 started I'll call our budget work session to order good to see everybody today David and we got a long agenda so I'll turn it over to you all right we're gonna go through this as everybody knows this is our budget work session to talk about the recommended fiscal year 2023 budget we have four presentations this morning and then we can walk through a number of budget responses so I won't take any more of the microphone I'll turn it over to Val to introduce the fire staffing study Val. Good morning Mayor and Council David and thank you for allowing me to kick off the fire and EMS staffing and organizational review. This I think probably deserves a little bit of fanfare we talked about fire staffing as we were wrapping up fiscal year 22 budget discussions with a promise to y'all that we would work with a consultant to really do a deep dive and look at fire department staffing in an effort to be prepared for fiscal year 23 budget to conversations and through a lot of work over the last couple of months with Citygate who I'm gonna introduce the principal for Citygate mr. Stuart Gary here in just a few minutes but we spent the last several months working intensely with fire department planning and data analytics medstar we have Ken Simpson here from medstar as we've really taken a deep dive at fire staffing and the services they provide you know they have 963 sworn positions 50 civilian positions right now they have 44 fire stations that they're providing services to residents visitors businesses all over the city and I'm excited to have Stuart come to the microphone he'll give you a little bit about a little background on himself and his experience and then he'll walk you through a present a presentation and detailing the final report that he provided I do apologize I sent that out we had worked with stew to get that finalized and wrapped up so we could move on with today's workshop presentation so I did distribute that to y'all late late last night with some attachments but knowing that stew would be here today to really walk you through the report and then after this session once you have a chance to read it we can field additional questions with stew so with that I'll turn it over to Stuart Gary to introduce himself and then provide the presentation thank you miss Washington mayor members the council it really is a pleasure to be here today I have a deep passion for this work and I think you're also entitled to know briefly who the talking head is who's about to take you through a 50 slide deck deck quickly and informatively but I think you need to know you don't just have an academic up here you don't just have somebody who dabbles in fire and EMS business I'm a bit of a unicorn so I'm the public safety principle for city gate associates city gate only works for local government on behalf of the public our clients we don't work for the private sector we're a virtual city hall who employees about to retire recently retired annuitants who have a love for public administration community and giving back I retired as a fire chief of department and since retirement I have affinity for you all I've served as a city council member and a school board member president during the great recession when we laid off 200 teachers because the state wasn't giving us enough money I've been on both sides of the table I've been in close sessions with briefings by experts by firehose pun intended and feeling overwhelmed as a council member you've received a 400 page study written by a team of fire and statistician and database experts myself when I said I'm a unicorn I'll date myself I first walked in a fire station as a sophomore in high school in 1970 and was trained to be a firefighter because there weren't enough volunteer adults during the daytime I was in the back of an ambulance by myself at age 17 with a red cross first aid card I went to the first EMT class in San Diego County I was in the fifth paramedic class in San Diego County I've come up through the ranks with a bachelor and master's degree retired as chief of department I've been successfully consulting now for top my head 17 years so yes I'm getting older finally but I started as a youth and you're gonna hear I trust my passion for these issues they are complicated and today's about listening and asking questions you've got to digest all the material you're gonna want staff to come back with implementation thinking we'll talk about that at the end but let's let's take a tour through Fort Worth fire services so the scope of work for us to was to completely review the fire and some of the EMS components of the system there are top five firing EMS takeaways and service delivery challenges we'll discuss we're going to talk about risks to be protected and outcome goals I'll explain why in a moment then we're going to talk about service demand measures response time performance fire headquarters staffing and I'll say this about three times today the deployment of men and women on the ground doing the emergency service work can only occur if there's an adequate headquarters team to the logistically supply train and provide quality of care oversight and that includes mechanics put fire tires on fire trucks it includes training instructors it includes business and IT people that back office machine is rarely seen and almost never discussed at the policy level and we've got some policy issues today to discuss about that recap of our findings recommendations and next steps I'm gonna use hopefully not a lot of terminology today I don't define but as you take the print out of the deck home and you see an acronym or a word we've given some brief abbreviations here for example ALS means paramedic advanced life support you'll also hear me talk about percent of goal measures mathematical for term of that as a fractal which is very different than average I will talk about a standard setting institutions and in Texas you're unique and I know you're unique for a lot of reasons no pun intended but you're one of the few states in the United States by statutory authority has established the Texas Commission on fire protection and TCFP issues a whole sort of statutory regulations governing the provision of fire services the quality the training the equipment of fire services so we'll talk about turnout time and different issues of response time and what a first and multiple unit arrival is so our scope was to do that deep dive fire EMS staffing study a comprehensive review of effectiveness and efficiency to review the integration with med stars delivery of paramedic ambulance service and I've already described who our firm is and pun intended here not our first rodeo and we feel honored to have been given a job of this size frankly and also you're one of three large jobs right now currently city of Los Angeles is a client city of Portland is a client and I briefed for the final time the Portland Commission next Tuesday via zoom so we are used to big complicated data sets we also do one horse all volunteer fire departments and everything in between mostly in the western states how we did the work we received almost two gigabytes of electronic and paper data from the city we conducted internal and external stakeholder interviews we did a comprehensive community risk assessment I'll lead off with that a moment a very deep repetitive dive on incident statistics to get to response times types of calls locations of calls peak calls at peak hour of the day do you have enough resources when it's high tide for 911 demand for service GIS travel time analysis where should fire stations be located the headquarters staffing multiple progress briefings interactions with staff yielding a 400 page document I remind all of my client councils and most know this especially for the public listening at home there are no federal or state laws governing in the United States the minimum provision of fire and EMS services it's a home rule local control issue period many states if they have any requirement at all just direct cities to provide for it but don't say at what level therefore the level of fire and EMS services provided is a local policy decision you have the level of service you can fund and it may not always be what you desire there's a constructive tension more so since the great recession and all my clients well we want this level of service but how do we pay for it we get we get that the overall positives I can't stress this enough sometimes you come in and do a performance audit a deep dive review there's friction there's pushback not in Fort Worth very committed staff in every agency there was complete candor and data transparency your teams are focused and include med star in this to training and employee health the skills are technically competent I don't want the public today to have a takeaway just because there's things to work on these are agencies performing at the highest level they can giving excellent customer service day in and day out they're strained they're stressed in spots and we're going to talk about in a improvement sense what improvement can look like and stability in some aspects looks like I don't want anybody hopefully even a reporter listening these are not broken agencies in need of an immediate overhaul take this as a best practices tune up and they've been extraordinarily forthcoming with data and assistance and discovery to us so what are the top five challenges before I start to define them for you growth in the North City and along almost all outer edge area are straining effective delivery of fire station response times first paramedic delivery given pair med stars paramedic ambulance response times and ability and their service delivery revenue structure lengthy dispatch processing times given the interplay of three dispatch centers we'll talk more about that in a moment at length Lincoln's customer service before the first wheels even start rolling the need for specific outcome driven goals in my opinion by this city council to drive the future investment and deployment of fire services and we talk about how you set those goals and how you can have a very clear policy role in setting customer service delivery and then we'll talk about fire headquarters staffing budgeting for overtime the Fiskals etc take a breath and say okay Stu you just said goal setting why I'm a council member I don't know anything about emergency service setting goals what do you base goal setting on risks to be protected think about fire service deployment is calculating the whole machine backwards from what you want your customer to receive after they've called 911 we're to talk about what those deliverables are but once you all say by policy here's the fire and life-saving end game customer service point we in your staff calculate everything backwards from the moment of 911 saying hello and even Tarrant County 911 right has a hand in this the entire machine has to perform with exquisite precision every time somebody calls for help but you got to define the end game if you want lazy response times if you want half as many fire stations that's it that's a political policy choice so the risk to be protected for those desired outcomes most of our urban clients in simple terms would say well what's an outcome number one prevent permanent permanent impairment from medical emergencies where possible I'm injured I mail 911 come help stabilize me get me to definitive care I return me to a successful quality of life are some people already sadly perishing as 911 is being called of course but the system is also designed to save those still in need of acute care to get the care they need and move to a destination facility most of my clients also expect building fires to be confined to the room or compartment of origin right you don't want to burn out the whole floor of a high-rise you don't want a single family home fire in a 1950s neighborhood to spread to four properties ideally even say some of the personal possessions in the business or of the homeowner delivering those outcomes depends on adequate staffing apparatus types and response times over the geography if you remember nothing else today about fire service deployment I'm gonna give you maps and stats and you're gonna you're gonna go wow where am I 30 minutes from now remember these two things fire service deployment as is paramedics in a slightly different sense is about the speed and the weight of the attack speed is a single first responder neighborhood based to get to modest emergencies quickly and to completely handle the emergency with one fire crew and an ambulance if as needed the weight of the attack though is important for fire station spacing across the geography because when really serious fires happen I have to bring enough crews together quickly enough to get enough boots on the ground to simultaneous and effectively stop that serious fire from becoming catastrophic and going to greater alarms and my analogy to you all there it's like playing football if I don't get enough people on the ground can I play 11 versus 6 and football well yeah but what's going to happen to the six who showed up short and in my business if you show up too long too short a crew fire wins EMS tragedies occur timing is everything in this business if it's really becoming an acute emergency and yes everybody will tell you we don't have a lot of those and I would argue an equitable position as I want every neighborhood to have equitable access to emergency care and we're not going to say well statistically it doesn't happen that often therefore we really don't care about acute care we're going to do this homogenous different level of care you're going to hear me with passion argue for equitable neighborhood service delivery and I would say that whether you're elected by district or there's just five of you elected city at large I think we all care as public servants about the equity of access to our societies you also deliver the weight of attack that multiple people with specialty units such as ladder trucks engines has met water rescue vehicles as of just a couple of days ago for example it's not just about fire engines and ladder trucks so risk assessment we cut the city in the zones fire station first two districts we've counted the values at risk we describe those in a moment we look at the probability and in your prior incident data how often you go to those risks we multiply consequence and impact and we come up with a score by fire station area so that helps us start to understand simplistic sense is this all single family housing is a dense multifamily housing and business district commercial is an industrial R&D warehouse is an aviation because some of our specialty response teams and time over distance varies by hazard category so as you start to set a council level policy we have to tune the system to the actual risks on dirt so real quick you know these numbers people you've cracked nine hundred thousand you're headed to over a million people you become the 13th largest city in the United States and you're not stopped growing you've already got 350,000 residential housing units 275 critical facilities those are the things to be protected that are essential to modern society functioning water wastewater power telecommunication nodes health care facilities things that modern urban society can't run for very many days right great freeze things break really quickly if society's infrastructure and public safety teams can't keep the business of society running you've also got another 1100 maximum high-risk occupancies hospital health care mega educational institutions economic resources you've got over 27,000 businesses over 300,000 almost 400,000 employees so you talk about in and out migration populations which we have to in my business will win the calls for service peak diverse robust economy numerous cultural historic and natural resources so now let's talk about time well still you talked about risks and you talked about keep the fire to the room of origin and you talked about medical survivability how do we put that into words well coincidentally there are two timelines that diverge at the same moment in time so the left-hand chart for those of you at the table is brain survival when the brain stops getting enough oxygen so time zero on the left and you're alive and profusing your brain in four to six minutes without oxygen the brain starts to die most will say brain death comes irreversible at minute 8 to 10 if you're not profusing your brain and I want to be clear on two things it's not a heart's stoppage it could be a heart irregularity it could be breathing complications it could be things paramedics can intervene on to help stabilize you and get you to the hospital it's not always oh my gosh the classic TV episode crushing chest pain I fall over dead and that's it but that first responder needs to get there about minute eight or nine from 911 saying hello and as I walk you through travel time and station spacing that's a tough challenge eight minutes goes by really quick really quick coincidentally on the right side is what's called the time temperature curve at minute zero fired nights in open flame in a room so a fire can one of these overstuffed chairs back here could smolder for three hours the middle of the night once it breaks into open flame fire doubles in growth every minute the fire doubles and in a room a compartment fire by about minute eight goes to what we call the flash over point where the entire room has reached ignition temperature everything is going to burst into flame at once you now have a vicious fire that's going to chew its way out of the room into the rest of the building so coincidentally you want your fire and EMS first responders there in less than 10 minutes if you expect to keep small things small and if they delight arrive later with fewer people even on the multi-unit first alarm you're fighting this running clock hey let's talk about service demand we pulled four years of incident data for the fire department the red bars on the bottom of percent of fires good news America since the early 1970s in a couple of famous federal studies America's turned a corner on suppressing building fires we were much better off than we were when I started my career the blue bars EMS however the fire service and also the ambulance industry have increasingly become the health care of only resort as health care in America has failed to get equitable access to everybody yes I'm on my soapbox for a minute but EMS is on the receiving end if I don't have preventative health care if I don't have any access to health care my only choice is to call 911 and someone's going to come make my bad day better if I call 911 well that's resulted in a tsunami of EMS work for America's fire and ambulance operations the the other bars are other water rescue tech rescue hazmat other necessary fire service responses so if you look at time of day midnight on the left midnight on the right sometimes my clients especially smaller cities say well can I just turn off some of my fire stations at night to save money no this is 3 a.m. in four years low tide demand for service continues after midnight it accelerates with early morning rush hour people waking up you hit the shoulder of the day and you have high demand for service and that starts to taper off late evening some of that's climate recreation daylight dependent if I showed you Minnesota data it looks a little different but pretty much this same curve exists everywhere in America except Clark County Nevada on the strip and yes emergency incident a man on the strip looks rapidly different than this curve but you're you and you're normal this is but we have to peak hours the day we need to understand do you have enough units for simultaneous calls I don't have a simultaneous demand problem at 3 a.m. but I sure do it too in the afternoon talk about that in a second so this is a very complicated table it's well written in the report this is the percent of each hour in 12 months so let's look at 1 p.m. 1300 for engine 29 in that hour in one year they spend 24 percent of their time logged into an open incident logged into an open incident that's not refueling that's not cleaning that's not a comfort break that's not a meal break they're logged into an active incident 25 percent of the hour will we look for runs over time of when that hits 30 percent and goes hour after hour after hour if you're 30 percent logged into active incidents five seven hours running you're not taking care of the other necessities of maintaining the equipment check out report writing getting a meal break there just there is a threshold there to where you just can't go call to call to call and deliver quality of care and no one in here listening would want to be the receiving end of either an ambulance or a firefighter paramedic after they run 17 calls in a row what do you think the quality of care you know is at that point they're struggling right to deliver the best customer service possible but they're tired we're all humans and at some point you can only do so much physically in a row so we've analyzed that in the study none of your units are close to 30 at all today much less nor are they close hour after hour but the takeaway is at peak hours the day and these are not the high busiest engines in the city by total volume some of the engines have more calls in 24 7365 but at peak hours the day I'm telling staff put a yellow light on and start watching this and we'll talk about some mitigation strategies in a moment now I mentioned simultaneous it calls very important well in Fort Worth as in most cities you're divided into battalions which are groups of fire station areas most of the simultaneous lightning strikes peak hour of the day occur in just two battalions so as we start to look at those unit workload measures we then look at the geography to say how many simultaneous hits are we occurring and do I have enough troops on duty to maintain people going to calls and still have something in reserve for the next set of calls let's look at response time performance so the best practices between city gate and other publications in the United States I want you to think about response time as more than just drive time I don't want you even think about it as an average I'll explain why in a couple of slides our commitment to response time is total customer service it begins with 911 saying hello and it ends with wheel stop at the curb of the first needed unit and I didn't say at the patient side I said we'll stop at the address in many times they still have to access where the patients where the fires difficult to get to best practices for call processing would be to get from hello to alerting the crew in a minute 30 crew turn out take no more than two minutes when measured 24 hours a day ideally waking hours would be closer to 90 seconds first do travel the drive time once I'm alerted got the proper protective clothing on I'm seated and seat belted and the units rolling I just said all those intentionally because they're safety laws firefighters have stopped hanging on the rig putting on their coat like they do in Hollywood on the way to the call hanging on with one arm no no and no you got the proper protective equipment on their seated their seat belted they're rolling driving times about four minutes so if you add those components together a first unit called arrival goal is seven minutes and 30 seconds a little better than that eight and nine ish minutes I was mentioning on the two curve graphs first alarm multiple units you want the last do multiple unit to have about eight minutes driving time so if I do four engines two ladder trucks and two chiefs to a building fire the last assigned unit has eight minutes to get there some of some may get there in two minutes it's around the corner from the first firehouse right but the weight of attack has up to eight minutes to get there so how are we doing now I'm going to go through three sets of numbers today so bear with me I'm sorry this is now the difficult part of the slide deck Fort Worth fire departments performance just fires performance not 911 answering yet not MedStar to just the fire in EMS emergencies not that other gold bar fire in EMS to 90% of the case load in 2021 call processing took a minute 32 fire dispatch is only two seconds over national expectations that statistical dust fire dispatch once they get the call gets it executed into the cruise crew turnout is three minutes largely due to COVID sluggishness I've talked to the staff about this COVID caused extra PPE and precautionary things to happen things drifted but they can drift right back with corrective data and focus by the management team and the crews on to get crew turnout back to where it needs to be first do travel however is difficult