stop signs, um, whatever it might be that is traffic related.

In 2023, uh Captain Becker at the time, he added four uh traffic officers.

Two in the morning and then two in the evening.

The evening ones are more focused on DUI enforcement.

So in 2023, we increased our efforts dramatically.

Um we really put a lot of effort into uh slowing our our motoring public down and making the streets safe, managing those accidents, um, and again importantly, I imagine that a lot of your constituents are complaining about traffic and um the people that are running through uh the gap or or what have you.

And so we felt that it was necessary to bring back our traffic division and uh really put a lot of effort into that.

And you can see um we have increased our enforcement dramatically in the five years and very much so from 2023.

The orange line is our citations.

Um warnings are nice and feel good, however, our citations are the our problem correcting.

Nobody wants a citation.

So and then arrests very uh similar to the calls for service as far as uh the increase.

You can see from uh from the five-year period, there's about sixteen hundred uh extra arrests.

Now that could be from the you know, an increase in crime, but really when we put two uh police officers out there looking for DOIs and another two just strictly out there looking for uh traffic uh violations, that in turn turns to arrests, right?

We find people with warrants just based on a traffic stop.

Um we find people that are intoxicated, um the proactive work out there increased arrests, and so that would explain the increase.

So that's about all I have.

Chair recognizes counselor Meyer.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Would you say these trends are comparable to like municipalities across the nation or yeah?

With a city like ours that continues to grow, more people coming in, a centralized hub.

We have uh not only growth inside the city but growth within the region.

And uh we service all those people.

We service um we have a large um population that come for tourism, and we service all them.

They all need calls for they all have calls for service, um a need for police response, and so yes.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Uh Ms.

Armstrong, did we get your question answered?

Okay, and I would say also that through the use of grants, that's how we've been able to obtain these traffic focused officers.

And I have a slide on grants too that'll touch on it in a little more detail as we move along.

So just dialing into a little bit of our specifics, and I know Mr.

Lehman had mentioned how he went through this in a little more detail, but you know, I just wanted to mention, you know, we go through um, we're provided some numbers for our budget, and some of them are just pretty clear-cut, given to us right out the gates, and many of our line items are like that.

They're just you know, there's either um they're they're either set for us by you know, union contracts or provided by something that's figured already predetermined.

Um, for example, um you know, there's there's formulas to calculate or you know, our union contract already has our wages already set up and predetermined.

Um items like retirement, workers' comp insurance, interdepartmental charges, they're already locked in for us right out the gates.

Um there are some line items that we do have uh a little bit of authority over, and however, some of them are also fairly fixed as well.

Um, some of our software contracts, for example, were like our body cameras, they're locked into multi-year contracts, um, which is a good thing.

And those were you know, we brought those forth through council, they're approved.

The good the good part about that is they can't those contracts can't go up year to year because they're locked in.

Um, you know, and we know that we also have to set aside funding for vehicle repairs and fuel and building maintenance, and they're pretty consistent year to year, so we kind of just know what we have to lock in.

And overall, uh, for this 2027, we feel like we're in pretty good shape, and uh if you went through it line by line, um you'll see that this 2027 budget is pretty similar to the 26 budget as well.

Did want to touch on some of the grants that we have continuing, and just in case you had questions on them or whatever that might be, our our JAG grant, our justice assistance grant.

This is a grant we typically leverage for equipment.

We go into this every single year with the county jointly.

Uh we've used this to purchase uh equipment that we know we're gonna have to buy anyway, and it's been very helpful over the years.

You awarded typically every year.

We've used it for cyber equipment for our internet crimes against children software for for that unit as well, digital evidence for storage for our evidence lab, um just typically public safety equipment that we know we're gonna have to buy.

So, why not utilize grant assistance?

Uh Project Safe Neighborhood.

Uh, this is a grant specifically for wages, and this is a grant that we partner with the ATF on, focused on addressing violent gun crimes, people that are using people that are out committing acts of violence in our community focused on offenders to hold them accountable.

VOCA Victims of Crime Act.

Uh this is wages for our high-risk youth coordinator, and helps provide services for victims of crime.

This is something we've applied for annually, and we've had good success with our 2024 cops grant.

This is again how I had mentioned our street crimes unit.

