I'm sorry.

So I believe I uh I I left off saying that under the Office of Public Safety, Health and Welfare, we have approximately 750 uh personnel assigned to us, and our budget's approximately 115 million between all departments.

Next slide, please.

All right, so I'd like to take a minute to highlight some of the uh public safety achievements for 2025 since a lot of the things that our departments are doing.

Uh, we're funding uh we're funded out of um these committees.

So I wanted to highlight uh first and foremost.

If you look to the top under ECC 911, uh when I stated earlier that our 911 center is the core of our whole public safety operation, uh I truly meant that.

And you can see we have approximately 186,294 total calls for service that come into that center uh throughout 2025.

Uh 52,085 were emergency calls for service, and 134,209 were non-emergency.

Um what's so critical about this uh department is that all calls for service, public safety related, come into that center, and then they're dispatched out of that center to our personnel to respond throughout our community.

Um like I said, Brian's gonna be presenting after me, but one of the things I like to highlight is um the state standard for picking up a 911 call is making sure that we you average 911 calls getting picked up in less than 10 seconds, and we've consistently uh achieved above that benchmark, and this year we were at 94%, which is a true testament to uh the supervisors and the leadership in that department and the people doing the work in there.

Uh Brian's one of the major things that Brian's been tasked with since joining the team about uh a little over a year ago was refreshing the facilities, and he spent a large um invested interest in upgrading a lot of the technical platforms to enhance our operations.

In regards to the police department, they were just under 100,000 calls for service in 2025.

They were 97,797 calls for service, and that was a 5% increase from the prior year.

Some of the highlights from the police department.

Um, you know, we hear this often that we're the safest city in New England and safest city in Connecticut.

Um, and there's a reason for that.

We we have a phenomenal police department and a phenomenal relationship with our community members.

Uh our Stanford Police Academy went operational last year.

And one of the highlights uh in the police department currently is that we're within almost a year, less than a year, just over a year, excuse me, we're gonna be starting our third academy class.

So that's already proving uh putting out a lot of dividends for our community and making sure that we recruit locally, train our officers in-house, and we have um officers that are coming out of our community, serving in our community as police officers.

This year we just recently were able to get five positions funded.

Um conversation earlier, uh I was asked what are some of the uh one what are some of the biggest issues that I've seen in my close to 30 years in public safety in the city.

And my response was was pretty clear.

Um the city continues to grow uh tremendously, and our departments are not growing to meet the need of that growth to provide services.

Uh so we were able to get five officers funded this year out of the 13 requested, um, and we're gonna keep trying to chip away at that.

And then one last highlight for the police department that I'd like to make is this uh this will resonate with all of you so you can take it back to your constituents is that traffic enforcement was up 34% last year.

Um, and that's something that we uh we take very seriously.

A lot of a large volume of our complaints come in uh from our residents that they're speakers and other traffic violations.

So the police department has done a great job stepping up those those efforts.

Um regards to fire department, uh one of the highlights is they've been going through a major restructure.

Uh we added the second um uh on duty, uh second on duty uh fire chief um throughout the city.

That was a major part of their management structure change, and that new deputy chief uh adds several components.

Now we can handle two large scale incidents at once, which really complements their personnel.

Also, what we're working towards in line with those positions that I just mentioned about the police department and the growth of our city.

Next week you'll be hearing from Fire Chief Morris in regards to them requesting eight new firefighter positions.

And he'll explain in detail how that impacts their operations.

Sims, they kind of touched on all those highlights, so I'm not going to be redundant.

One thing I will say is Eddie highlighted the increase of 25% over the last five five years.

And we've been working very closely to make sure that we get this service out in our community where it's needed, and most of that growth is down in the South End.

So we're in the process of working to outfit a station down at the Leighton Line and Center Wider Center so that they could dispatch directly out of there to make our responses more efficient.

You've also heard from Jody Bishop just uh prior to me.

Uh one thing I'm gonna highlight is the accreditation.

I'm very proud of that team.

They've really worked very hard, and um and that's a major accomplishment for our health department to be accredited.

Um, the health department for those of you who are new to the board, they're pretty much involved in every aspect of our community.

It's really like eye-opening to see um what the health department's role is in our community.

They pretty much touch every aspect of it.

Um, and just to highlight, um, they've responded to more than 1,053 citizen service complaints and conducted with a small staff, I might add, over 800 and 780 food inspections.

And then lastly, that public safety uh citation enforcement group.

This is pretty much our quality of life uh department.

Uh they've responded to more than 1782 requests that they've addressed and 2,977 individual inspections.

They were particularly busy these last couple months because one of the main things they deal with is uh unshoveled sidewalks and things of that nature.

So they're they're really busy for a three-person team, especially two of them being part-time.

Uh Barbara, next slide, please.

All right, so as it pertains to the budget and looking ahead into 26-27, uh our goals and priorities.

Um, you know, it's most important, the most important thing we have in public safety is is our resources, our personnel infrastructure, uh, and equipment and tools that we we ask uh or we provide our personnel to go out and do the jobs that we're asking them to do when we're at our community.

And you need all three of those to make sure that we provide the highest level of public safety services possible.

Uh and as you can see on this slide, I'm not just referring to emergency uh responses, but also non-emergency.

Uh, as I stated, I've been in public safety uh with the city for close to 30 years, and I know we really excel in emergency responses, and I think the latest example of that was all of our departments coming together for the uh major critical incident we had back in December on Oaklawn Avenue.