six minutes and 33 seconds whoa whoa whoa wait a minute chief Gary you just argued 10 slides ago national expectations are four minutes yeah they are on a flat street right angle grid street network with great spacing spaces to great station spacing you've got to reverse to park topography's curvil in your road networks you've done in some cases not your counsel's fault but what I call as an analyst leap frog annexations you got fingers and holes and Fort Worth just kind of sprawls over over the last century or 50 years so 633 for travel is a challenge we'll dissect that your two and a half minutes long there so your first unit called or arrival from fire dispatch being notified in that year was 1021 fire had a prior budget published goal of 624 that did not include fire dispatch time that was the only turn out in travel so I'm going to recommend adopting a more comprehensive set of performance requirements and then first alarm travel for that last year unit is 18 and 21 minutes that's reflective that you're so big in the station spacing in areas is so thin the multiple units can't all get there quickly and that differs by by geography of the city now let's talk about average versus fractal real quick a lot of agencies will still use the term average well we get there in an average of eight minutes hey chief Gary you said eight minutes on the time temperature curve is right in the norm average is the middle of a data set if this were a normal bell shaped distribution curve if my average was four minutes right from zero at eight minutes I'm done this is a right shifted curve it's lopsided why because I'm only getting at four minutes to sixty some percent of the calls at the fifth minute I'm getting to more calls to get to 90% of the calls city-wide is taking 633 and travel why because in the outer areas or in the core inside the loop to the simultaneous calls the first due units not available so the second due unit has to drive further to pick up engine threes call because they're already on a medical all of that combines to work against you in Fort Worth the spacing the topography the open space areas the nature preserves the water bodies the highways it all constrains the fast movement of fire trucks okay now let's look at dispatch by center so police gets the call and has to transfer a fire EMS call to one of two other dispatch centers medstar or fire police over three years at to 90% of the fire EMS calls took two minutes and 42 seconds to get to 90% yes they're transferring some calls quickly police data analysts agreed with us with the data we pulled was good but to get to 90% of the transferred calls is taking over two minutes they're asking too many police-centered questions in our opinion before saying go to medstar or fire that has to be rectified medstar has to do wants to do is best practices to do met what's called medical priority processing they want to interrogate the caller a bit more because maybe they don't need a paramedic ambulance or they don't need an ambulance in eight minutes they need an ambulance in 20 minutes it's a low acuity event however that processing takes time they spent to the 90th percentile of 213 they're in the left column their numbers have gotten better post covid they've shared been very transparent shared all our numbers with us multiple times we and their data analysts have agreed on the numbers and medstar is getting better and call processing of late I'll also say later they want to redo the priority one tier and I support that but historically they took the two minutes plus so if a caller was to be really questioned to the nth degree by three calm centers the calm center performance before a unit was notified could take anywhere from three to six minutes best practices two minutes police needs about 30 seconds to say not my issue and get it to medstar or fire and then medstar and fire got a quickly go is this life threatening I need to get units rolling and I'll play the rest of the questions later because in the next 90 seconds if I learn different I can always deescalate the response I could send a different unit type four minutes in but if it sounds bad better to start the movement of the people to the incident well somehow in this deck the slide got sideways my apology up here on the right should be on top this is a caller saying to 911 what's my problem your three calm centers are electronically linked this is the decision three three pathway a caller has to navigate through three calm centers before its wheels rolling I'm just saying at a very simple level there is dead air in there no pun intended to process improve and get acute calls out faster and by the way I'm not criticizing police because they've got a vital role times to is that life-threatening to them do they need a cop they need to listen and continue to process their information also we've looked at the daily logs we haven't listened to dispatch tapes here but if you look at the daily logs their challenge out of a tsunami of non-emergency calls is to hear this one's life-threatening I got to do different that is that is an art form learned acquired skill it can be honed practiced with feedback and quality control and tape listening they can get better but I don't want to say they're just indifferent they've got a tsunami of workload coming in and they're looking for the needle in the haystack medstar and fire have half a tsunami coming in most of what comes to fire and these centers are electronically linked so when police says go to medstar it pops up on medstars computer screen that's the good news but then the continuing question happens and then medstar gives it to fire fires got to do something and kick it to fire's credit there's a long story short I'm gonna say it now I said I wouldn't roll around in COVID when police was busy started to institute if a 911 caller couldn't get answered quickly enough it rolled to fire dispatch so fire dispatch and their 90% performance they're getting a couple of hundred first 911 calls a day they're able to triage the call and kick it back to police and fire quickly Gina has a question go ahead Gina my question to you regarding medstar and the I guess the the way the questioning takes place we know that this is not unique to Fort Worth and we know that people have lost lives do you know what solves it yes yes and let me address it a bit more later it's a exquisitely good question and succinctly right now they're listening process for what they call top priority is too fat it's too big quantitatively they've already done the clinical research based on actual patient cases to narrow that to a smaller subset to retrain everybody to say when we hear these cute these are merging cues it's everybody go so they've done the clinical research it's still being socialized within their committee and board structure it's not deployed yet but the good news is the research is done and they have an act leadership has an active interest to hone that smaller and retrain everybody to say let's focus on what we've learned tend tends to be clinically really acute so medstar which actually leads now to medstar they deploy a variety of units they deploy ambulances with one paramedic and one EMT which is not a paramedic that's all explained in the report sometimes basic ambulances that only have two EMTs they also have units that are critical care paramedics that transfer critical patients between health care facilities it's not 911 system business but they have subscribers who say I need to move a patient to the cardiac cath lab at the hospital you know 10 blocks away the only way to do it's an ambulance with a nurse and or a paramedic they have supervisors they're a new federally sponsored program they're working on mobile integrated health the houseless some of the street mental health issues don't need an ambulance but they need a caregiver team and they're part of your work with both police and fire in the hope team and the mental help emerging programs in America and you're doing it too to get some of the non urgent stuff handled by not police fire and even medstar resources but medstars fielding some teams for that especially a peak hours of the day but when a call comes in they blend all of these resources together they don't set aside a group of ambulances only for 911 so if an ambulance is downtown in its first-do district in the loop and a hospital makes a case for an urgent transfer the closest ambulance or the third-do ambulance might take it well then if bad luck strikes and lightning hits and 911 call comes in then medstar tries to get a paramedic there to stop the clock may not be an ambulance so when they talk about time to first paramedic they've got multiple tools they are deploying they're a board a few years ago adopted a performance metric a priority one at 11 minutes 85% of the time thought my head was 2016 it's in the report I shouldn't spitball a number but I think it was 26 can shake your head 2016 thank you 400 pages I don't pretend I've memorized every last factoid their performance over the years range from 73 to 84 percent it was a little less than desired pre-covid COVID whacked everybody for different reasons in terms of street travel time or response time performance and their averages which they also reported were anywhere from a little over eight to nine minutes and that's my and the best practice is problem with averages in public safety in the United States it's just saying well the middle of the data says I'm there in eight minutes isn't that good enough well do you want to be the data set that got was received care five minutes longer than average so you need to ask what's past average we'll talk about that so a medstar's priority one response times from medstar dispatch without police from medstar only receiving the call their dispatch processing pre-covid was a minute 23 best practices got sluggish during and post-covid is crept up in our data years to over two minutes I've seen some of medstar's most recent data not officially as part of this study and their priority dispatching is getting back down again crew turnouts infant is a mall because they're already on the streets in the ambulances takes about 30 seconds stop what I'm doing get moving with my ambulance but their travel time to 90% of the priority ones runs right around 10 to 11 minutes travel time you had 90 seconds for dispatch add 30 seconds for turnout then add police 911 processing that could be really short or really long all of a sudden medstar's not getting there from call to arrival till about the 12th to 14th minute more on that in a moment before we move on to have a question about more of a comment about that I know that medstar has a system performance committee right and you mentioned the data back in 2016 and that and that's accurate that system performance committee's being right now we're looking for candidates to populate that okay at the time that committee recommended taking the approach of using averages instead of in your case here the data to present using 90th percentile data again just an observation but I think that's something that the new system performance committee could look at so that we can have more of an apple is an orange as comparison you provided some insight there right but at least the available medstar numbers are not all you know calculated that way so just kind of makes it a little difficult to yes and their official board policy was to report public facing average internally facing fractal percent performance and sometimes over the years people you know bureaucracies make different decisions how to report the data and it doesn't always scratch everybody's best practice for preference so they've also and I'll speak for Mr. Simpson hearing certainly speak for himself if necessary later they have shown keen interest in this study we redid a deep data dive with his data analyst and my analyst and myself and we we rescrub the data we got to yes on the data and they have shown great inquisitiveness and have openly asked for some coaching on how we assembled the fractal performance numbers and how to turn a page to that best practice and he can verify for that that's that's at least leadership a request and have grown as part of this this study great thank you but now back to fractal you ought to be asking yourselves well that's 90% what's the 10% we missed so as a hypothetical not all of these were acute because I've already said the P1 buckets too big but in the four years of data they were compliant 78% of the time at minute 11 so that's 103,000 incidents that they were past minute 11 if you look at the ones that were past minute 11 it's 21,000 or about 18 a day about 18 a day over four years for P1 priority ones were gotten to past minute 11 now it's a deeper dive to say was it 1101 or was it minute 14 and how and did we get to 88% by minute 12 and it was just that last two minutes of a few calls in the most outermost edge of Fort Worth the flip side is we were caught out of ambulances downtown doing a confluence of demand and yeah we got we got there too slowly because any system at some points can run low on resources especially ambulance systems and more on that economically in a minute so we analysts say who's missed the target where do they live how acute were we were they and does that demand an increase in performance let's talk about mapping briefly computers marvelous things nowadays when they work right and not the sideways slide in this case this is four minute driving time from the existing fire stations four minute driving time over your road network at speeds fire trucks can accomplish long story short fairly accurate map plus or minus couple hundred yards this is what four minutes covers and you have gaps in the system now at this scale of map especially for those on video at home you can't quite see the street network some of those gaps have no streets in them they're not developed yet they're open space future growth areas but four minutes especially out in the newer all this loosely say newer areas four minutes is a challenge let's look at the addition of just two stations station 45 is programmed it's under construction can open this fall with at least the first crew 46 is the land is bought not yet in design so just plugging in those two stations improves up there and down here we still have some other gaps most of my clients then say well if we can tune down shorten dispatch and turnout what does five minutes look like and I've been asked this question endlessly what's the economic efficiency difference between four and five minutes of travel well here it is if I turn on five minute travel look at the improvement four minute five minute so in your topography and road network we've suggested you don't have to adopt physically spacing fire stations based on five minute travel and then we're going to talk about growth triggers and what drives the need for extra stations and a few more slides yes so I mean what's five minutes based on it's not in FPA or OSHA right so where does that come from and how does that reconcile so it reconciles by if you choose to use it for spacing if I want to get there by minute eight ish something if I can lock down dispatch to 90 seconds to two minutes if I can lock turnout time especially day time to 90 seconds two minutes nighttime hours we're working in from the ends we want to arrive by here we lose this much before we start driving I have the physical time there to space at five minutes and five minutes works more for curvilinear streets and it's very costly and describe it briefly like this it's very economically efficient to serve the palm of my hand I can push out into my fingers some of those annexation strips with a station and possibly economically by 25 50 75 miles of new road coverage within four or five minutes but as I approach my fingertips I've done this for clients they'll say show me what ten more stations looks like and by time we get past the three or four really effective stations they're spending in some clients cases two million a year in operating to add five to eight more road miles in 60 more seconds so what we try to calibrate in their statistics in the report what percent of the public streets do you cover today what added stations can value add to that and you're trying to strike a balance for physical spacing and sometimes the road network allows you to get to calls in three minutes sometimes it's six minutes and any impact ISO rating the impact ISO in this state has to be taken into into consideration we don't give it great deference because the way insurance premiums are actually underwritten it's based not only on the fire department classification but the risk types of the properties and their individual properties in most states can get premiums based on their risk not just the fire department score so said this way I could be a suburban community with a class 3 fire department but I'm I don't want to pick up a big box but I'm a big box retailer across the United States and I've got a tilled up building with a sprinkler system employees in it 24 hours a day because I'm either open for sale or I'm restocking and the insurance industry says that's a pretty safe building we'll give you a class one or two premium so there's a lot more to just that fire score being the only thing to look at and depending on the state and the zip codes fire protection as a percent of your total homeowner premium dollar has fallen over the years to be less than 25% that industry pays more and other perils than they do to fire insurance so there's a lot of moving parts there it does need to be taken into consideration especially given the the statutes of Texas and you certainly don't have to adopt five minutes I'm trying to just make the business case that's 60 more seconds if you can get the other parts short shorter maybe the brick and mortar spacing could be a bit more elastic and maybe it's four and a half so just to summarize it potentially impacts ISO but the risk to residents and businesses may be mitigated by other factors correct so it's it needs to be researched past this point how how stridently will or won't they they care and they've also started to adopt this not started ISO is adopted nationally this methodology for looking at fire department performance they finally got away from the fixed how many fire hydrants are covered within a mile and a half distance of a fire station they did that for more than several decades so let's keep going this is no no no I have a question I appreciate the hypothetical and I appreciate you expressing it as that but I hope the chief and Val and everybody in here with a uniform for fire was listening to that five minute discussion in terms of that that component because I'm going to need you guys to make that relatable to me so I can become an advocate for it right now it's just very very remote and distant and technical as it's supposed to be but you're trying to get us to say five five minutes spacing is good you you're going to have to show me how it's streets that I know and all that stuff so hope you are listening they will thank you very much council member and I'll say this at the end but also interject now you've got outside advice not the chief not certainly not all of you and the city management team you need to refine those recommendations and they need to be brought back to council for policy consideration today's a workshop you're listening you're asking questions I certainly most of my clients at this first review of so much tech long information don't immediately make policy decisions they ask for for feedback exactly like you just did I want to know more on this issues we're all listening for that so we know how to refine the research so when they bring you back a final response time recommendation for policy discussion they can explain the moving parts I've been here since 2013 very familiar with how this works I just need them to make sure that they know how to explain this to me thank you Leonard just quick question on the assumptions behind the minute travel time is that just distance and speed or speed so it's time over distance it's a different equation than what is a mile and a half distance stop at versus my velocity I'm a moving thing over the road network how far can I likely reach in four to five minutes of movement I'm oversimplifying the math involved in that because velocity is not constant from I'm going to my brakes are stopped at the curb and there's other interplay but the computer understands the grid the road network the posted speed limits we have also done I didn't talk about it today because it's a de minimis impact here we also get traffic congestion data that was my next question we run a separate model with congestion data it's in the report congestion in most of your neighborhoods is a de minimis impact okay you lose a couple percentage points not not worth redeploying but I have other clients at peak rush hour they're losing 15 to 25 percent of their reach due to traffic congestion it's a profound impact and I'm not in this executive summary today I just chose not to include it thank you just one final question I think it's made is similar to Leonard's and I'm trying to wrap my head around this five-minute metric did you not say that that five minute metric is is helped by the presence of curvilinear streets it takes into the factor that that's what you're driving over okay so said this way if you adopt four minutes in some of these neighborhoods unless you can afford to put fire stations every about 1.75 distance miles apart you'll never hit four minutes 80 plus percent you're setting yourself up for an unattainable goal and then you have to ask yourself our fire severity and EMS severity worth the 60 seconds to almost double in some neighborhoods the spacing of fire stations I could I could name some of my urban clients that are successful somewhat close to four minutes their downtown flat cities right angle road network can almost see the other fire station so a lot of the national discussion over the last 20 years on four minutes was become we have an end game we have a hello game what was left in the middle not a lot of science went into it's four versus five it just was the number left in the middle 20 years ago when they started talking about dispatch and turnout and customer survival so there if we want them there at seven and a half seven minutes four minutes became the de facto drive time and I have not encountered outside of a few outside of densely populated urban cities with older really good fire station spacing most metros your size in terms of percent of total road miles coverage you'll struggle to get into the high 70th 80th percentile of the public streets covered in four minutes and you'll never get there because of my tip of the finger analogy up in some of these edge area neighborhoods you just don't have a lot of street and 40s here as to wind and wander to get to some of these some of these dead end locations now could you set a policy of four minute spacing to 75% of the streets you could I'm recommending you consider four versus five and consider a policy for the spacing of future fire stations I'm gonna go into those specifics and a few more slides have a couple of questions about the four versus five the slide that you showed us earlier that gave us the 10-minute window that we want a response in right eight minutes was a breaking point for when a fire becomes maybe less manageable to put it in late terms how does that one how does this five-minute impact that that overall sequence that you that you showed us earlier was because when you walked us through that it sounded like well we needed that four minutes because you've got a minute for dispatch you've got it you know 30 to 90 seconds for our fire department to gear up and get on the truck and you know hit the lights and sirens and get out on the road and so adding that extra minute drive time only only works you're correct if the two front steps get faster and if you can't get them faster you're back on four minutes okay I'm not moving the outer marker may be fudging 30 seconds eight versus 8 30 but I'm not advocating for it for 10 minute first responder arrival okay and then are there any stations that are a format can you go back to the format my question is do we have a the map is helpful because you can see some I can see the green around it but it would be interesting to know the breakdown stations that are within a four-minute drive time they're in the report okay the tables and tables great both at the station level and the percent of road miles actually covered okay thank you for that I appreciate that we obviously haven't had time to look at you know you're getting a power point of a 17 16 page executive summary of 400 pages could we