This helps cover um our street crimes daytime unit.

And this goes into February 2028.

This is our and we also have a 2025 cops grant.

This is for three years.

This helps cover the 10 officers that I had mentioned that we're working on filling this year.

Those 10 openings.

Covers those wages.

That's how we're able to obtain different different officers specifically focused on traffic enforcement through the state.

And you know, if your constituents are talking about traffic, we hear it all the time as well.

Uh weekly, sometimes daily, we're hearing about hey, my neighborhood, we want this, we want enforcement in our area, and it's uh something we track and very heavy focus for us at this time.

Uh a couple different grant opportunities.

Uh the fire chief had mentioned this first grant, the public safety and mental health initiative.

This isn't just a police grant, this is something we put in together as a city.

Uh you know, we're a piece of that, but it's primarily focused on the fire department, and um we're a partner in it.

The community violence intervention and prevention grant.

This is a grant that we have reapplied for, and we've had it since help me out, Dave.

2022.

Yep.

And we feel pretty confident we're gonna be able to seek.

We're gonna be able to get this grant again.

Um Dave told me it's money in the bank, so if you know Dave.

And it's supported a lot of our outreach initiatives.

There's no direct city match to it.

I put down the homeland security grant.

We we applied for this, and it took a little bit of a backlog, but we eventually received it.

And it's over a hundred thousand dollars specifically for safety barriers that we received.

And you might have noticed all the big heavy concrete blocks that we utilized during some of our recent Fourth of July events.

Um, this is this isn't gonna cover all of those heavy blocks, but it's a lighter, easier to move grant or I mean barrier type of material that can stop heavy vehicles, but it's a good starting point.

It cover a smaller space for now, but it's be easier for our partners at public works to move, and it's something that we're gonna keep continuing to put in grants for, so we eventually have enough to utilize this instead of the big concrete barriers.

So it's a good opportunity for us to keep looking at.

Okay, so next up, assistant chief sits.

We're pretty lucky we have a leadership expert in our house, teaches leadership classes, and he's gonna dive in here for a little bit.

Usually the term expert loosely.

So just really talking about our our staffing and our workload comparison.

You know, as Captain Siegel said, and you can see the 157,000 calls for service up there.

Uh, just to let you know, you do have a an extremely busy police department.

Uh I recognize that we may categories are not our calls for service a little bit different than everybody else.

We might include some proactive stuff, but Sioux Falls may not.

But at the end of the day, if we were to take our proactive stuff out, uh, we'd still be very comparable with Sioux Falls, and we'd still be having right around that uh 200 or 2,000 calls per officer.

So we do have an extremely busy police department.

Our our ultimate goal would be that uh 1,000 calls per officer per year.

That's kind of the the gold standard and and the benchmark that is set.

Uh we have a lot of catching up to do with officers on that.

Um, again, as you can see, we're right around that 2200 mark.

Um, there's also another out out there, the national average for uh police officers per 1,000 population is that 2.2.

We're sitting right about 196, so not too bad.

Uh about another 20 officers would get us to uh to that location.

So again, out of all those police departments up there.

Uh we consider ourselves the the busiest police department in the Midwest, and and that's the reason why.

One thing we did budget for again this year is our our wellness package or the continuation of our wellness package.

Uh we've we've had that in in our in our budget since 2023 with the approval of council.

And um while we recognize that there is a cost to this this package to this benefit, uh we can't talk about that that cost if we don't talk about also the the cost savings.

So, what you see up there right now, we hire a new employee for a year starting in 2027.

It's gonna cost uh just shy of a hundred thousand dollars once we we pay them their salary, once we uh we do the roll up, the health insurance, the retirement, the workers' comp, uh all the benefits, and we equip them, it's gonna cost us roughly a 100,000 dollars for that employee for a year.

Uh a lot of studies out there because of the the training that goes into law enforcement in order to you don't get hired, you do a week and you're out on your own.

It's it's nine to twelve months on average for a police officer to start working independently.

So based on that, um, what they say for for public safety is attrition rates can easily double, if not triple, because of the cost goes into it.

