The Winston-Salem City Council met on Monday, March 3, 2025, at 6:00 PM at City Hall, with Mayor Allen Joines presiding. The meeting included a City Manager update, approval of a consent agenda (with one item pulled for discussion), and three informational updates on pre-K initiatives, federal advocacy, and housing. A closed session was held for legal and economic development matters, and the meeting adjourned at 7:24 PM. Council Member Robert C. Clark was absent.
Items on the consent agenda were approved unanimously by a 7-0 vote (Council Member Clark absent), with the exception of item C-4, which was pulled for discussion and later approved separately.
Dr. Louis Finney (President/CEO of Smart Start of Forsyth County) and Dr. Tatia Prieto (President of Prismatic Services, Inc.) presented on the ARPA-funded pre-K initiative. Key points:
Kyle Leopard of Strategics Consulting LLC presented the agenda for the NLC Congressional Visit scheduled for March 9–12, 2025, in Washington, D.C. Key points:
Samuel Hunter, Assistant Director of Neighborhood Services, provided updates:
Good evening, everyone. I'm Alan Joins, Mayor of Winston Salem. It's my pleasure to call to order this March 3rd meeting of the Winston Salem City Council and ask the city clerk to call the roll, please. Councilmember joyner. Present. Councilmember Clark. Councilmember Andrew Bowen. Here. Councilmember Scipio? Present. Mayor Pritim Adams. Councilmember Taylor. Present. Councilmember Hall. Present. And Councilmember Burke. Here. Thank you very much. Would you please join the city council and me in a moment of silence? Thank you. Would you join the city council meeting the Pledge of Allegiance? I Pledge Allegiance to the United States of America to the Republic for Stands. Thank you very much. Our Sergeant Arms tonight is Lieutenant Vernon Chu. Thank you, Lieutenant, for being with us. And uh fire marshal tonight is Micah Bodford is here as well. Thank you for being with you. Uh let me uh recognize our city manager for his update. Thank you, Mayor and Council. Uh just a uh several things tonight. Uh, first let me uh start off with I know several of you have asked for some clarification on issues that have been reported in the journal about our Winston Salem uh fire departments. Uh just to reiterate that I have told the to each of you we have not cut any staff in the fire department. Fire department has still has the same number of staff that they have typically had. In fact, as a reminder, council, you added 2.4 million dollars in overtime cost to the fire department budget this past year. That's in addition, we're getting some additional research on clarifying all this, but over the past five or six years, you've also added two safer grants, which are usually about 12 firefighters each, so there are about 24 firefighters just with those grants uh to the fire department staffing allocation as well. So I know there's been a lot of discussion about all this, but there's also have been some misclarifications as to what it means by staffing versus minimum staffing. In order to manage operations within an adopted budget amount, which we every department has to do in the city, the fire department did recently make some operational changes to reduce minimum staffing levels from 89 to 79 firefighters per shift. This is to adhere to the overtime budget that has been put in place for them, which again was 2.4 million dollars higher than what they had previously. This does not mean that we limit our staffing to 79 firefighters. In fact, since the staffing changes were made, the department has averaged 85 firefighters per shift, been as high as 90 and hit the minimum of 79 once for half of one shift. Just to put that in perspective, if we are fully staffed, and every firefighter is available for duty on that day, you would have 117 assigned folks to each shift, and out of that 117 is what we get our minimum staffings from. So reducing the minimum staffing means that staffing levels would only be down due to employee absences such as sick time, vacation, injury, or other approved lease. In those cases, now when we get below 79, the fire department wouldn't call in employees to work overtime before they had been calling in folks when they reduced below 89 on each shift. There's also been a fair number of references to the National Fire Protection Association or NFPA standards. The main standard that we look at is the recommendation of having 17 personnel that can respond to any initial alarm of a fire at a single family home. So if there's a structure of fire, we want to have at least 17 people respond to that call. We have 20 stations strategically located across the city, and the fire department has an average response time of just over six minutes, deploying more on-seen resources for higher house fires than the 17 recommended by the NFPA. The chiefs has reported that even at a minimum staffing level of 79, we would typically send 29 people to a house fire. We average about 300 house fires a year in the city. And so at each one of those, we will we are consistently providing more staff members than is required or not required, but then it's recommended by the NFPA to adequately address those house fires.