discreetly discuss you could get me up here you know teaching coaching for eight hours in a compressed 50 slide deck I'm trying to hit the high notes and say orchestra leaders here's some things you're going to pay attention to well I hope you weren't suing months and then my next question is so what's it do we have a population trigger that we look for that four minute I'm gonna recommend one in a few slides okay great let me get a little deeper into the data yes that's where we're headed okay and just just one more thing and this is not a question David this is to you the more I'm listening and and whoever brought you in kudos the presentation is great but David this stresses the need that our PDC process has to be less cookie cutter and real focused in engagement from all all departments what's happening is you know when when you take a look at developers and when I asked for waivers here waivers there and we end up creating an impediment for our trucks and our planning it's going to take a bit more focused coordination and because of that that's why I like your team approach that you're introducing to the development process not your business but no it's one of my recommendations along with the trigger point the state the staff and research work has to make that implemented so real quick finish the maps this is eight minutes for one ladder trucker chief so if I only need one of the specialty units in that eight minute end game pretty much with 45 and 46 much of the city is reached in eight minutes driving time now that's not effective first-do customer service as we just discussed but the but with the two new stations the specialty units have the reach at about eight travel minutes one special unit not three or four but at least one so there's other maps in this study that look at the massing of multiple units but I first look to see can I at least get a ladder truck in chief in in 90 plus percent of my city in eight minutes so sorry I'm looking at this map and if you go back to the top side and I'm looking at councilwoman Bivens it's actually your district 27s so when I see it on the four minute in the five minute there's an improvement but when you go down to the next slide to me that's kind of jarring we see so I'm explaining the difference thank you this is not the measurement of every fire station in eight minutes this is the measurement of ladder trucks and chief officers and you have fewer ladder trucks and chief officers than you do neighborhood fire engines a singular quint other than a quint the the specialty units in the American fire service serve multiple first-do station areas right a ladder truck to every three or four engines philosophically this map is looking at how far can those specialty units reach in eight minutes over your road network you thank you for that clarification which I guess leads me to my next question can you walk us through the different types of stations maybe and what we have at those so you know twos is downtown it's maybe gonna look a little different than 11 up north so yes it's in the report and you can't see it at this at this scale but draw your attention to the legend if you're looking at a map and your printed report and if it's PDF on your screen you can zoom in right on the image on your laptop or iPad a red circles an engine pure red circles single fire at fire crew a dark blue circles an engine was with a ladder truck a red blue circle is an engine with a quint which is a pumper and a ladder one one unit a blue circles only the quint that's a pumper ladder single single team so the maps are all legend did and those descriptions are in the report and the performance by station areas in the report and staff will be happy to obviously after this morning walk you through those differences it is a lot to get your head around even quickly and I remind all my clients there are multiple measures here and you have to consider many of the measures together to get a comprehensive prescriptive statement to the patient and I'll use a medic emergency medicine analogy I walk into your ER bed and say what's the matter I'm visually assessing you I'm listening to you I order said labs when I get the lab test back my visual history with my oral history and the lab measures and say you're not ill or you're ill so response time simultaneous calls types of station spacing formulas type of trucks men and women all combined to say are we effectively meeting customer service no and said this way no one measure tells the whole story I can't diagnose you with just a lab test just a blood test I may order an x-ray or a CT what are the capabilities of the mutual aid stations that's my question and they're mapped in the study they didn't make the cut in the slide deck because there's just so much time this morning but they have limited inflow ability because many of them are too far from the city limits to replace a primary Fort Worth fire crew they can assist but they're but the you don't give a whole chunk of Fort Worth to the mutual aid units but they're shown in color and they're programmed into the mapping study thank you I thought about that when Elizabeth mentioned my 27 because within a few miles from there I've got Hurst and I didn't know it's so close I actually hold meetings there I help meetings everywhere and it's very very close I didn't know if that was a consideration so thanks for raising that and we do need to talk about that because we touch so many other different municipalities and I'll just add to that because I lean back and talk to the fire guys here a second ago with all the growth that's happening where Bentana is in Bill Ranch and everything else we have nothing out there maybe something playing I don't know about but I know it's I'm just I'm just putting this on the record for for for here so we're in planning as phases as part of it to making sure that we're servicing those as all that growth happens and I'm about to show you your growth location maps and make a very profound recommendation so eight minute specialty unit reach and then we also as analysts remember talked about multiple calls and workload per hour where on the geography is the highest density in this case in four years of EMS calls well EMS events typically follow souls per square mile population density so you'd have more EMS calls where the population densities are the greatest fewer in the emerging suburban zones if you look at the density of building fires now more inside the loop given the age of the buildings right in the population densities but there's pockets that break out elsewhere of building fires now this is not every building fire this is a mathematical density map where's a greater focus of historic building fires the last four years so we look at that part of this is me just telling you giving you a taste of what's in 400 pages so staffing per fire crew some units that are outside the loop are busy and have weak second unit travel time stations are too far apart so to meet two in and two out safety preferences for structural fire fighting and other reasons if that first due station is busy on anything and the customers waiting for second due or if second due first due has a really critical emergency that fourth member makes a big difference because now under the safety procedures I have two teams of two not one team of two with a supervisor so a long story short here given the hazard of the buildings the larger quantity of structure fires inside the loop the current system is delivering some speed and weight of attack for the risk to be protected you need to continue to staff your primary engines and ladders with four firefighters per crew 24 7365 you just don't have the weight and spacing of deployment too many of them need all four members on serious emergencies okay growth projections thank you councilmember here's here's what you just asked for so I won't go through the data right now in interest of time you know your growth rate you're going to grow from 2020 by about 31% by 2045 my findings are faster residential growth outside the loop at the margins industrial growth outside the loop in the far northeast and the bulk of the growth of is going to occur where station spacing is the weakest yellow light heads up this is what's coming and these are your zoning map population density on the left darker colors are the greatest increases in population and they're not inside the loop industrial commercial zoning entitlement ability on the right darker colors are you're growing industrial commercial districts outside the loop inside the loop station spacing historically is better than outside and a lot of my Metro clients I don't want anybody to feel bad over 50 years communities grow outside the core like tree rings and most of my Metro clients physically challenged with each successive outer ring of growth the station spacing just got thinner and thinner and thinner and the curvilinear neighborhood safe streets planning design focus hey first grand kid now everybody wants the streets to be safe right you want to be walkable pedestrian friendly well if you do that you're not building streets conducive to rapid fire truck ambulance or garbage truck deployment there's a trade-off the quality of life versus time over distance on the road network okay deployment summary we have suggested some of the report that staff brings back to you refined to adopt response time outcome driven goals we recommend you work earnestly in two steps to take the current three party three location system to improve dispatch and turnout time significantly if that forensic work yields the recommendation to merge the three centers back into one and maybe even distribute internal workflows a bit differently not just by police med star and fire silos but more in an action team sense we feel there's some long-term opportunities there but you can save time starting soon even if the end game is re-merge emerge don't don't let that distract you from working today on what you can do with the current technology and people I'm not advocating that a merger is the only solution on the table it may well be research driven and technology driven to be a better idea but right now today you got a lot of men women and expensive technology running sit down and look at the workflow procedures and ring some time out of the towel that's job one foster low acuity EMS response systems with med star they are innovating they are doing non-traditional response networks in a fragile economic ecosystem more on that in a moment and encourage you for fire services measure all aspects of performance using 90% against the council in the future adopted goal measure so let's look at what improved response times look like with this tuning today fire today in 2021 got on scene call to arrival at 1021 police adds to that charitably 30 seconds but more likely plus a minute to two minutes that means fires really getting on scene about minute 13 to 90% of the occurrences now not every call is getting 13 minute customer service let me repeat this some callers get four and five minute customer service because they're close to a crew either physically or the crews out and about in the neighborhood gets the call and goes a lot of different math moving here but to get to 90% of all transactions upwards of 13 minutes but if fire saved a minute turnout time and police transfer a drop to 30 seconds now fires arriving at 951 haven't tackled the travel time problem this is retrospective data fire could drop just under 10 minutes with front end improvements med star was taking from their hello not police round off the numbers here 14 minutes just over if they suffered under long police call processing transfer they might not be there till the 15th or 16th minute too long for acute patient care acute patient care med star if they just got police to shorten their times could at least drop closer to 14 minutes and med star as they redefine priority dispatching can take more seconds out of their call processing time so if everybody works the front end I think you get at least fires first responder easily there in less than 10 minutes before you add stations this is data without 45 and 46 remember this is over our shoulder last four years and we'll talk about med star and paramedics due to workloads risks in your large station areas maintained for a firefighter staffing I've stated open 45s with an engine a quint ladder and a battalion chief as finances and hiring and promoting allows that's not something you flick the switch on you just can't say staff X number of crews on a moment's notice and staff and you all know that proceed as planned with station 46 you've acquired the land keep unit our utilizations on fire at or below 30% hour after hour after hour to accomplish that med star continues their low acuity programs approach however however if you lose on the low acuity workload reduction if fire keeps going to an ever increasing tsunami of public social calls for help you're going to hit those busiest companies that peak hours the day they're going to become overworked and they're going to need part-time reliever units squads or full four-person engines at peak hours the day on alternative work schedule you won't need them at 3 a.m. which going to need them at 3 p.m. so we've given you an oral recommendation there is a backup that if EMS calls continue to climb what can be done adopt trigger thresholds for opening a station I'm suggesting based on the growth data we've looked at at a maximum when there's more than 10,000 residents in a contiguous area beyond five minute travel time I kind of back to the brick and mortar balancing time on road design maybe you do both maybe inside the loop it's four minutes and you know in population density falls below five thousand a square mile it's five minutes hold that thought but adopt a policy that says when the souls in a contiguous area reach this number we've seen it coming we plan for it and we're going to open the station when we cross the threshold not five years after we crossed the threshold so we've recommended an intense data planning team start to work with the planning and development community and model at the sub zip code level where growth is occurring what the developers think they'll light off next start to have a station five or eight year plan and be willing to adjust the next station if development slows in one corner and accelerates in another corner of the city which is start land shopping for stations you closely monitoring response time and development patterns you bring the two together annually and you update the future fire station master plan you're now ahead of the bus you're not being caught three years later and why did i pick ten thousand it's about the size of a small town in texas that has at least one fire station coincidentally you've got some station areas today that have fifteen to twenty thousand people already in a one station area so i picked ten thousand to start your team's discussion on there's nothing in america that says nine ninety nine is any better than you know ten thousand and one but you've got to have some kind of population density in our opinion tied to time yes sir just if i could interrupt you for one second maybe for context david maybe it's a question for you how have we done that historically how is the the planning done in the projections uh been completed for where we build and when i'm gonna go a little bit from memory i'm just thinking about 43 which is wash ranch and 45 which is the one up in the the y area there uh those actually both came from the fire department working i think with planning at the time looking at where future development might occur so wash ranch occurred at a much slower rate that original development agreement goes back to the early two thousands right but i the growth really took off when i would say at post 2012 uh the 45 is more of a fill-in station right so it was a prior fire chiefs that said we need to beef up the north here and at a station uh 46 was a conversation with the new developer that was doing tarleton state uh can't remember the name of the group but asking them to dedicate some property for the future growth that will go down there so we will follow the number of rooftops and different facilities that are built down there to decide the timing of designing and building that new fire station i think what he's talking about here is looking at think about the far northeast or south of wash ranch is looking at what do we think that growth profile is going to look like and i think those are questions that come in about annexation and i think we've got to do a much better job as a staff in in because annexation is not free i mean it's not just a look at what revenue comes in from new residential communities but it might be that we look at some of that development say we need to be really careful about annexing because it could be and i don't want to make annexation just about a cost benefit analysis but there are certainly costs that we would incur if you if we had to build a fire station do annex residential property i would tell you that's not that's not a good proposition if you're looking at it from a business standpoint right because the cost will far exceed the revenues that come in from a residential community and so we need to be thinking about it annexation in a much more thoughtful way because it is not free on the expense side that goes for road maintenance over the long haul and it also goes for the infrastructure for delivering services as well but i don't know if that helped answer the question but we like the idea of being able to plan where we ought to annex and fully understand the cost implications of doing so and and has our approach changed or improved in any way technologically or otherwise in how we can model of these overlays yeah we're looking more at modeling right so yes we want to develop the models that can overlay because as you know growth doesn't sneak up on you right it starts with land transactions and looking at land activity then it turns into a plat then it turns into a subdivision plan so these things don't sneak up on us and we have enough advanced notice to be able to do some capital planning and operational planning for what we need to do okay in the growth areas and in what we're seeing on this slide um are we in agreement of the 10 000 threshold and do we have i think we want to look at that excuse me i'm i'm not in agreement i'm saying it's a starting number to to have a deep planning dive around yeah and to bring back to you when do the souls per square mile exceed your policy comfort level for first responder services that's a that's an involved conversation and i'm just trying to say such as i could have said 5000 i'm just priming your conversation yeah i think the variables are the right variables it's picking what do we think the right numbers are that's still up for discussion but i think the variables and modeling is the right direction okay as part of the study do we have any locations in the city that would meet that particular 10 000 resident requirement to need a station you have develop fire station areas today that already exceed that and it's the only one fire station so we've given you a table in the study of population by station area and along with the workloads in all the other metrics to take this comprehensive evaluation to say where do we tend to calibrate when too far is too far how many people is too many and staff needs to as they work the modeling bring you back some policy considerations and it might also vary by types of risks you might get some extraordinarily but jobs of beneficial risks and you and those industrial or commercial applicants go we really like you here sooner rather than later where you develop large large lot two homes to the acre many horse ranch properties and the developer is going to take 20 years to get to build out because it's just just to say that their performer you kind of put that on the back burner and say that may never even build out but over yonder we've got infill live work units in a new urban setting but it's out in a neighborhood that's redeveloping and now we've got population densities really growing and cost densities let's go pay attention to that versus the the two to the acre zoning a lot of moving parts here I'm gonna ask the question I'm sorry I'm sorry you've been waiting I missed you go ahead so so Elizabeth kind of asked part of my question but the ask would be have have y'all done any kind of study on this or their areas specifically where you would recommend we look at now for stations and then the second question I want to ask is related to assets currently deployed at stations have have y'all taken a look and do you have recommendations on asset deployment between our stations as they exist now in ways we could better better provide coverage through additions or movement the short answer is yes for example what I recommended for station 45 apparatus and staffing and there's other maps and pieces of the study that talk about the reach of the ladder units the reach of the chiefs and the road miles of coverage so yes that data is there with regards to population density if I go back to that slide and I want an interest of time we were scoped in the timeline to get this done this budget cycle from when we were hired in late winter we couldn't sit down with planning and do the demography and deep modeling that your city manager just said they're capable in willing can increasingly ramp up I just looked at those two growth maps I'm simple right I pulled out your general plan your zoning and said oh my gosh outside the loop oh outside the loop station spacing I already know from my study is thinnest outside the loop survey says start to be more rigorous in your advanced planning and locating those future station or apparatus needs I mentioned peak activity units for example busy peak hours the day but sometimes you have to bring crews into the training center for physical hands-on training just no other way around it well that district's empty for two or three hours while training occurs and training's got to move and cover well I can't create too many holes at 3 p.m because I can't road deployment but if I have a battalion that's super busy in the afternoon and I need to take them to training a few days a month I could put on a four-person engine that's float and I've recommended this to other clients this four-person crew floats for five or eight hours covering calls will both for peak hour demand and for vacancies created by training so there's all kinds of solutions out there and we've talked about some of that in the study but I've got one more important thing I'm about to say I think there's things you do before you reach that threshold first tune up your advanced planning have a council policy on customer service goals and when you think too far is too far and then once you establish those policy benchmarks staff then works the data back to say well here's where we're going to focus first and second and seventh okay that's physical fire stations now Chris did you have something I'm sorry no go ahead I'm sorry I'm just looking at the clock I didn't see the hand my bad okay he's gonna wait um improved paramedic deliberate you have what's in the united states called a public utility model any ambulance system in america has operated for the better part of my adult working life as an economically closed ecosystem that paid that paid its bills by revenue received from transports not public tax money and I'm not going to use the term subsidy because I don't want subsidy to sound evil or bail out or failing but ambulance services bill for services and you know what's happened is calls for service and costs of labor and equipment have exploded in america medicare and medicaid have never kept reimbursements consistent with the cost of services most closed economic ambulance systems the united states today are in tough financial times I've got a chapter of summary information from med star's reports med star will be more than happy to explain their fiscals to you but let me say on their behalf my educated analyst opinion is they're not deploying more ambulances because they're increasingly financially up against the wall I think your delivery of first paramedic care is some degree not equitable 24 7 to all neighborhoods to it depends too many on the specialty units having a paramedic free if the if the local ambulance is already busy and you're getting there north of 10 minutes whatever you do to the med star data on the front end processing can't there's no turnout time to fix they have too many road miles to cover arguably at times the day with too few ambulances and if they don't have the money to improve that where does the conversation