That hundred thousand dollars doesn't include uh the interview boards that we're paying to conduct the interviews, it doesn't the 80 hour background investigation we're paying the background investigators, uh the medical examinations, the hearing, the vision tests, uh it doesn't include the the overtime that that officer is earning throughout that year as they as they learn to become a police officer, nor does it include the overtime that we're paying a police training officer to uh to train that train that officer.

Uh when I talk about loss of productivity and efficiency, we're basically playing paying two police officers to do the work of one at a much slower rate.

Um I'm using 10 officers here, you'll see on the next slide, but the the base cost to replace 10 officers to they come out of training can work independently, is roughly about $880,000.

Uh and to pay the training officers to train them for these months is about $800, $900,000 for a total of about uh 1.7 million.

That's how much it costs to train equip police officers until they they get out and can work effectively on their own.

And here's why I'm using 10.

So the three years prior to our wellness package uh that's been approved.

Uh we are averaging an attrition rate of 20 officers per year.

Uh we had a an attrition rate of 14 percent.

And since that time, uh since the wellness package has been in effect, we're at six, five, and six percent for attrition rates.

That is unheard of in law enforcement.

Law enforcement is still uh very routinely in averages that that 14 on the low end and and 20 to 25 percent on the high end.

Uh and we're a big believer, you know, we could have we could have taken a route that a lot of agencies have taken, and and I've seen signing bonuses up to 50,000 for signing bonuses.

No one getting the ideas out there.

Uh paying for moving expenses, they're gonna pay your pay your your to rent your apartment for a year.

Um I was a firm believer and not rewarding people that we don't we don't know.

Uh if we're gonna do anything, let's take care of these guys.

So after you would train all your officers, uh we pay for the wellness package, the city is still saving 1.1 million after the cost of the wellness package.

That's that's the savings to the city, and you're getting highly qualified, highly trained uh officers that know our community, and just become more efficient and more productive.

You know, a couple of interesting things we've seen since implementing this wellness package is we've seen a drop in use of force, and we've seen a drop in complaints.

Uh we have a firm, we have a saying out there that in order to take care of other people, you have to be able to take care of yourself first.

And we know this is a very difficult job.

Uh you get uh expected to solve problems that have taken years to fester.

You gotta do that in seconds, you uh get hit, punched, kicked.

Uh some people tried to take your lives, and you got to carry on, and you gotta go forward.

And some some interesting studies here from FOP National Study survey that 70% of officers are considering leaving law enforcement, 50% experience high burnout, 80% are experienced uh experiencing exhaustion.

The life expectancy in law enforcement is 22 22 years less than that of the general population.

25% of officers have high blood pressure, 40% are beast.

Depression is twice as high for police officers as it is in the general population, and almost 50% have uh post-traumatic stress disorder.

Officer suicide is also 45% higher than the general population.

So, since we've implemented our wellness package, again, you saw that you saw the the return just on uh attrition alone.

Um look what our officers are saying.

94% report that uh the package is uh effective to extremely effective in addressing burnout and stress.

80% reported the wellness and retention package has positively impacted their decision to stay with the RCPD, and 81% improved uh reported improved morale.

So I think as leaders um you know we have an ethical obligation to take care of our staff, not just financially, but also physically and mentally, and this package is a big part of doing that.

What you have here is uh our organization chart.

You might be looking at it and thinking that's upside down.

Well, we flipped it on on purpose.

We flipped it because it shows uh as a daily reminder as leaders that we are here to support our staff and not our staff supporting us.

So we had that flipped.

Um this rest outside uh the chief in my office, and and it serves as that as that daily reminder that um we have to invest in in our in our officers and our public safety professionals, uh, and we need to support them in their growth and development and success.

Great.

So uh while all of us are here for questions or things we didn't touch on and stuff you want to dive into further.

Thank you.

First, uh Chair will recognize counselor Armstrong.

Great.

Um I have two questions.

Um coming from a law enforcement family.

I know how serious this is, and again, we appreciate everything that you do on every level.

Um what's the morale?

Yeah, I would say morale is good.

I would say morale is high, but like I mean, I think this is a good sign right here.

This is we put out an email saying, hey, if you're interested in this process, uh come on over, and and this is our turnout.

So um I'd uh is there an anybody that wants to come up and speak to that?

I mean, I I have a view of it, but if there's anybody that wants to talk about it, right to it.

I would think on it.

Why not?

Yeah, absolutely.

