The Public Safety Committee convened on December 16, 2025, to review the Animal Care Services (ACS) Strategic Plan progress, analyze deep-dive crime statistics for property crimes, and update on mental health and wellness programs for first responders. Key discussions focused on the feasibility of zero population growth for stray animals, the efficacy of proactive enforcement in reducing crime, and the capacity of the department to provide mental health services amidst staffing shortages.
All right, good afternoon. The time is now 2 05 p.m. and we'll call public safety committee meeting to order. Madam Clerk, would you please call the roll? Councilmember McKee Rodriguez. Present. Councilmember Castillo. Councilmember Spears. Chair Corps? Here. Ma'am, we have a court core. Thank you. All right. We have a few items on the agenda. We'll start off with approving our minutes from the November 17th public safety committee meeting. Are there any um updates that need to be made to the minutes? Councilmember, I don't know if you caught anything this time. Okay, we'll take a motion on it. All right, we have a motion and a second. All in favor? Aye. Any opposed? Okay, motion carries. All right. So we have three items for discussion today. The first one is on ACS. So Maria, if I'll hand it over to you to give a little background on it. Thank you, Chairwoman. Um, so today what we have is a presentation by John Gary, our ACS director, to give you a brief update of the animal care services strategic plan and some of the progress that we have made towards accomplishing some of the goals. But more specifically, we want would like to talk to you about some of the statistics related to uh spaying order surgeries and some of the uh progress that we have made with the two additional clinics that were open late last year, and some of the participation of our community as well as details of the other uh clinics that we have across the city, including some of the um challenges that we still have with uh individuals um in in a waiting list as they are trying to get surgeries in in our locations. So with that, I'm gonna turn it over to uh John. Thank you. Good afternoon, Chair and Committee. Um, as Maria said, I'll I'll quickly go through um some of the progress with the it's really overall statistics, but we'll focus really on the two of the items that you asked for, and that was about the officer hiring and and then of course the spending or clinics and how they're doing. Uh so the first uh the first slide that we have here, this is really just those five uh items that we show uh through our strategic plan that are our main focus areas um that we have. And then uh going into the public safety. So um in FY24 and 25, we added about 22 first responders that you all graciously funded through the budget process. Um positions uh were also added to enhance uh bite and dangerous investigations uh in FY24 as well. That brought that team up to um four dangerous um officers and an eight bite investigators for a total on that team of 12. Um the hiring status for those positions 100% of the new positions have been hired. We are actually um overhired by three. Um and we're uh continue to do that. We had an academy that just graduated in this last uh September. Uh and um we'll have the next academy that will be starting uh shortly uh in this after the first of the year, we're probably around the springtime is when that academy will start with hopefully a completion date in late May. Uh as you can see down there, uh it does say we have 50 first responder positions with current current four vacancies. That's um that's only shows that way because of uh we have our um trainees that that get promoted up. So we actually technically we are overstaffed by three. Those officers will soon um go from trainees to officers, and then that number will be um as you'll see it'll be it'll actually be more than 50 that we have. Um there are investigations. We have a total of 17.