go so back to my what's really important today the top five themes here's here's the next one we'd like to see you increase paramedic ambulance coverage to 90 of the priority one incidents at just under 10 minutes we think that's a that's a reasonable goal for acute patient care and what i've called and others in the staff of starting with your leader at the end of the table co-leader the city manager i think you should adopt a policy of patient-centric care because to do otherwise you're allowing economics to deliver the care you can not the care that you might expect in acute emergencies i'll say that again patient-centric care is not economically driven it's driven by what do we want in how many minutes to get there and let's find a way to fund it economically driven care is ration cares and much of health care today in america right well you don't really need that ct councilmember firestone it's really expensive and let's just put you in an icu bed for a few hours and monitor the situation that physician darn well knows economics are driving patient care choices i'm not saying it's totally bad i'm saying if you prefer a better level of neighborhood paramedics option a med stars got to find the revenues to increase their deployment matrix and perform consistently under at this council's adopted policy level or and or i walked into a situation i didn't expect when i started this job your fire department had for special services and other reasons gradually grown a paramedic firefighter workforce in a lot of the united states most not most many many fire engines are paramedics dallas right next door paramedic on every fire engine they stop the clock until the ambulance gets there and if the ambulance is delayed too busy bad weather flat tire picker reason at least one paramedic from the neighborhood fire stations on scene you've got 90 paramedics plus or minus right now in the fortwood fire department i have to divide them into three shifts per day right abc rotating 24 hour platoons that gives you because you have to factor in vacancies and who can work where when you could in a matter of months in our humble opinion deploy 20 to 25 paramedic engine companies not some of the time as you do today 24 7365 and work with med star to put them in the harder to serve areas or the clinically high demanding areas gotta look at both sets of math hard to get to high demand and then option three would be do you take the paramedic fire response system citywide staffs got to bring those costs and timelines back to you that's not an overnight thing or increase med stars capacity if med star hits the fiscal wall then should fort worth invest more dollars of local tax revenues into med star for fort worth desired customer service levels so my last bullet says if fort worth sets a paramedic first response policy that is more aggressive than today's and equitable to all 46 47 50 station areas regardless of population density regardless of different severities they need more money if you're going to give them that money and you prefer the ambulance approach over the fire approach once you fully vet this with your staff leaderships if you give them significant money for a significantly different customer service than the rest of the system i'm saying publicly you need to look at the governance ability for you to ensure that your investment guarantees inside the corporate limits of fort worth the customer service this council wants i am not saying blow up the interlocal agreement i want to be that on the record i'm saying governance and money and quality of service have to be prescriptive enough that the council knows a future investment is delivering to fort worth you're not in charge of the suburban cities we all know that but within your corporate limits what's your level of customer service and if you're going to pay more to get it whom do you pay under what degree of policy control enough on that i really got to go through fire headquarters staffing so as you know there was a budget gap this year and we and our finance team member looked at it here's here's the headlines a confluence of factors caused this year's budget deficit and it's really to some degree a systemic thing and exacerbated by covid exposed the weakness in the system not staff weakness but weaknesses in the system let me explain the department prior to covid was budgeting over time year over year based on last year's usage they just took small percentage increase and said let's put a bit more in this year there's things are things maybe cost a bit more to backfill on overtime however headquarters since the mid-1980s orally maybe even before certainly in the last pre-leadership here and under this leadership headquarters was reassigning they we call it loaned in the report it's the old internal term for it they reassigned fire station staffing to do 40-hour jobs in headquarters it was the only way as headquarters programs and services grew they fed it with line fire personnel well stew how did they pay for that well they had salary and benefit savings because you always run vacancies right you miss judge hiring an academy timing and cycling you have positions that you never pay a dime for they converted salary savings to replacement overtime for the transfer program worked beautifully until until covid now workers comp time loss explodes and yes you got two years of federal offsetting dollars this year you didn't have the federal offsetting dollars so you had upwards of 60 today when we did it in march 60 personnel from fire station assigned to headquarters 40-hour jobs sick leave workers comp is up because of covid you were under budgeting overtime and the fire department budget ended up in the red depending on the number and the date you measure it a little under you know 19 million dollars so the system was working and you didn't see the weak spots no one did right until covid said oh my gosh our replacement overtime headaches enormous so when we looked at headquarters they're properly organized in a 19 business sections into four bureaus they're completely necessary for a metropolitan fire department to meet local and national regulations and best practices they're by no means overstaffed you don't have people sitting in a back room doing some nice to do thing over-expensively but over many years the reassigned positions ebb and flowed plus or minus 30 to as high as 60 in march in march the loan position program represented 29 percent 29 percent of all of the headquarters team if fiscally was working when there were salary savings and enough requested overtime to budget it so i want to also make this very clear i'm about to talk about refining those positions and studying and permanency or not i'm not advocating you turn them all off tomorrow you can't take 29 percent of the headquarters team and just put them back in the fire stations in a fortnight there's going to be service level reductions if that's the council's policy choice but you don't have to do that the loan program is in place the people are working some have been returned to the line for overtime balancing late this spring so what we're recommending you do in a broad sense is to keep services pace at pace with growth in the department in the city we consider in headquarters converting some positions to non-sworn over time we've identified in the following table our top priority for reassigned positions review instead of looking at the whole program we've broken into three tiers i'm about to show you tier one which is largely mandated really really should do programs fire inspections arson investigations some logistical supply and by the way all of these workers these are not chief officers these are not senior civil servants these are line workers doing meat and potatoes work in the internal gears of the of the machine and you really you look at the priority one positions and say do we want to continue them as reassignments do we want to give permanent funding to some of them do we want to convert some to non-sworn i'm just saying it's time for it worth to get your head around a more permanent staffing per forma for headquarters that you can then properly budget for i don't want to be very clear in the record i'm not saying the reassigned program was bad but that combined with under budgeting forensically over time combined with a strong storm that came through and nocturne urn leaves sky high um you can't fix that overtime hole just by putting people back in fire stations and have a safe effective headquarters so these are the priority one positions of the 60 we think 38 deserve a tier one uh scrutiny and there's 11 in executive services and another 27 in support services logistic logistics and communications and speak for chief davis briefly what do you mean communications remember i mentioned as 911 gets busy rollover happens to fire dispatch it takes a few more dispatchers per shift if they're now answering active 911 calls as well as just the total cost increase headquarters summary recommendations build a robust multifaceted sorry before you move on just want to understand these numbers right now i think you're saying there's 60 in march in march back in march there were 60 were on loan they were on loan reassigned and out of that so help me understand this chart if you'll flip back the 38 ever you're saying our priority are our top priority to give stability to yes so out of those 60 they're starting to start start with these 38 yeah and say how do we maintain them going forward okay permanent new budgeted cost they could still be the rank of firefighter lieutenant or captain right but do i have to hire more line people to put the 38 quantitatively back into fire stations right in lieu of overtime or look at the cost and salary savings post-covid maybe you want to run the 38 on salary savings just budget for it so you you see it coming okay so that's 38 but there's still some other that are loaned positions those would be like tier two and three and three so so we tear it up might be in the report that we didn't you know it's needed to maintain regulatory and needed services today strongly ought to do programs yeah in a 13th largest city in america and then there's the nice nicer to do programs some of the social and education outreach stuff not legally mandated you won't get in trouble if you don't do it but but there's an impact there and we want staff to bring you back those impacts along with the the adequacy of how many total people so the sort of follow-up to that is there were 60 loaned etc and there's a tiered system to get them back or to prioritize is that saying in some lessons there's 80 plus positions that the fire department should have since those were actual firefighters and no so no we're saying they're operating today with the 60 reassignments right solidify those duties sworn non-sworn permanent versus reassignments take all that in the mix we then projected on our best practice insights and experience where headquarters could likely grow in the future and i'll just say it this way it's in the report 60 is stability 60 is not the future okay and you have more than 60 in headquarters today remember i said it's 29 of the pie right you still got this big pie right and as you add people and services over the years the headquarters support cast members have to grow right that's all that's all we said okay and so we'll probably talk about that or it's in the report what those numbers should look like i just wanted some clarification there can i yeah i i guess i'm trying to figure it's like three-dimensional firehouses and people moving around here um so i may be similar to michael i'm trying to just get my arms around um you know what do we have today historically what what decisions have we made to fill the needs and and where are we trying to get to you know are we are we trying to solve for historical problems immediately and then project or are we simply saying we need to write here's the right size for today and then what to anticipate anticipate in the future it's a very good question especially if you haven't had a chance to study like 50 pages so the answer is councilmember this is an inflection point to bring stability to the system we want you to study everybody out there today and make some workload and customer service driven decisions what's the right number how to permanently supply that number and once you get stability to today's programs then look to the future i've got a slide in a minute i'm precursing what i'm about to say get stability first refine the understanding as you tune up the program for headquarters and then those business metrics will help you set what future fte's demand just like population growth for fire stations if i can project what the business community is bringing me as fire marshal to inspect new buildings well i can see the new building inspection growth two years out right i can start to say i may need another two inspectors out there or i'm bringing in buildings that take six hours to inspect versus one hour so i have to have more fte's because the complexity of my workloads gotten better or worse so we want you not all the business units in headquarters today have really defined workload measures against a customer service outcome they're just doing what they're being the community is asking them to do without coming back here and saying there's a cost benefit to this so we want you to get solidify that i've i've i've got a you still okay i i have a question and i'm going to look at the chief to not to me and k i just want to make sure i'm on the right track i got the report late last night but i really appreciate the executive summary too so thank you uh one big takeaway for me on this is historically we have budgeted in overtime and this appears to bring some level of stability and balance by having the proper staffing and the dollars to match is that is that happening with this recommendation i don't see how you budget on overtime so i think the answer is yes when the recommendation is implemented over the next several months by staff okay okay so i'm good with that we would need a policy change too so let's let's let's let elizabeth and carlos finish questions and then let's get to the end of the presentation and i have a feeling we're going to break for lunch yep get food come back in here and then we got lots of questions i know is that okay is that work yeah elizabeth you had a question my my flight's not till 545 oh good okay i am yours but i did promise a wife a mother and a granddaughter i would be home late tonight that happened okay so is it can i keep going or is there another question on anything right now that we need to address yeah go ahead i'll wait till the end of this one because this is really more for staff okay go ahead please thank you so um build the overtime predictive model better stronger we've also identified positions in headquarters to reduce what we call single point failure where you only have one person trained in a complicated job without a backup or one person is handling revenues and debits which in accounting principles right should always be separated you don't charge somebody something and then the same person booked the revenue in so our finance uh department had worked with uh mark rousher and his team and some of that's in the budget decision package before you so in parallel with all this staff can tell you later what they've already are working on so this is not static staff's not going to start cold tomorrow they've already got things in the upcoming fiscal year to address and some of them differ from our recommendations and that's okay this is a coach coaching socratic push pull we see it this way and maybe we see it pale yellow and they see it bright yellow and they elevate a position outside of the tier i recommended they live here they know the real issues and they've taken the advice and they're changing the team as they think best fits their their needs right now and we all as consultants respect that we can only drive them so far i'm not your chief much less your city manager not one of you and we can just say in the compressed time frame we had this study and we turned a lot of things over here's the things to continue to to to action plan okay second second takeaway or third takeaway equip all reserve fire apparatus for use without needing to transfer equipment from frontline units under repair from the warehouse some of that's a weather outdoor storage problem some of it's just a supply train cost of goods do we keep everything equipped or do we take an hour or two to transfer from warehouse or a front line rig if the front line rig breaks to have the reserve rig we want the reserve rigs equipped and we want them equipped sooner rather than later because as you just had with the flood disaster if you had to recall the off-duty platoon and put 10 reserves in service you don't have 12 hours noticed to do that as soon as the staff shows up the reserves have to be put in front line service because you're in a disaster driven event last the fleet and information technology staffs are growing and have different better abilities and we think department's fleet and information technology staffs can better cross talk and talk about how they can integrate and self support each other a little bit of historic siloed organizational design not people i'm just saying organizational design there and i think some improvements some bandwidth could be improved by better cross working with citywide it and fleet so capstone recommendations priorities this is the end number one which you just asked me stabilize become data driven improve policy oversight set policies to deliver the outcomes you want and consideration of the public and firefighter safety streamline dispatch now time is everything refine how to continue effective headquarters programs as growth occurs by policy maintain equitable neighborhood-based fire and paramedic care and we're calling at establishing a patient-centric customer quality of care triggers for the right-sized field and headquarters services and consider the use of non-sworn fte's for appropriate headquarters an example that would be a warehouse logistician fire mechanics can be firefighters but they're still certified they could also be non-sworn mechanics with a career ladder so just take a take a renewed look at some of that next steps so i told you a lot of slides ago today's for questions and contemplating what's before you in the most of my clients not most many clients at this point at the end of the day turn to staff and say would you bring us back a framework for implementation would you bring us back an implementation plan a master plan something in a couple of months that says this is how we put the improvements into into actionable motion direct staff when they come back for that implementation discussion to lower dispatch processing time improve paramedic first response to all neighborhoods by directing the deployment of the already available firefighter paramedics you have that tool that it doesn't have to be either or initially open fire station 45 as you can staff it with appropriate equipment resolve permanency and funding of headquarters services we've also just recommended as many metro cities grow eventually they realize that they're tasking the fire chief to take on a whole nother big line of work in emergency services organization your fire department loves it they're very good at it they're respectfully very proud of what they did during covid those however are also grant funded positions vacancies occur there are really really well trained now it's a college discipline and some of them come out of ex-military you can really get some permanent non-sworn disaster preparedness professionals to bring stability to that in my opinion take one headache off the fire chief's plate but it's open to conversation this is not a negative fix it recommendation i'm just saying most of my metros have started to separate that away from the police or fire chief and make it a dedicated unit in the city manager's office longer term established that planning data analytics development services team with fire for growth triggers where growth is going to occur have council adopt the policy that identifies the trigger point for adding fire stations i'm sorry it took two hours but you had really good questions and yes 58 slides in 60 minutes was ambitious but you're asking everything that i expected so thank you for the attention and the time in the chair i have a couple questions and it's actually directly on what you just mentioned first thank you for taking the time to try to condense so much information into slides and i think as as you have learned today this council is quite inquisitive and you can never fully prepare for the answers that are the questions that we're all going to ask and a lot of these questions i don't think we would need to ask if we had had the study before today and so my question to you is when did you initially transmit this final study to our staff after the last round of fact check uh discussions and a conference call it was approximately early evening our time tuesday off the top of my head without looking at my calendar and e-mail threads okay and then yesterday while i was flying we were still editing a discussance certain fine points in the power point between the final delivery and staff routing it and signing off on it for the very last time i'll also say in deference to everybody this was a huge project it took a long time to contract we didn't start till late winter i haven't told you this before but we got got into some real integration of incident data database headaches between the multiple record systems we didn't even get police processing time so we went back to tarant county and had the aha they electronically measure the hello they know when the circuits become a live voice circuit your police computer doesn't they don't track off hook and the world never programmed it to that's not a negative police decision so we had delays reassembling databases including some very candid open work with medstar we drag in a summer early june we do mid project we're still finishing research we made an aggressive commitment to get the first full draft which we made to the city on wednesday august 3rd and since wednesday august 3rd you've largely consumed my teams i'm not going to say it on the record because i've got clients probably listening we made a herculean push to vet and fact check a lot of the little numbers not the big policy things but the little numbers and it took through this last weekend okay so this is certainly not my preference to brief without the document would not have been my advice but because you all were teed up today and we knew rescheduling this many people me included was going to be awkward i supported staff's decision to transmit late and let's start the conversation today knowing that nothing stops today this is just the ongoing big work effort i appreciate all of your effort and this is to staff so it sounds like we've had this report for a couple of days and we got it at 11 o'clock last night 300 pages a 50 page executive summary i can't tell you i've lost count of the number of times we have asked a question and been told it was in the report we didn't have the opportunity to review that report that's a a disservice to this council it's a disservice to the residents last year when we sat at this table in august and we told you we wanted more firefighters and david cook you pushed back you told us it wasn't in the budget and we told you we wanted more firefighters and that started this process of the staffing study and we said we would agree to 10 firefighters and not that i think it was 20 or 25 that we originally asked for if we had this staffing study and it was my direction and i was very clear that this should occur before the budgeting process so that we could have this conversation because what i've heard today is not we need 50 new firefighters or we need two person apparatuses or 26 person apparatuses what i've heard today is that there's a lot of policy implications that impact this budget that we don't get to have today because we didn't get the report that you've had for 48 hours and i understand that you maybe were refining a power point and that's great but we could have already taken the time to start digesting this and maybe not have so many questions and have a better idea of what we're doing because now we're going into a budget cycle and it sounds like we need to talk about what we're doing with 911 and how we're staffing that what we're doing with our development services and how we're integrating that what civilian positions need to be in the fire department versus sworn and we don't get to have that decision today