Just briefly.

And this is Sean.

Sean's our wellness coordinator.

Yeah, thank you.

Yeah, you're better buddy.

Hello, thank you.

Appreciate the opportunity.

Always get in front and speak in front of people.

But uh absolutely the the wellness package has been a night and day difference with the police department and morale, just how things feel when you enter a room.

Um before this, a little more bleak, it's a little harder, especially when those days are really difficult when you have those calls that you're not going to be able to forget easily.

It's hard to continue to come back to work every single day.

One of the things I love so much about the police department, my my experience, I I was a military police in the Air Force, and the major difference between us, I mean, the work is way different, number one, but number two, the major difference is I made a decision one time to work for the Air Force, and I had to live that decision for four years.

If I had a choice, I probably wouldn't have made that decision every single day.

These guys make a decision every single day to come in to work, and they do it because they know they're being supported by their by their team, by their people, by their council members, by the community, and that makes a huge difference when we're talking about morale.

So love everything that we're doing.

Thank you for your support.

Great, and thank you for sharing your personal story, and it actually leads to my second and last question, I promise.

Um, where do we find potential candidates?

No, she's not.

Oh, go ahead.

You go ahead.

Assistant chief sits handle that.

He's in over our recruiting.

Well, we for we started, we hired uh Alexia Kallal.

She's uh a talent recruiter, she is she's amazing, she does a great job.

Um branding, so we've we have a lot of stuff out in social media.

We we've done ads, we are had ads on Monday Night Football.

I don't know if anyone caught any of those or not.

But you know, I think for most importantly, the biggest connection for us is right here.

How word gets out from our staff is uh huge.

Uh our staff knows who's gonna make good police officers uh in this community and who's not.

Uh so word of mouth um community support, leadership support, and uh that's how we get that's how we get the message out, and I think you know, of our last several hiring cycles, the majority have been local uh from our area, which is which is outstanding.

Hey, just out of curiosity, how many people have military experience in the room?

That's another good uh measure also for us.

Well, and I met with uh several of your officers last Thursday, and it should be commended that what was this 30 years, 22 years, 19 years on the job.

Um so thank you.

Next we will move to Greg Strowman.

Thank you, Chair.

I just have a comment.

Um I think you bumped yourself out there.

Oh, I just have a comment that uh fortunately my um encounters with the police have been limited, but um the times that I have been down to the public safety building, I've been super extremely impressed with the way that um chief and anyone else that's in the area, whether it's the person at the window or it's the chief, all the way um throughout the hierarchy, everyone treats the people that just drop in there with respect and uh try to be helpful to them and answer their questions, and they're very patient and professional with them, and I just really appreciate that.

And um the other thing, the other question I have um regard it regards um budgeting and funding.

I wondered if you have had had a chance to um have time with Dr.

Temang to find out when the rest of the opioid settlement funds would be in so that you can use for yeah, is there any progress on that?

I mean, I know that DSS is just really slow about doling that out, but it seems like well you have an update.

I think the doc is probably more knowledge on it than I am, but I believe we're working through sort of a pilot program with the county, but doc you probably have more info on it than I do, frankly.

Aggressive work in progress, sir.

Yeah, that's that's probably a better way to put it.

Next we will move to counselor meyer.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Uh my first this is more of a request.

You had said that the there's currently no city match for a community outreach grant that we receive.

I guess I'd be curious if um if there was at some point some match um what sort of outreach you could do.

Um I think community outreach is incredibly important.

So if someone wanted to prepare something for us to take a look at, I'd be interested in seeing that.

Uh yeah, no, that's that's good.

Uh and what they're getting that is we don't have to match any funding towards it.

Um so it would be funding that we would just receive without having to pony up to it.

Kind of a win-win for us if we do receive that that grant.

Okay.

Um my question is it looks like we did or we will have about a million dollars difference in grants that we're receiving next year.

Um a million dollars less.

Um, and this is just for my high like high-level overview.

Is that grants that we had just um planned to off-ramp, or are we in progress of receiving someone?

So we just can't put it in the budget because they're not confirmed.

Um the finance director would like to weigh in, he might have something to say.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Yeah, the majority of that is because we have uh several grants that we have used to help onboard uh the new police officers, however, uh similar to the uh safer grants that we have discussed for the fire department.

Um most of those grants, including the cops grants, they're heavy on the first year or second year, and then they start tailing off, and so as they start um falling down, then the general fund has to provide that additional support.

And so that's what's happening with the police department.

It's not that you know they're getting a lot of additional officers or anything else, it's just that um the amount of support that they receive from the federal government is going to be reduced, which is part of the plan that we had going into that uh last year, I think, when we uh started looking at that.

That's the exact same thing that we're gonna see next year and especially the year after in the fire department.

So just to make sure everyone's on the same page with that, we're gonna see the exact same thing happening.

And in fact, the grants for PD likely will decrease again in 2028 because of the same factor.

Thank you.

We can get more and keep it high, though.

Uh next we'd like to go to counselor Meyer Maher, pardon me.

Um Chief.

I know you've increased the usage of cameras.

We've all seen in the media there's gonna be a lot of pushback by residents because of too much surveillance and they're so accurate now with our license plate numbers.

Yeah.

Can you just comment a little bit on that and what your plan is for this year?

Are we adding cameras in certain areas?

Yeah, so you know, I think the huge pushback is it is related to these flock cameras that have had data breaches and such.

Um, you know, we in particular have stayed away from Flock.

We don't own any flock cameras.

Um, you know, there's these apps out there, or there's there's a lot of social media out there that is very misleading, and um, we've tried really hard to debunk that.

Um, you know, we do have license plate reader technology, and we've had that for years, but not in particular to the to the flock cameras.

Now we do have a couple of license plate reader technology type cameras that are up in our high gun violence and high violence type of areas, and we're trying that out on a year type of basis to see how that goes.

Um the one thing I'll tell you about our cameras is that our technology is very guarded, and it's not being you know monitored 24-7.

It's very specific to the crime in particular.

And this is this is technology that we've used to help us solve big cases.

You might remember we talked about this publicly when people were raining down bullets from Skyline Drive a while back.

Um this is technology we've used to help us solve cases like that, and people that are having their vehicles stolen and such.

Um I don't know.

To me, it's a there's a big difference, and it's something that we're trying, and ultimately we we serve the people, and we'll see how this all pans out.

We're prarding our uh technology very closely though, and I do have folks that are experts in it.

I know um some of you have asked some questions, and um the assistant chief and who's our other camera expert.

Probably you, you're one of them.

Do you have more detail on our RP on it?

Yeah, so our camera systems, you know, there's a lot of uh rumors out there that they're monitored, we use them to monitor people.

Essentially, how our camera system works is uh if you're a victim of crime, let's say your your car gets stolen, we will enter your license plate into the database.

And if your database passes an LPR, a license plate reader, we'll get an alert and we can send officers, officers that way.

Uh if you're missing your danger endangered person and you're associated to to a vehicle, uh we'll enter that that license plate in, you drive by one, it'll alert, we'll get an alert, we'll send officers that way to find you.

There's no one sitting behind a camera or looking in case of uh say a shooting uh where we've had before, we can go back and we can say the shooting happened at this time.

Let's look and see if we any license plates were logged during this time, and that could give us potential places to start looking for for suspects.

It doesn't tell us who's driving the car.

I can't identify anyone that is driving the car.

It's really capturing the the license plate in the vehicle, but but that's that's really about it.

Um other than that, uh, you know, we only have them in our high crime areas.

There's a misconception out there that using these you could follow people around.

That's simply not the case.

Uh we have four in our high crime areas.

We can't follow people around with four in our high crime areas.

However, there are a lot of flock cameras out and about, and I I see them.

Um, for example, I I drove into the Lowe's parking lot this weekend, flock cameras at both entrances.

Uh some WDT flock campers all flock cameras at all the entrances.

So flock cameras being um are very popular amongst private businesses to to monitor who's coming and going from the parking lots, but flock has nothing to do with the the city of Rapid City.

Uh again, our our technology is axon.

Uh Axon is uh is a very secure digital platform.

That's where our holds all of our you know thousands of hours of body camera footage.

They're they're CGIS compliant.

Um they axon stores all of our our digital evidence.

So we have a very secure platform with no no known data breaches, and on top of that, we have a very strict policy on uh when and who can access the the information from these systems.