because staff elected to transmit a 300 page report at 10 47 last night and that is wholly unacceptable david you want to respond but i know jared has a question so i don't want to forget him sorry jared worries i think that's a relevant point council member beck brought up so i'm going to wait for this discussion i'll go ahead and respond i think you've got the report uh at the thoroughness that it needed to be at the timetable we were able to deliver it what you've got is a recommended budget that's before you that includes some of the recommendations that we knew was coming there are some key policy choices uh that will come before the council what you've heard from him you've heard in the budget recommendation that occurred a couple weeks ago we have money in the budget for a 911 study we have money in the budget for a 911 coordinator because you're right nobody in the organization owns the 911 process from beginning to end we're going to fix that it's not just about hiring more people in the police dispatch is somebody's got to own that process from beginning to end one of my takeaways from the study and stew's help is nobody's using the data either that's in the 911 system not any of our departments and so we need to use the data that also exists in that system stew talked about right our utilization of all the fire crews where none of our fire stations is close to 30 percent utilization we do have some response time issues that we're going to have to deal with stew mentioned that we ought to continue on our path of station 46 that is down in councilmember williams area and to add an engine company in station 45 that's also in the budget it is important that we become more patient-centric more of our calls have to do with the ems calls and anything else there's money in the budget to look at whether we want to give more support to med star so yes the recommended budget as was put on the table couple weeks ago includes some of those recommendations it doesn't complete the work because some of those policy questions are going to come back before the city council but yes we would have all loved to have had this completed and wrapped up by june that did not happen and did not take place and it is and it's not even wrapped up now so i don't it's not even completed now because even that conversation about loan positions or reassigned positions we need to bring to you the detail most of those are funded in allocated positions they existed in 2018 and 2019 and we'll come give you what we think the gap looks like in 2023 but that's a lot of rambling but we have used the draft report along the way to make recommendations of what's been put in the budget. Gina go ahead yeah i appreciate that and i i believe you but we should be afforded the opportunity to look at that and if we were presented a budget before we presented this and we were given how many hours to to review it before we have those conversations y'all are not doing the job of helping us govern the city by giving us the information we need in a timely manner so we can make these decisions. Gina so i want us to do better my question is number one well now i'll give you the statement i think last budget year was very clear council members wanted to see more firefighters not more by way of overtime or by way of delaying the hiring we really wanted to see more firefighters and in our limited knowledge in terms of how you establish staffing needs i think the number 10 rings a bell and what we came up with i don't know but it's important to me that we number one you know i've i've been in an ambulance i've been in a fire truck you after calling 911 my firefighters got to me and i'm alive today so the the staffing needs of our fire department is very important to me and i hope we can get the answer before we adopt this budget how many new positions in fire will this budget fund and i think you're going to see pretty much a council united in the need to see that and understand that because i don't want to be told well you're going to get 10 but then there's a back story to how that 10 is counted and so that's that's that's my uh my response to this and my partner just got back from out of town we're glad you made it back safely but you're once again redhead on alert thank you just speak just i want to be clear there are 23 new positions in the in the recommended budget for fire 14 have to do with the engine company at station 45 or wherever we want to put it up in the far north uh there are five civilian positions i'm going to lose a few here there's some for the hope team and there's two protecting veer specialists so there's 23 in the recommended budget and my follow-up later will be when we have this discussion continued i'll be asking the chief are those the positions that he is requesting jerry go ahead thank you and thank you stew for the report um similar to council member beck i i wish i would have had more chance to dive into it but um i have a i have a question around basically trying to wrap my head around firefighters supporting ems calls so if if firefighters are supporting ems calls and i appreciate your you know analogy of the five fingers what is the level of staffing needed to support um that additional support of the ems system and then what's the appropriate in your opinion response time for med star for the calls are left and how does that relate to 38 um priority one positions on loan for the central office i'm staring into the light because there's like four things to unpack it's it's the right question i'm trying to figure out how to weave it together for you um with regards to to ems patient care it needs to be a crawl walker on approach you don't have enough ambulances in my opinion today to demonstrably lower ambulance travel time even if they were sitting on fiscal reserves which they're not you can't hire and deploy ambulances fast enough to make a material difference in a year to two covet wrecked paramedic emt nurse physician training in the united states every ambulance institution even some fire departments are under severe staffing train they can't get paramedics and emt's out of the pipeline fortunately here i'm suggesting two things at once you ask med star what does better look like and and does it come at something you can't afford and fire chief we can at least deploy every day 20 to 25 firefighter engine teams and consider growing that now the chief can't go manufactured another 90 paramedics either in six months but you take the 90 you've got deploy them 20 to 25 a day to help fill in the more difficult areas you're buying time and improving patient care immediately and then figure out long term should that go city-wide with firefighters or be the ambulance service i'm suggesting as a metro you already have a four-person crew you've already got the sunk cost of deploying 24 7365 four people many other response systems would make one of them a paramedic to be in every neighborhood and stop the clock on acute emergencies and let the ambulance times economically and justifiably for acute calls lengthen a bit but if you don't deploy paramedics in neighborhood fire stations your ambulance systems got to get more strength and deployment both of those two are going to take some time to study number three some of the headquarters team members do support training and quality of care oversight for paramedics so in the united states much less texas there are quality of care and oversight standards just like there are for licensed nurses radiology techs right it's it's a clinical profession with standards recertification and oversight there needs to be people in headquarters to manage that you have a tiny team today if you deploy the 90 the 90 medics or choose to grow the program that's going to impact the headquarters positions we don't know how many until you decide the customer service delivery model so the focus of the next few months between the city staff and med star is we need to bring back the economics and the choices for policy and then that'll give us the numbers and they're either going to impact med star more than you or they're going to impact fort worth fire and part of that decision package has to be just headquarters support the number of paramedics you're trying to deploy but i want to rest the good news is i've got clients that don't have paramedics already and would have no hope of getting more quickly while they wait for the training pipeline to repair itself you know this is my analogy to somebody yesterday was this is like the airlines with flight crews right now hey southwest would love to return a schedule to normal it just doesn't have the pilots and you can't manufacture pilots in a fortnight healthcare workers same way does that answer your question council member yes let me ask a follow-up and i appreciate that as well mayor pro tem said it well and many y'all y'all know that my dad was in a similar experience in one areas that wasn't covered by the five minute times and he needed ambulance services and you know fire was there i'm not sure if a paramedic was on the truck so that makes sense as well but fire was there and ems wasn't during the snowstorm and how else we had to get the firefighters help to load my dad in a car and drive to the er and so i guess what i'm trying to get at is let's just talk to your numbers the recommendation from staff right now is 23 authorized positions added and you said that we have 38 priority that need to be filled because of the loan program and then how many additional if we decide to continue supplementing the medical system the ems system with firefighter support how many additional staff on top of the 38 will we need to be able to buy us some time in the meantime until another study happens to figure out the number for the long-term policy discussions staff needs to answer the second half of that let me clarify something you just said which was a partial adding of two things that shouldn't be added together those 38 reassigned positions are filled today with budgeted firefighters they're out there as we speak today doing their jobs uh at fire headquarters there that was the clarification there there's how did it relate so the the 60 got turned down a bit in the spring for overtime uh savings to try to balance the budget the conversation needs to be what's the minimum 38 48 60 how do we provision those permanently what type of employee but you have them working today many of them not all of the 60 then if you deploy 20 to 25 paramedic responders the chief has to go talk to the paramedic oversight staff and say if we go from anecdotal a few paramedic engines a day to all into this commitment also in your partnership with the local because they're station bidding assignments and other factors to work out part of this needs a discussion with your firefighters leadership uh chief if we deploy those 20 25 paramedics what's it mean in headquarters oversight and I haven't studied that with the chief I don't have an opinion on it other than to say it will have an impact but until we know the number and the policy choice it's so I don't want to off the wall say it's two more or it's seven more can I just make one I appreciate that answer and to council member Becks point um that's why we needed to study earlier because we're having policy discussions while also having the budget conversation um and it really should have been done earlier David I just have a point of clarification I've had a chance to look at this it is 23 new positions being authorized for the fire department right yes but none of those are administrative staff and we're talking 38 is the first paramedic is that right 38 is what he's identified out of the 60 those those positions the numbers here there's only yeah but this one yeah those positions already exist and they're funded yeah right so the question is what are the additional allocations that would be needed to support those headquarters right those already exist and are funded yeah not saying what's not funded the 60 of our firefighters have been moved to administrative positions right but you're saying 23 I just want to point out it's only nine that would be an administrative that could move nine off right for this budget am I missing am I missing something no what we need to bring back to you is how all the positions are allocated that are not in operations okay that are already funded okay either through direct allocations of staff and there's a person and a position right or they've been funded through overtime which was temporary partly because of the covid so we need to bring that back to you and a follow-up question to those administrative positions and looking at some of the findings and recommendations and this may be a better question for chief but some of the new administrative positions in this current budget is the plan to utilize those employees for some of the more administrative duties that some of your firefighters have been conducting that are causing some of your backlog and some of the findings you're seeing especially related to overtime is that true chief tell me if i'm not right you have to go up to the microphone sorry uh good morning good afternoon now uh some of the uh the 23 two of them are dedicated to supporting the homeless corridor like like along lankster avenue that we have talked and been working with the forward police department in such a positive way those are directly related to the conversation at the table the civilian positions that are added to the budget and i i'm correct i believe they're five are to support payroll workman's compensation and those are not firefighter positions now they are additional work responsibilities that we're trying to become more efficient with i think that did that mark no so okay that's a question yeah and maybe and i know we're going to break for lunch and then come back and sit down so maybe one observation might be and i know there's a lot of tension around the table this is hard work and this is a this is a study to keep in mind that will not just impact this budget in many ways this budget is just a start for what we're going to have to do in the next coming years and setting up the department in the city for success that's my one observation the second would be there are findings in here and and some of the recommendations that from a budget perspective i do see the start like let's just take nine on one study for instance that is the most fundamental thing we're going to have to figure out because none of these other things are going to be helped before that and we're talking about salaries i was just texting with ken to ask him what the starting salary is for an emt at med star it's just north of 38 000 a year you know you could make a lot of money at amazon right now and so we're competing with a really difficult workplace environment that has nothing to do with health care necessarily so i these are all complex problems we're going to have to face as a council and then the last thing i would say before we break is to get some of these things done this body is going to have to work together with management or we ain't going to get anywhere and so what i would ask of each of you is to bottle your frustrations be really detailed in your questions and concerns because we have time both in this budget over the next month and importantly in planning for the next six preparing for the next fiscal year to get the work done and i think why we all ran which is to make it better than we found it and making sure that another council in the future doesn't have these same complex problems to to deal with so just channel that energy into that process is my request to you because i can promise you right now in dallas that ain't what they're doing and and it's a it's quite a mess on their hands and so we're going to be a really good example of one of the fastest growing cities in the country and be able to do that better together so i'm going to recess us for a few minutes and we're going to come back together jared you good questions answered i'm good okay perfect let's recess and grab lunch open back our budget work session so just for audience listening and those here from staff i think our game plan now is first of all appreciation to stewart thank you so much for a very thorough presentation i know a continued conversation so we're going to sort of put a temporary bow on that discussion allow staff to continue to work together allow us to digest the full report and schedule another session in one of the upcoming budget sessions we already have held on the calendar so staff will come back around to y'all for that um if you do have any questions though i would say they're specific for stewart you want to talk to him maybe just grab him offline oh he's got to leave here at least the next hour or so to catch his flight but i'm sure he'd welcome any questions or specifics that you might need from him as he works with staff does that sound good to y'all awesome and then our next presentation we're going to move to transit initiatives um and rich andreski is here our president ceo trini metro and a variety of other friends from from trini metro thank you all very much for joining us today we really appreciate it thanks to all our fire friends that are leaving now hi fire rich the floor is yours i think dana bergdorf is going to appropriately introduce you so good to see you of course thank you mayor thank you members of city council dana bergdorf assistant city manager i just wanted to take a moment to recognize trinity metro as a very important partner with the city and uh implementing various goals that we have not just in our f y 23 budget but in the in the long term as well in helping to shape the future of fort worth so very happy to have rich andreski join us this morning as president and ceo fraternity metro i believe rich you joined us four months ago with two months ago or maybe there was the announcement four months ago but he's only been on the top two months so but yeah so we'll expect a lot from you though just from those those two months of experience but rich comes to us from the state of connecticut where he was the bureau chief for public transportation in the the connecticut dot or department of transportation so working with all different modes of public transportation with a variety of different transit agencies so a lot of great experience that we welcome uh here in fort worth and i'm sure he was excited to experience drought and flood um in the the two months that that he's been here in fort worth but please join me in welcoming rich thank you good morning dana thank you so much i've enjoyed getting to know you over these uh a few short months um and it's a pleasure to be with all of you council members um and i want to recognize two of our treating metro board members here today chris nettles and michael crane um dual role as city council members and sitting on the training metro board we also have nick genoa another board member here with us today in the audience so not almost a quorum but not quite um i'd also like to start out let me see from yeah well i you know i do i do want to say that i think it's been a huge win to have a city council on the training metro board i think it's improved coordination communication my observation on two months on the job is i've heard a little scuttlebutt about past relationships between the city and trinity metro and i got to tell you things seem to be working much better at least from my perspective and i see some nodding heads so that's a good sign also want to just introduce a few of my team members with me today we have wane gensler our vice president of bus operations uh a j r gnn vp of rail operations we've got fred crossley our chief financial officer vp of finance and steve montgomery director of government relations and chad edwards would be here i know you all love chad but chad's got a personal obligation today he couldn't make it he sends his regards so a little a little bit of history i always think it's good to do a little level setting trinity metro has been around a long time you know us as the t many of you we go way back to 1983 for the first 35 years of our history we were more or less a bus transit provider we we did partner with dart on trinity railway express but had a rather limited involvement in that and we had some big aspirations namely text rail and in 2013 there was this pivot on the city city got involved as i understand it there was a change in leadership at the board and we got serious about text rail in a hurry and the competency of trinity metro still the t at that time improved greatly there was a change in not only the board but change in executive leadership starting with paul ballard in 2014 retaining new talent to help us build out that text rail system and that all took place over the last uh five to seven years and i got to tell you that the caliber of the team in place today is extraordinary i i've been in the industry 23 years um i actually had worked for different agencies not only connecticut and i got to tell you the team here is exceptional uh big thinking visionary but also focused on the day today focused on the customer i've been on the job two months and really still in that listening listening mode and you know listening to our stakeholders uh you know we're we're doing a budget presentation here today but i want to take a minute on vision i think it's important sort of take stock of the big picture before we drill down as i mentioned you know we're a multimodal agency now we provide not only uh text rail and and trinity metro bus service we have fortwork bike share we provide access which is the powered transit service we have zip zone which is our newest and great latest and greatest on-demand transit service where you can like an uber call call for your transit ride to come pick you up really the big question on my mind is what is trinity metro mean to all of you the city and the county and you know how are we how do we fit in with the growth goals the community quality of life mobility equity all of those topics um and that's a conversation that's not a easy one one off answer that's that's a complex answer that we hope to answer in terms of setting the goals for the next five and ten years and beyond uh transits being disrupted many industries right now are being disrupted in a great and significant way and and transportation is is also being disrupted customer expectations our services should not you shouldn't have to build your life around transit you want to go you want to get on a bus you don't want to wait an hour for that next bus to show up on demand is the name of the game it's it's challenging to provide on-demand but we recognize that is the future so that also means high capacity transit is part of that equation making sure that buses at least in my opinion at this point order run no less frequently than 30 every 30 minutes probably more frequently as often as every five to 10 to 15 minutes we're not there yet but that's sort of a goal the idea that you you really shouldn't need a schedule to use public transportation just show up at your bus stop and look down the road and see the headlights coming and that's that's sort of our aspirational goal and we're thinking big we're thinking big because a couple a couple points on this we continue to grow at a record pace far exceeding most places in the country there's still lots of developable land there's lots of residents moving in that's not showing any signs of slowing alliance is booming the amount of development taking place just requires some new thinking about how we move people about and what we want to be careful of is having growth you know being a victim of our own success and having so much growth and so much population growth that in five 10 or 15 years it becomes impossible to move around easily so we're thinking big and we really you know want to get your input on that a little bit about the state of the business today starts with the customer customers ride we used to have a saying you know choice customers versus non-choice customers and that's sort of outmoded the idea people ride for all reasons we have people riding because they don't own a car we have people that prefer to take transit we have people that choose to relocate to places because transit's available we're listening to our customers we need to be more responsive in terms of providing information and comfort for customers so you'll see there in the under the customer experience column you know some of our near-term initiatives digital signs real-time information lighting if you're out in a bus stop at night you should have a light so the driver can see you and there's a degree of safety outreach is another big part of that custom it starts with the customers but it really