If it would be helpful to you, we can send you some information that details all of this out and get it to you so you can read it and take a look at it and even some of our policy that really secures and locks down this information for you, if that'd be helpful.

I just remember the sky drive.

Those guys were arrested.

Yeah, it's caught.

It's a public safety tool and a force multiplier that helps us when we are short of resources at times.

And I would add on there that stolen vehicles, missing endangered individuals, um, and serious violent crimes is what these these uh cameras are used for.

They're not there to monitor traffic, investigate misdemeanor crimes, issue people citations uh for running a stop sign, it doesn't do that anyway.

Uh, but it's stolen vehicles, missing endangered individuals, serious crime investigations.

Thank you.

Ms.

Secrets.

Thank you, Mr.

Chair.

Um, thank you also to um those of you that have worked with me over the past couple years, few years.

Um, the police department contacts that I have just are so willing to be helpful and send additional information and follow up with residents, and that's greatly appreciated.

It makes us all feel good and look good, and we really appreciate what you guys do.

I know it's a tough job, and um my question was uh two things that I think have been uh especially meaningful in my short time on the council has just been the increased traffic control or traffic enforcement in the downtown foot patrol, I think has meant a great deal to people.

Um once those positions you mentioned that in 23 they were grant funded, and we were able to add an extra seven to eight positions on the traffic enforcement.

Once we dwindle down those funds, are we able to retain that in that specific use, or do you then um absorb that back into your standard operations?

Yeah, our our plan is to keep those in place.

I don't I don't think we can go backwards with our traffic enforcement at this point.

The the expectation has been set, and we we're either gonna keep it going as is or find new ways to fund it through grants.

I I think the impact is huge, it has a large ripple effect.

Um as a driver who I tend to drive fast everywhere I go to because I'm in a hurry.

Um it reminds me to slow down and to it just keeps us all in check, everyone that's around, and I just think it's so important for safety.

Um and then on the downtown um enforcement, the same thing, it just is a tremendous impact on the residents and the perception of safety.

Um super grateful um for that effort.

I see people downtown all the time, and I just think it's it's a great positive interaction too, opportunity for the police to interact with our residents.

Um I I guess my last question would just be do you feel like you're supported in this budget from the chiefs of view here since I have you both up here, um, that this is what you need for this upcoming year, and and you feel good about that?

Uh I feel good about it, and I also feel like I have support um you know for unforeseen things that might come up.

You know, an example would be uh a while back we had a drunk driver run and run into one of our buildings.

It was an unforeseen expense that came out of nowhere, and we had to ask for some help from you uh to get some you know uh get things going to get an emergency fix going, and you know, when things like that come up, uh it just seems like you know, not only the city, but you guys are there to help us out.

So I think we're in good shape.

I I guess the other question that as we went through this is just I can't wrap my brain around how we have so many calls for service comparable to the other communities that you had.

Maybe it was just who falls comparison, but um what drives that in Rapid City specifically?

Is it just our unique geography or I it's it's just crazy.

I think we just have um, you know, we have a lot of issues with alcohol, we have a lot of issues with drugs, and it's something that we continue to deal with every single day.

Um, we're trying to use very unique.

I mean, we're trying to use very cutting-edge methods for this type of stuff.

Um the the joint outreach that we're doing with the fire department.

Um we're getting recognized at national levels for some of that type of thing, and you know, if if anyone has you know the the answers and can write a book on it, I would buy it.

We're we're doing everything that we can, and we much like the fire department, um we are very we have a very incredible professional staff, and we run very effectively, and you know, we're gonna continue to monitor our staffing because we all know we could use more.

And you know, we're gonna continue to monitor our staffing because we all know we could use more.

Um it's hard to come to you and say, hey, we want to hire 20 more people when we're still trying to hire 12 or 14 right in this moment.

Like we have to get we have to get these folks hired before we can add more.

And we're gonna need to do that in the future.

Like the numbers show it, our folks know it.

Um hard to prevent burnout when when you're that labor-intensive day every day of your life.

So well, thank you all for your service.

Appreciate you being here.

Thank you.

Well, I know it sounds like a platitude, but we're all deeply grateful for the work you do.

And with that, I'll be looking for a motion to adjourn.

All in favor?

We are adjourned.