also it's making sure we're engaging with customers about their needs and talking to our stakeholders all of you and you know in the partnerships that we have are also critically important so it's not only the city of Fort Worth but downtown Fort Worth Inc the visit for a worth other organizations that we partner with to provide services those are critically important to us not just in terms of dollars and cents but because we again want to be responsive we want to be providing service that is meaningful and that is not only serving customers but is important to our our stakeholders. Mayor Matty you talked about improving bus stops that's top of our list so facilities we're going to get into that in a moment I talked about zip zone we want to be careful about expanding zip zone too quickly we're seeing great a great response to our zip zone service but I think the business model needs some refinement we want to be careful about trying to provide this to all of Fort Worth and and falling short on reliability or our our financial goals there so it's a work in progress and vehicles you know we're I think vehicles after bus stops vehicles are what customers experience day in and day out making sure that we have you know an up-to-date fleet notably our TRE a rail fleet with Dart is tired so we need to do something with TRE so that's on our long-term to-do list I'm going to run through the budget numbers here we can take a deep or die but I'll give you the sort of the top level so we carry about six million or we're forecasted carry about six million riders in the coming budget year to do that we're going to spend about 140 million dollars there in the bottom line total expenses and reserves our income though is you'll see at the top line there total revenue 255 million some of you might ask well geez you're you're spending 140 but you're getting you know incoming revenue is 255 well the difference there is that we rely on that revenue to fund our capital program and our capital program is lumpy we don't spend like operations we have a consistent cash burn every day every every month it's different with capital depending on the projects we're undertaking we might see a a higher need for you know spending capital versus when projects are winding down or in between projects so this is our five-year look you'll see there the budget column the third column from the left 140 million there and operating expenses what you'll see there is capital expenditures down below midway down the chart in the current upcoming budget year fiscal 23 we're forecasted to spend 106 million so what you'll see down the bottom sort of a bottom line look there is ending funding available so our funding balance currently is forecast to end the year next year with 80 million what you'll see over the five-year lookout is that we we spend down fairly quickly and that's a in large part due to the construction of tax rail to the near south side medical district and we it's worth noting that we cannot take on debt so we have a limit around what kind of debt we can take on and how it's really short short-term not long-term debt and so we have to cash flow these investments so when we talk about new priorities and new directions for trinity metro we have to be mindful that we have to keep a certain reserve in place to fund operations number one number two a certain reserve in place to fund our long-range capital program and recognizing that there are many variables right now that could cause us to have increased expenses we know fuel is highly volatile we know that construction and labor are also subject to inflationary pressures so you know we're going to end this five-year period with nine nine point four million in reserve that's a razor's edge so we have to watch and as we think about the future trinity metro i guess what i'm getting to here is if we want to be bolder and think bolder we're going to need to talk about revenue at some point but we're not going to we're not going to get into that today unless you'd like to rich just quick question what are your um legal limitations or parameters around reserves and what you can carry over every year is it does the legislature allow for however much money you have left reserves or do you have to return some of that to taxpayers no we don't have to return the reserve to taxpayers uh they're they're obligated funds in our program so they're we say surplus or reserve it's really a they're in fact we have future obligations against those dollars okay we have an obligation to keep 10 million in a reserve a cash reserve account okay um and the rest can be kind of undedicated for future projects the next year yes okay yeah go ahead Carlos okay you have a question in you know you bring up um looking at other revenue sources it's pretty much a looked at applying for federal competitive funds at all i think it's a 5307 type of uh money catchall based on population yeah no great question i appreciate the question um so we uh yes number one we get 5307 funds every year those are uh form what's known as formula funding through the federal transit administration we also go after discretionary grants like the build grant program we were successful in getting a build grant to double track and assist with construction of trinity lake station um in partnership with nct cog so uh yes we do go over to discretionary programs there's funding right now um out there for you know rail cars for accessibility programs for um operation support there's lots of different we we we keep a close watch on that and and um yeah absolutely um leaving no stone unturned yep thank you but i think for this council i know it's hard because we've looked at numbers all day but if you look at fy 27 you're trying to draw attention rich to that ending fund balance available is below the 10 million you need in a reserve fund and you're just drawing attention to the concern of we have to plan better for what that looks like in future fiscal years yes it's there's there's very yes okay yeah well said yep um yeah aspirationally if we think about expanding zip zone for example or we think about increased service on our bus routes those dollars are not accounted for here in this program uh and even you'll see in a slide or two you'll see even bus stops signs and shelters are funded but not maybe to the level that we'd like so this is a fairly lean i know we talk about hundreds of millions it may not seem that way but there are a lot of goals and priorities and and um we we would like to come back to this at some point and have a larger conversation about you know how how big should trinity metro grow to support the city i will tell you that we spend about 89 dollars per capita per year um we lag just about every pure city out there akron ohio spends more since an addy spends more akron spends about 94 dollars a year we spend 89 so even even little old akron so and you know we're a we it's one benchmark to to take stock of certainly we we don't necessarily have to be the largest on a per capita basis but my my impression is that just um the we know talent is mobile we know people make locational decisions based on quality of life access to jobs opportunity and you know i'm an example that right i moved moved here um and i i it makes a difference people consider that in their locational decisions and if we're going to support you know more growth more corporate headquarters more technology investment r&d you know that workforce is looking for mobility they're looking for ease of getting around sometimes that's a car but sometimes it's public transportation here here the top sort of priorities i have to tell you this this program doesn't fully reflect a new direction some of these are continuation of prior commitments um about half of the programs dedicated to our rail side and rail is more capital intensive so continuing to invest in and upgrade t re service extending text rail to the medical district but we have quite a bit in our program for our bus customers as well uh security enhancements uh improved bus stops these dollar amounts are not totals they're the dollars that we expect to spend during fiscal 23 um the programs are much larger potentially than what you see here it's just this is a snapshot for for the one fiscal year are there any questions on this i have one uh when it comes to bus stops and shelter replacements um for example in my district there's one on texas 199 in my opinion it's not in a very safe spot i wouldn't want to wait on a bus there i mean there's no shelter there's not much room there to begin with um how often do you perform i guess an assessment or an audit of where you have shelters and where you need them because what i see they're shelter replacements but not shelter additions or am i reading too much into that um great question so i'm going to get to that in a moment in terms of our shelter program i can tell you that we are taking in a complete inventory we have an inventory we're updating that inventory we're looking at the full range of conditions that are stopped so is there a shelter is there a sign is there accessibility um shelter of lighting and our our intention there is to touch every bus stop in the next three years so every single bus stop throughout the city will be inspected upgraded in some way shape or form including signage we want to introduce qr codes for example so if you have a smartphone all you have to do is hold your phone up to the qr code and it'll connect you to the real-time information where's my bus but we're gonna take a deeper dive in a moment all right so okay thank you i was gonna ask Carlos a question instead you made a mess i made a mess over here but when you was talking about safety uh you is it crime related or is it like standing in an area where no not crime related Chris i'm talking about location safety yeah just standing there because they're on 199 sorry the speed limit is posted at 45 but people don't abide by 45 they come in at a pretty fast clip and you don't have a shelter or place to sit down there's a bus stop sign right my point is maybe we ought to look at that so okay Richard I think I'm sorry and so I think I guess the question is do we look at for the future if relocating that location to better make it safe or well I can add to that I can give you some some history Carlos at one point in time the T was so I'll just say customer friendly you could call and say we need a bus stop right here and there would be more and there wouldn't be any a lot of research put into it they just plop them down and that was those were the inefficiencies that predate you and when when you take a look at a bus stop like that if it's been there a long time that person who requested it and it could be just one person and they would put it there and so the the assessment that I think we're going to hear about will add a level of sophistication that we hadn't seen before I used to be on your board a long time you know a thing or two right well we're going to look forward to working with each of you in your respective districts that certainly so there's a number of factors there's certainly the objective operational how many customers what's the condition of the stop there are other factors is the stop located in your hospital a child care center is it near a school there are other dimensions to this so more to more to come on that system wide ridership we we took a bit of a hit I think you all know this ridership was historically much higher COVID happened that changed quite a bit what sort of what you're seeing here is the gray is sort of is the trend line you'll see that big drop in 2020 with COVID the blue is last year's ridership and the red is this year's ridership and we're decidedly higher consistently higher riders are coming back it's not they're not the same riders we lost some of the riders that used to commute every day five days a week they're commuting maybe fewer days per week where some of them have moved to full-time telework but we're getting new riders so some of those new riders are folks taking advantage of text rail to get to the airport or to come downtown text rail is growing significantly we have bottom line here is we have 30 percent more riders this year versus last year so rich just so I can speak publicly and not mess up if you look at your FY 2022 numbers as of July are those 507,000 unique riders or is that 507 rides rides okay thank you sure our bus system we you know about three and four roughly three and four riders are bus riders the still are primary business although rails growing quickly we have 20 percent more riders on bus year over year and we believe about 15 points of those 20 are attributable to a better bus connection so that was our restructuring of many of our routes we had routes that meanderd and tried to do too many things and served too many areas didn't serve anyone particularly well we have now routes like the number 15 that operates from central station to the north side station through you know across panther island and the stockyards that route is an example of you know a higher performing route now simplified easier to use and understand also frequency so the routes that have higher frequencies are performing better as you would expect so bottom line 20 percent more riders year over year and the trend the trend line continues to go in a positive direction I just want to make a comment to what mayor pro tem biban said a lot of that was restructuring so some some stops were taken off and consolidated etc as part of that overall and I know it was before your time but that was also something they looked at to make a better connection yeah thank you for thank you for that michael yeah it's um the better connection is an example of sort of a close working relationship with the city you know there's there's been a lot of good planning that's happened to date which has allowed us to make some of these improvements and that's that's another topic of discussion making sure our pipeline both you know our planning our service and our capital projects we have a robust pipeline and continue to you know make improvements going forward the dash dash has suffered from west 7th street to be candid we've had a lot of delays on the dash enough so ridership there ridership there is middling we'll get back we'll get back to business you know once once and I gotta tell you there's been occasions I know Wayne can speak to this where the Fort Worth and western railroad blocked the crossing on west 7th and that that doesn't help ridership either so but but the dash is important and we're going to talk more about you know the original vision of the dash which was not only the cultural district connection but other other dash routes and text rail text rail is a super performing service for us text rail is we had our third all-time best month in July and we are almost getting close to our all-time record probably because December is typically a big month for us I have a feeling that this December we're going to you know break some records and here's text rail sort of without the overlapping lines so this is the entire history of text rail since opening day you'll see COVID really hit us we're also subject to the weather but what you'll notice about the overall trend line is that people are discovering us I'm still surprised back to school night last night and I talked to somebody that can be sat up DFW for work and had no idea text rail existed or and when I explained it and explained we have a long-term parking um he immediately said well why why wouldn't I do that I'm going to do that next week so I just I don't think everyone's fully aware of of the services we offer do you have internally as staff do you have a goal in mind of where you'd like to be that's attainable for mentally ridership I I like I like the million the million trips goal right now we're at we're on like sort of in the 600 thousand range a million annual trips would be roughly 30 200 boardings a day okay and we're currently at six 1700 yeah I'm looking at my team there okay am I right 18 1800 I think I think we can get there we look at the number of implements you know the activity at the airport um I'd love to grab one percent of those trips which I think is reasonable um one one percent of those trips plus increasing the commutation to downtown there's going to be a lot of development in housing around central station coming online in the next few years we those those should be really transit riders that are living across the street from the train so I yeah I think it's very attainable I would say a million trips with it within five years maybe maybe within three is possible and we're leading the pack so among all the transit systems in Texas including capital metro Houston metro and others we we have 73 percent of our riders back on the system that that compares with um dart which is around 65 percent so we're we're doing really well right now and um I think it's a it's a credit to the whole team we're really going above and beyond to try to reach customers marketing um customer service um providing really a first-class customer experience as as much as we can without you know additional investment I'm sorry before I pivot to our programs any any questions no okay I can uh we this is sort of the overview of the major highlights and priorities for this coming fiscal year number one top of the list is bus stops we talked about that a little bit nct cog has agreed to provide a million dollars to assist with accessibility building out the concrete pads we're going to be dedicating seven million uh six million of that seven million um it's works out to about 3,800 dollars of bus stop that is not nearly enough it's a start so what we're looking at is every bus stop ought to have a place a place to get information number one so a sign qr code that links to real-time information number two which have every every bus stops have a place to sit so if we don't have a shelter there should be at least a bench attached to the sign um we also want a light at every stop and we can do this without utility work we can do this through you know solar solar lighting and um I guess I would I would sort of put the challenge out there that we would love to partner further on this topic and I can sort of kick off that partnership by inviting all of you uh if you'd like to join me I'll be out on October 22nd with our team we'll be up and down um our bus routes throughout the city we'll be doing bus stop cleanup day it's fun it's actually not a whole day it's a morning we'll have breakfast um come on over to central station and we'll get we'll get in the car and we'll go out and um I think it's a it'll be a fun yeah go ahead I'll I'll give you my idea that syncs with that I I really hadn't thought of a bus stop cleanup probably won't be a volunteer for that but I think what you should do is invite all of us to take the bus to work one day you know pick pick a week that's always been real successful in terms of raising awareness and if you get the mayor and I know you will they'll all follow her to work if you had a real job can't can't buoy bus let's do it so that that's an idea that's very successful but she's not going to clean up but I'm going to ride the bus so I just heard yeah and you you can get Jared to ride the bus somewhere all of us wherever we work and you'll you'll get a lot of media coverage on that I was going to say that but when you talked about cleaning up I thought I put that in there now I love it I would love to join you too so just name the date I'll be there okay any any questions on this one if you could just I'm going to look at your stacks I know they're going to do it if you could send us the digitals for the bus cleanup day um to chair and and and do that yeah and I'm and I'm going to give miss Bivens out there she's going to be out there with me yeah Rich when you think about sorry a bus stop improvements do you and it's a three-year seven million dollar program you already spoke to every bus stop will get evaluated and some improvements made but how do you meet the times of what what riders are wanting I mean are you completely renovating some of our our most used bus stops you and I've talked a lot about I can't stand to see someone trying to find a shade tree and 110 degree heat waiting for the bus and so I just I just wonder and I think this is an important competition I know Kelly works on this daily thank you Kelly on how the city can be better partnered especially from an infrastructure standpoint I'm just I'm I'm assuming seven million dollars is not near what you would need to improve every bus stop the way we'd like to see them and mayor that's exactly right we're we're going to prioritize and some stops will get a higher level of investment I think without without actually seeing the the data from our our inventory my best estimate right now is two to three times this amount is probably required to do to do the program justice we are going to prioritize stops with higher volumes there there are stops that have as few as one or two people per day there are other stops that have potentially 50 or more boardings per day so we are going to focus in on those stops that have higher activity I got a you know the photo that's here is sort of a middle of the road right if there's a there's a shelter there's nothing exciting about that bus stop so a bus stop like this if it were a higher volume bus stop might warrant a larger shelter it might warrant actually a real-time bus sign they're making signs now that are solar powered that provide cellular connectivity so we're going to be working through that but I got to tell you $3,800 doesn't go very far when you're talking about capital it's um thank you that answer your question it did yes thank you and I believe it was in your district but I could be wrong we had some folks come to council and talk about a neighborhood specific bus stop revamped that they wanted to do I thought it was really innovative because it was unique to that neighborhood and so is there any room for capacity building on that particular type of project because you know I look at that that bus stop and I think well if it were in front of Cook Children's I'd paint it blue because it would look like their roof or if it was on Kanbuie you know we would pay homage to the bricks or you know whatever it is and so is there any room to to to build that program so that our neighborhoods can um take some ownership and maybe some pride and hopefully increase some ridership I I love the question because yes I think I think we need to do that one of the one of the ideas we've been talking about is doing a a challenge a program where we put out a RFP to solicit ideas for bus stops and then do some model model bus stop development and maybe there are modules or panels that can be swapped out with local artwork or or different a different color palette something scalable though is sort of our goal here is something that's quick and easy to replace repair and replace something that's fairly affordable um our goal is not only to touch all 1700 bus stops but to do that on a regular basis after the three-year program so if if a shelter gets damaged if there's a broken glass or a car hits a shelter we we need the ability to be able to get out there and but yes I think it's a great idea Michael no and just to adding to that somewhere at Trinity Metro is a 2017 leadership Fort Worth bus competition finalist that won and it was a kid I think out of maybe Dunbar some high school that we partnered with near Southside and Trinity Metro to do design competition and very excited about it than nothing ever got done with it so I'll say somewhere there's a report of a really cool bus stop design that we put out and it was a fun project to work on it was my group with leadership Fort Worth but that's been out there and I think it's a kind of a cool idea to incorporate neighborhoods and bring that to fruition think about like the utility boxes where you see art throughout the city Carlos sorry rich rich one more question since we are talking about things uh pertaining to ridership and you know for a while council has expressed to Trinity Metro the desire to increase that ridership um I seem to recall from 2021 the council had expressed a desire for Trinity Metro to better track ridership what what has changed since then to now how are you tracking ridership and how has that improved over the course of that year and I'll give you my my answer and then Wayne I'll look you can correct me we have automatic passenger counters um and our fare box data we have a daily count that we get um on on both the bus and then rail system the buses are automated I believe the rail is a hand count uh the train crews are out on every train lift um taking tickets from customers we have very good accountability on ridership and that's required for the federal transit administration we have to report that every year and that goes back to the question on formula funds our formula funding from the federal government it relies on those ridership counts so those ridership counts um go into a formula and we share in the in the in the in the funding available for our our region text rail text rail is again we're doing really well on text rail but we have I think you all know this at near south side extension to the medical district six 40 000 some odd jobs um we have a an extension there that's in the works actually tomorrow we're going to be taking proposals from firms to provide program management services and then later this year we're going to be uh hiring a an engineering firm to do final design good news here I mentioned those those funding reserves we have currently 167 million allocated in our program for this extension um you'll see the breakdown there um including the the city's participation major major project for a whole variety of reasons certainly opens up access to lots of lots of employment a lot of coordination with external part parties this is one of the reasons this extension didn't get built in the first phase there's a lot of coordination with UP and Fort Worth and Western in particular um you know our current best estimate right now is that this would open for service in late 2026 another major a rail initiative is what what is known as this NT Moves bill grant this is the the grant I was alluding to earlier 25 million um coming from the federal government a total of 72 million being invested it's going to take um the railroad and really make it a double track railroad for four miles so there's two miles of additional double track taking place here um which will provide operational flexibility schedule improvement meaning more flexible scheduling because now we have two tracks it'll reduce freight train interference we we've struggled as of late text rail has been a star performer tier e not so much tier e has suffered from reliability issues some of it mechanical some of it freight train interference some of it um the loss of riders due to downtown employment especially in Dallas dropping off but um this this project um again partnership with nct cog it includes a you'll see a line item there for 13 million for this clear path technology what clear path technology is is that the freight trains that come through Fort Worth um come from all parts of the greater region and the conflicts with passenger rail through this software can be mitigated so a train that might be 50 miles away can be held back a little bit creating a slot for the passenger rail service and better manage the flow of trains through through the region um any questions on this program oh i'm sorry it also supports the trinity lake station project and there's the uh the schedule revenue operations in in uh september of 27 that trinity lake station comes on much sooner this is for full completion of that um train dispatching program trinity lake station is um we had an opportunity to go out many of us uh board and senior staff to go look at trinity lake station foundation work is complete um there's quite a bit of activity the second track is being installed this will relocate the station that's currently at richland hills at eaterville road and move it down not a mile or so down the track to to this location which is tied in closely with the the development that's taking place yes yes it's um we're really proud of proud of the of the of the new station coming on it gives a chance for us to reach new new customers richland hills station did not see much development so um it's mostly parking around that location this location will be anchored by residential mix use development and uh we're we're looking forward to it um station opens uh a little more than a year from now and if i may add just so you guys know when when ken finishes this development we're talking 3 000 homes and i think he's at about 1800 now and we're talking you know mix development retail commercial and you'll be just minutes away from the airport it's going to be amazing so it's trinity boulevard and 820 y'all come thank you high intent so we'll just now that we talked about rail we'll we'll go to bus um i mentioned alliance i think you all know the commitment that's been made to improve access to opportunity and alliance there's this new program high intensity bus basically a guaranteed i lost my screen here let's see as long i guess as long as you're seeing it um we'll run from the dr dentist duncans transfer center um into downtown and then up i-35 in the managed lanes to our north park and ride um fast frequent service guaranteed arrivals so this is new for our region perhaps for the state um where our advertised arrival time will be guaranteed if we're late we will refund the customer their fare so pretty pretty innovative we think the reason we're confident in doing that is because of the managed lanes we have the ability pretty much we know those managed lanes will flow um nicely and so we can we can offer that guarantee oh two more things uh this these are being operated with accessible coach style buses that you might see on a charter service they're fully accessible they're also electric um and um we're expecting them the service to start in 2025 reason and we get we're not starting it sooner is uh there's a a considerable lead time on the buses so we just have to we um it's going to be a couple years before we have those buses on the property and this is to connect um people to jobs yes very much so yeah and then we have sort of our basic campaign every year to maintain our assets so you'll see here we have 7.2 million allocated uh basic upkeep of our facilities nothing terribly exciting here except to say part of the business is making sure we're caring for those public assets right so painting a signage concrete repair and that's that's ongoing and then one of my favorites is the high capacity transit corridor um we have seen really exciting things i've been on the phone quite a bit with my counterparts throughout the country just spoke with the the CEO of indigo in indianapolis a few days ago about their experience and she flat out told me this has been a huge driver of economic development companies have so have intentionally located near these high capacity transit stations um it's not we're not calling it bus because these vehicles can be like rail they can operate with distant spacing between bus stops they in dedicated lanes they can look like rail they can have uh tram like features um with doors on both sides so very much an innovative program it's coupled with traffic signal uh transit signal priority um and we're really looking forward to working with the city on this and nct cog there's quite a bit of work to do before we're ready to design it there's still some questions about where in langcaster avenue it runs which lanes it runs in and occupies where the stations are going to be built what features will the stations have we want to get that right we're spending you know this is this is this is a you know a rail level of investment in terms of the infrastructure do we have audio maybe so though before we watch this video i want to say um those those are the highlights there's quite a bit more to our program as you would imagine again this program does not reflect a new direction yet this is sort of what i'll call an interim or a transitional year at least the way i'm looking at it and that there's some big big things ahead and um you know we'll be coming back to you to talk about um right now i'll say we're in sort of in a conversational stage about the future of trinity metro we're going to get a little bit more formal next year and start to put pen to paper and really come up with you know the next master plan for the agency so looking forward to working with you on that so bringing back the riders we're starting an advertising campaign i'm going to end on the video customers are not totally aware that we exist 22 of survey participants recognize trinity metro 78 didn't know who we were the question was posed do you know who the who the transit provider is of taren county or city of fort worth 78 percent or yeah 78 did not know so clearly we have a a mind share you know an awareness issue out there which is probably holding us back in terms of ridership so uh we're starting this campaign it's called our tm campaign and the program is built on the idea that getting the getting people to know at least that we exist so let's see if this you'll see that in print uh too it'll be on a lot of billboards and benches throughout the city great presentation rich quick council questions go ahead jena i took some notes to to share with you richard and i'll send these to you already tell you about the idea of utilizing public officials to use a bus to go to work another idea to raise ridership and is very impressive the numbers you showed but you might want to make a presentation to the executive round table here and get them to include information about trinity metro in the employee orientation packets and the annual health signups uh when i went to work in dallas uh writing getting the easy pass was part of my orientation and i think you're bringing new momentum to the organization the other thing that i would suggest that that you consider is you know always make sure people know the difference in pay the disparity because we see dark light rail over here nobody comprehends there's a full penny full scent going toward them as opposed to over here you only get half a penny because we use the other half sent to fund ccpd the crime control district and i would always make sure and and you know you never know you may get people to give more money in some of the format but people don't really understand the difference in funding and the final thing i'll share with you is i hope you guys can incorporate the historic wall into some format of black history month uh the wall has been there it was part of the bringing the tiari into downtown fort worth but it's uh just so you all know it's a it's a clay pictorial exhibit of black history in fort worth from the 1800s to now and i have a stake in it because i did the voice over but very few people really know about it and it's just like they don't know about you know about trinity metro but those are some things that i think would be very very helpful but especially getting employers to promote trinity metro because they do it big time over in dallas and you've got an audience right here and again it was part of my orientation when i went to work for on core so that's all i offer it's a great presentation thank you mayor pro tem good any other questions council for rich they need to know rich thank you very much for the update okay sorry chris no i don't have any question i just want to appreciate rich and his good leadership and the staff that are here and the staff that we're working with i truly believe um trinity metro is on the road to do some great things i'm starting the right track uh michael and i have a couple of tm that we're going to add to there we won't say that now uh we've been working on um so yeah i can only imagine and so i will just challenge i met rich is that i think uh mayor has mentioned a couple times you know how the city can partner and either even more than what we're doing now um that may not whatever that looks like and so we appreciate your leadership look forward to working uh things moving forward thank you chris any any other questions from council no rich thank you to and staff for preparing such a thorough presentation we're very excited that you're here in fort worth thank you for relocating your family from connecticut i haven't gotten to meet your wife yet but i'll get to do that and say thank you to her as well your kids started a new school i hope they're enjoying that um we're very excited to work with you there's a lot of exciting things in our future thanks to y'all's leadership so appreciate it thank you so much mayor matty and in council okay david looks like our next presentation is school safety school safety and we're going to call on chief notes and i think he's got a cast with him chief mayor and council we want to thank you for your time today to talk about another very important topic i talk about our school safety and our school resource officer unit one thing i want to start with is uh i think a lot of people are unaware of just how many isd's we have that touch the city of four worth right now we've got 15 different isd's listed here in alphabetical order you have at least one school in four worth one of the questions we had is in addition to isd's would it be possible for forward pd to have s ro's within charter schools and private schools so we're working with the city attorney's office to get a final determination on where we are allowed to be without violating any regulations or laws to this point we understand any open enrollment charter school we are allowed to have officer presence there we're looking at other charter schools and private schools as well to confirm that and we'll get a response to you on that as soon as we're able to determine it all we would ask is it would be the same agreement we have with the isd's with the same sharing agreement and we would be happy to work with it whatever school districts the city determined they would like us that as far as our participating isd's we have several obviously our largest is going to be four worth isd our annual contract with them is over four million dollars it's what they provide to us to provide s ro's in their school that includes 12 high schools 22 middle schools with the total between those two of over 28,000 about 29,000 students total of about 42 s ro's and you then you see on the far right column the ratio we like to keep that ratio below 1000 per one student but we actually will work with between 1500 to one student ratio smallest obviously being lean of pope but that gives a breakdown not only of the sizes of the schools we're serving but the number of school resource officers that we have in those schools so what is the school resource officer this is the official definition a school resource officer is a full-time law enforcement officer with sworn law enforcement authority trained in school based policing and crisis response assigned by the employing law enforcement agency to work with the school using community oriented policing concepts what's the purpose so for us the city forward provides school resource officers for the purpose of creating a safe educational environment we do that in partnership with the various districts that employ us and the partnership is something we're going to touch on a little bit later we brought someone with us who we partner with and forward with ISD who can expand on just how important those partnerships are Nazro that's a national association of school resource officers they teach the triad model when it comes to the duties of a school resource officer in school we know they are law enforcement officers that's the easy part but they're also educators our school resource officers spend a lot of time in classrooms with students and also with the educators to give different presentations on safety and other things we'll discuss in a later slide but they're also informal account counselors and mentors for these students and this is where the relationship building that takes time to build trust is really at the heart of what the sros are doing when it comes to the cases that they work they are police officers they do enforce the laws that the state of texas requires now when they're on their assigned to a school we expect them to be on campus we expect them to be visible and what this will do is help deter crime on those campuses they'll investigate and file charges for criminal offenses with the students if it occurs on their school campus during school hours or in the on a bus transporting children if it happens to be a case involving an adult after they investigate it will actually have one of our standard criminal investigators handle the case rather than our youth unit this gives you an idea of the kind of criminal enforcement that has to be taken and i'm going to tell you right now that last number that's an extreme outlier and i'm looking to make sure there's not an error in the number of weapons that were seized so we put that on there because that's the data we have right now but i want to confirm that and get back with you to make sure that's right because if you look at weapons over those four separate school year six five sixteen seven hundred and thirty now i did speak with our two rock star sros who are here with us today and uh actually don't mean to put you on the spot officer judd but you did when i brought this up earlier you brought up some of the behaviors you're seeing post-covid behaviors with students and maybe how they're pushing the boundaries a little bit would you mind explaining the same thing to this group please sure i'm ethan judd i'm an officer with forward police department i've been a school resource officer this is my now 10th year in the unit i've been a police officer for 15 years in arlington heights high school um i can't speak to the veracity of these statistics i didn't compile them but what i can say is that what i've seen anecdotally is we've seen a lot more juvenile misbehavior in the schools post-covid because the kids were basically spending a year off at home either remotely learning or doing some some version of mixed remote and in-person learning and uh we saw a big push in the juvenile misbehavior again i can't speak to the veracity of those i know personally i have seen an increase in weapons on campus and uh it's it's not something that i'm happy that it's happening but i think that the more referrals and the more searches and the more we enhance our enforcement to provide a safe environment i think it's going to be a productive resolution uh for those students and for the campus thank you i appreciate that sir here's the cases they don't work a lot of people aren't aware so senate bill 393 was introduced in 2013 by state senator rois west we've all heard of the pipeline to prison which was referred to and it came to sROs and their presence in schools some felt it was just a way for us to put juveniles in the criminal justice system that is actually the last thing we want to do so senate bill 393 forbids police for mishearing citations for misbehavior in school so like a class c citation that doesn't include traffic violations that includes class c misdemeanors on campus now this is designed to keep children out of the criminal justice system for low-level offenses and that's where the school district's responsibility to step up and take care of that kind of low-level behavior yes ma'am so when the school district administers uh discipline do the school resource officers then step in at a later date to determine if there's a criminal offense or is the school district given the deference first i saw you step up did you want to take that so during the investigations that happen for any juvenile misbehavior that would be classified as a class c for the lowest level of misdemeanor offense we do our investigations concurrently we work with administrators to determine if it meets the elements of an offense for a high-level look charge or if it is going to be classified as a school offense which would be juvenile misbehavior class c nature and therefore subject to their discretion and administrative discipline rather than uh us issuing a citation so i guess the answer to your question would be that the investigation is run concurrently we work in cooperation with our administrators and staff to make sure that we're addressing all aspects of it to see where it falls before we make a determination so would it be um one or the other in the sense of if if the school administers say the school puts them into uh what is it called and has detention yeah um if they make that determination then that's we're not going back and and looking at stuff right yeah are we sure yeah once the school makes their decision that's the school's decision we don't look forward into that unless it becomes criminal then we get involved in it let the school say we don't put them in a sense of we don't suspend them let the school handle them okay Gina chief can you go back to that slide with senator rois west on there now if if officers cannot issue citations from misbehavior in schools can officers still take a kid to kimbo road or yes ma'am if it's a higher level offense one that someone would normally be arrested for say a class a mr meaner or a felony obviously yes they could be taken to kimbo you know when it when it comes to the history the records you know of that student you know who was taken away are those sealed because their juveniles and will they remain sealed or what happens to the future of that child who was taken away once they become an adult and if you want to plan on it please please do so that's when records would be sealed the any any juvenile record would be sealed so that means it's even when they turn 18 they don't have to worry about that they should not have to worry about that okay i'm still confused as to how it's the school's authority but the officer can take the student away without issuing a citation well as they said if it's uh something that would just be a class C misdemeanor then that's the school's that can be just the school's responsibility well they could ask the officer to take the kid away well if it's a higher level offense we're not going to take them for a class C offense if it's a higher level offense if the investigation determines it's actually higher than a class C then yes an arrest can take place okay so chief just for those that might be listening or watch this later what is a class C versus what is what what's an enhanced you know infraction or crime in this situation that that would warrant PD jumping in and being involved okay say for for instance an assault so there is what you know what's called an assault by offensive contact so maybe there was some contact or a mutual combat situation between some people that would be a citation but if it's ruled that it was actually an assault or someone was attacked that's a higher level offense that's a class A and for that a student could be arrested what's the difference between an assault and attack mutual combat and attack i'm real interested in this topic so i'd like to know i understand so mutual combat situation what you normally see is two people who in a school when i was in school two people meet up somewhere after school and they fight two people show up and they agree to fight an assault is when someone is attacked without provocation that's not mutual if someone is just walking down the hall and gets punched that's an attack that's assault yeah yes ma'am this is an anecdotal and i just recently talked to a principal about this issue and they're a principal in a fourth ic school and they weren't disparaging any student or family it was just sort of like your observation of the tension that's happening in schools right now and how it's impacting teachers as well right and it's creating this tension throughout the school and so when things do happen there is a gray area that is causing the school district to say you deal with this and that's falling back on fourth pd and maybe previously a few years ago that wasn't happening before it was just it was a very insightful conversation for me as what the role and responsibility of our sros should be versus what y'all are faced with oftentimes and trying to deal with these really difficult situations in a on a campus setting and then the last thing i would say is that the school leadership sounds like it's a really important factor in how you do your jobs i'm sure y'all could tell me stories of of how your principal or administration supports what you're doing versus when if if you haven't maybe a new principal new campus how difficult that can be for your jobs because it sounds like this this law especially is a tussle between the two the school district and the police department in this situation absolutely the the job that our sros do is vitally important it's incredibly difficult they're walking a fine line every day about what they can and what they cannot do obviously what tragically happened in uvaldi recently i put it things put the spotlight back on what they do and it's shown more of an appreciation for what they do but i hope it also highlights the difficulty and the very complicated decisions they have to make every single day one thing a lot of people don't even realize we have or how often it has to be used is our threat assessment and response team and instead of reading this slide to you i'm going to turn it over to one of our members of that team and someone who is very impressive highly qualified and what he does has a heart for the work and when it comes to threat assessment at schools he was what i would consider our resident expert and it's officer job so our threat assessment team i don't know how aware you are but over the last five years when i began as a threat assessment response member we've been seeing an increase in social media and internet text message cyberbullying type threats where a student will make a declaration that they are either intend to shoot up a school blow up a school commit some type of attack of violence of a life and death serious bodily injury nature which rises to a level of criminality prompting immediate investigation what we do on the threat assessment team is we receive those were available 24 hours 365 we receive the information we make an assessment and coordinator response to locate the person who made the threat and neutralize it through intervention usually that intervention involves once we locate who actually made the threat it conducts of a home visit of a school resource officer and a school resource supervisor along with any other patrol personnel who can assist us we go to the residents we make contact with the violator usually it is a student at the school we discuss the violation i show evidence whenever i do this i show clear and convincing evidence of how i tracked and what i did to determine that it did come from them and then we discuss intervention plans if an arrest needs to be made it is we also follow up with a we all request consent to search of the students bedroom or any area that they have access specifically only for weapons we want to make everyone feel as safe as possible and we know that students do not always they're not always honest with us about if they actually have access to weapons we discuss gun safety with parents if there are weapons in the home that the student does not have access to or are not in possession of appropriate storage of those firearms so they do not have access to them sometimes parents eyes are open to the fact that just because the gun is in your room doesn't mean the student may not have access to it we provide those and then we make a referral to tarrant county juvenile services or the tarrant county district attorney's office for filing of charges if necessary it's been a very successful model we have a high success rate probably 85 to 90 percent of the threats that we receive we do locate and neutralize in this fashion sometimes though because of the difficulties of navigating the tech space and the technological aspects of tracking through the internet with privacy laws and specifically if the threat comes from overseas which i've seen then we're unable to locate the actor and so we have to do the next best thing which is harden the target we make notifications to all the staff to the police personnel so that we have extra people there to make everybody make sure everybody attending school the next day feel safe thank you sir sorry chief i have a couple questions um is this first of all thank you for doing that um is it a situation where a student will report it to you like how do you gather that information is it self reported by their classmates like they saw on their instagram or whatever or yeah do you how do you plug that in we get it from a lot of different methods i'd say the most common is it gets reported to 911 after hours a parent will usually see something or a student may see something and they will directly call 911 and say hey i don't know if i should report this or i i see something that's really concerning to me but somebody said that they're going to shoot up a high school and i need to report it that gets funneled through our communications to the school resource unit and then usually to me on the primary i have other officers that have trained in it but i'm the subject matter expert in it and so usually it goes to me for assessment and then for response is there a distinction between um and a type of post that says specifically like i'm going to go to school x with a bomb or a gun versus um those the folks that maybe aren't making those overt threats but have clear indications of some sort of mental illness and or you know homicidal intent those warning signs that tragically after each one of these incidents right we go back and we look at their social media and and there's like oh well all the warning signs are here so is there anything that can be done or anything that we are doing to address that more nuanced threat as well so specifically for me i know that for any of these i also do a referral to social services within the campus i make a recommendation that they speak with the social worker i work closely on my campus with our intervention specialists we have two of them for any of these situations that come up that don't rise to the level of criminality but do rise to the level of concern so that they can receive appropriate intervention usually that involves with discussion with law enforcement about concerns that they may have maybe it's being driven by something like bullying maybe it's being driven something by isolation it may be driven by abuse so we want to make sure that the person who's making these either declarations or these intentions or notifications or just musings posts things of a concerning nature that the root cause of it is addressed before it escalates to an attack and once we get that referral we stay and maintain that close contact relationship to try to build rapport with that person to make sure that they never go in that direction again there is a clear difference between a declaration where somebody says i'm going to do x and then somebody just saying somebody should do this and we have to make that and that's part of our assessment process one last question i have two young kids in school and so and i think actually most of us do here and you know there's that idea of i don't i don't want to tell i don't want to be the snitch i don't want to go and you know have all my friends hate me um and i'd like and i you probably don't have an answer now but i'd like maybe an ire or some things we come back are there things that other communities do like um maybe not crime stoppers but that's more in line with how kids communicate these days whether it be i don't i mean some form of social media or maybe an online portal where they can share that you know students feel safe to anonymously maybe share some of that information with y'all i don't know if we're doing that now but i'd like to see if um if other communities have something kind of innovative for that because i think that's a a worry for me is those folks that aren't maybe making those declarations but have those tendencies that i mean when this happens everyone kind of looks around and goes i'm not really surprised that you know something always seemed off with that person and so to suss that out a little bit so i think one of the things you talked about when you said those um they're not necessarily trusting crime stoppers because crime stoppers is available in our campus um we do presentations on it we make sure the information is put out so all students understand how it works um and then overcoming the culture of protectionism um from one student to another to trust us as adults that we are on their side that part of that rapport building process that we go through as SROs letting the kids not only get to know us but getting to know them and building that trust so that they understand that we're here to help um is big one of the things that's come about recently on social media i'm not sure how many of you are aware of it but there are lots of anonymous pages on things like tiktok instagram snapchat uh any social media account pretty much has these and what they are is they're generally run by students or people who are student adjacent sometimes they're family members and they pose as an anonymous reposting service for students to basically spill their gossip and some and sometimes not necessarily all the time but sometimes these type of declarations and intentional threats come through on those pages and usually they're reported to us by them by the person who has the page um because usually it's a student that they create a page uh that doesn't identify who they are but says send me all your your gossip and drama i'll repost it sometimes they'll reach out to me directly and say hey i run this page um but somebody says something really concerning on here i need to report it i've also seen though that somebody that ran a page where somebody reported something that somebody made a specific declaration that they were going to shoot up a school and when it didn't get traction they reposted it using found imagery from the internet to make it seem worse than it was even going so far as to put a countdown on it it sent the entire school in a lockdown and i was tracking not only two people who had posted um but i was also tracking which one was had more veracity and which one was more authentic um so i've seen both i've seen both really positive behavior from students who say this looks wrong i feel in danger i want to report this and then i've seen students who are maybe chasing the fame that's they're looking for on social media to try to uh bring some notoriety to themselves have actually escalated a threat beyond something that was an initial mere declaration to now it was a mere declaration with a timeline that's actually a very insightful question and i've i don't have all the data right now but i have heard of certain apps that students can access and anonymously make notifications like that so let us look into that i would love to get that information back to you i have a couple of questions um how can you give us a percentage of how often we're getting threats like this for the schools i mean is it 10 times a month 100 uh i'd say that they're going up i think when i first started i dealt with about three to five in the first year but i total total yes in the first year but that was in 2017 2018 um now this in this last year i believe we dealt with 26 threats um so far this school year since we've been in school since monday i've dealt with three 30 so okay it's escalating and becoming more common sometimes it will go several months without a major threat coming through and then sometimes look on very sequence in nature where we're seeing maybe some copycat type behavior i have seen that and um so sometimes it just i haven't found a distinct profile but i can say overall it it does seem to be increasing that is the trend and you are currently a sro at arlington heights all the heights yes i transferred to arlington heights high school last october when crally isd ended their contract with fourth police department to provide school resource officer services to their districts uh where i was there for four years before that okay and you also the lead yes for this program here yes i do this is a collateral duty okay in addition to my sro duties so when we have these major problems are come up how do you do both well usually these occur after hours so i respond uh under our emergency callback procedures all sros receive phones we have take-home vehicles so we can respond to emergencies on our campus um and i take it upon myself to take on the extra workload of fulfilling this because i'm very passionate about it so maybe one day you'll work if i could make this my primary duty i would but unfortunately right now we just don't have the resources to do that so i do both as a matter of fact we had a conversation uh edwin with uh dany garcia who you will meet shortly and one of the things we're determining now in law enforcement is we're having to create spaces create units and set aside personnel just to respond to technology advancements period whether that's technology that's occurring around us or technology is occurring in our department itself we're having to shift and this is one of the shifts is going to have to happen because if we go from three or so in one year to three in a week the needs great the need is very great were there any other questions before we continue oh carlos uh yes sir and uh i'll start with you officer jed on this you mentioned uh we've been talking about threat assessments you know for the most part but when you look at it uh you know school safety is comprised of several elements a lot of those elements also include uh the participation and adherence of uh school staff administration teachers etc you know to their own safety protocols to making sure they um have their training up to date when it comes to threat assessments when it comes to lockdowns so they know exactly what to do that it's as much second nature as possible does do the s ro's i mean i'm sure you're involved with that in assisting them to make sure that uh they know what's expected yes you know of them but that do the s ro's themselves rank how well they're doing periodically rank the the schools or the faculty and staff schools i know no ranking that we've ever done but ranking grading we do we got a few back we do periodic review and assessment um we've done it initially we've done it yearly um we've escalated that to now we're going to be doing quarterly reviews of our safety procedures as far as how we integrate with the campus for their emergency operations plan with the ISD's um if we had a perfect world we would probably increase our drills increase our training time so that everyone understands that safety is everyone's priority that there's a reason behind the reason why we have exterior doors remaining locked why we need to adhere to wearing your badges and IDs at all times um complying with lockdown procedures taking them seriously uh ultimately to enhance our protection and prevention yeah and i totally understand that you got to balance that out too because the primary purpose of school is to educate absolutely and you can't have too much of an impact in the regard of doing these other ancillary things just as a response to the times and chief um just out of curiosity um the ISD's in the area uh generally you know i know some we talked about eagle mountain Saginaw ISD choosing to go with their own in-house you know uh SRO policing you know uh compliment but uh the larger ISD's have you seen uh in terms of number of requests at SRO's that number to stay the same generally increased slightly you know in light of what's been going on maybe you can comment to the the most as far as requests go we have made requests i know for increased officer numbers at schools because a lot of these districts grow very rapidly along with the city of Fort Worth and uh as i said before we like one SRO per 1000 students but we'll go up to 1500 we've had some schools that have grown rapidly and for the safety of the the students the staff the faculty and the officers we want to make sure we have the correct numbers of officers there we've had some discussions uh with some ISD's about potentially increasing but the actual formal requests for more no thank you sir yes sir i sure that was not truthful when i said it was my last question but this is easy if you could just um provide a list of SRO's by council district like contact information that would be really helpful um i know to me and probably to the rest of my colleagues so that you know we can reach out and y'all can reach us Arlington Heights is District 9 so but i'd like to have that same dialogue with my SROs that we're able to have with our MPOs and they're they operate a little differently and so we don't i don't do a good job of that so if you could get this that information that would really help we'd be more than happy to thank you thank you for for wanting the information all right we'll move along uh when it comes to we talked about the law enforcement role of an SRO as far as the educator role a lot of it has to do with being guest speakers and here's the topics that i mentioned we would discuss gang deterrence drug resistance decision making driver safety bullying when it comes to our staff they participate in some of the civilian response to active shooter or events or craze training they work with them during their staff in service days do a lot of tabletop exercises and i will say this summer the last count i heard was over 500 faculty and staff from ISDs across the region have come to forward the PD for free training we've had teachers we've had other staff members we've had administrators and i've spoken with several of those classes and they are absolutely thrilled with the training blown away with the way it happens with the the way it seems so real and actually gives them tools things they can do to keep themselves and their students safe while we're responding to their location this just gives a breakdown of some of the numbers of like the anti-bullying drug presentations and so on that SROs take part in during the school year pretty big numbers informal counselor uh we were talking before these two gentlemen one of the things we look for when we're looking for SROs is someone that's got the heart for the work someone who wants to engage with students build those relationships build that trust and have a positive impact on them and this is where the mentoring comes in we want them to be positive role models a trusted channel of communication because some students do not have that otherwise and a source of community resources for whatever the students might need we've actually I've talked to several officers on our department who are only on our department because of positive interactions they had with an SRO when they were a student that's the impact it can have to show some of the counseling sessions and community connections our SROs have made with students and other family members when school's out they still do a lot do you think well they're just there during school the school year they're there during the summers well they're in summer camps during summer school but one of the most important parts of their roles during summer comes down to the training they do the TASRO which is the Texas Association the school resource officers and NASRO that we discussed earlier they do the refresher training they train on alert I know officer Judd here is a alert trainer himself the active shooter training but they also invest so much in our educators staff and faculty to make sure that they are as prepared as they can possibly be for whatever they might face so for the schools that are not covered by the SRO program that does not mean they're not receiving services from the forward police department any emergency situation we're will respond to and I can tell you now at a school the only problem you're going to have is where we're going to put all the cops that show up because we are going to show up and we will go in uh non-emergency situations are handled just like we would normally dispatch any call emergency situations are a little different for the schools where we don't have an SRO on campus our patrol officers are encouraged to go there daily we actually have a call where they call out on so we can track the number of times an officer patrol officer goes there our NPOs make regular visits to our schools that aren't covered by SROs as well as our citizens on patrol they did a great job for the first week of school and we just talked with those uh the leadership team over our citizens on patrol our cops and they're going to be doing that daily now for schools not covered by SROs now these are just some things we we were asked what are some school districts are doing we are presenting what school districts are doing but we're not presenting this because we're recommending it these are just some of the options we've seen happen with other ISDs so this is with Burleson they're actually having private armed security on their campuses where they do not have SROs it seems like reaching out to retired police officers often offering a decent salary might be a great way to attract some quality security highly trained security officers there that's one thing we're seeing and that's in burleson ISD something else that's actually been in place since 2013 school marshals and school guardians so here's the difference school marshals receive more training 80 hours and Tico is the Texas commission on law enforcement by the way they are basically security officers with some law enforcement authority they receive that training and are assigned to various schools to provide security services the school guardians on the other hand is someone who's already a school employee maybe a teacher who receives I believe 16 hours of training and is allowed to carry a firearm that's safely secured on school property the position of the forward police department the position of the Texas police chief's association that is an ISD decision that is an ISD decision all we ask is if any school is going to take part in any of these programs they work closely with us they make sure the recruiting, vetting, hiring, training is solid and make sure we're included in that process for one thing to make sure the process is going well the second of all the last thing we want to do is respond to a school see someone with a gun and not realize they have a teacher there that's armed oh a little bit lighter we have another one of our rock star SROs here officer Terrence Parker and I've asked him to come in here and give us a little taste of what a day in the life of an SRO is like well I can tell you the first thing I did when I wake up is like what are my lovely kids gonna have me do today so for the most part get there get there in the morning see the kids get off the bus walk around the campus high fives here and there a couple mean mugs mean mug them back you know they're coming to greet you in the hallway walk around make sure the doors are locked once the kids are in class make sure they go to class stay out of the bathroom see love to migrate in the bathroom I don't know why but kids love to migrate in the bathroom oh hey there we go kids love to migrate in the bathroom I don't know why but they love to go to the bathroom get them out there get them in class interact with the staff get with the principal find out what she needs what's going on today what needs to happen you know anything pressing any students you need me to talk to anybody you need me to keep an eye on I found out I'm not as young as I used to be trying to play basketball with some of the kids down there in the gym and they just wore me out so I gotta stop that I got bad knees make sure the campus is secure walk around you know keep our students that have graduated that are not allowed on campus anymore keep them off campus work with campus security with us with Dan I work with campus security that's out there just uh and interact with the kids mostly a lot of these kids look for someone to talk to you need someone you need I'll come off as a safe space for them if they need to vent cry BS whatever they can always come talk to me I tell all my kids I say look whatever we talk about see between us it's in here unless I have to take some type into action otherwise and I do something I have to notify staff and look staff needs to know about this but for the most part I try to be there for them try to give my ear so they can talk I listen to them try to solve any and every single problem they have which seems to be a lot especially when it comes to social media all the kids in social media it's like oh they said this about me they said that about me and you know this person's talking about that and I'm like did it hurt you no did they do anything to you no it's just words keep walking ignore it as hard as it may be try to look look into it too much but kids these days they talk so and so said this about somebody so I try to be that mediator in the middle I look at these kids as my little troops I'm military drill sergeant so I trained you know kids coming into the military and put them out into you know training to go to war I take a different approach for these kids they my little troops there but I try to mold them and build them up to be better people within the community look forward to something I ask them what's your five-year plan what's your 10-year plan you know you're a junior where you're going to go you're going to college you're not going to college you have a job lined up when you get out of here I try to help them out to put them on a different path give us a different light in their eyes because for the most part all they see is where they're at our rest them they're in the office because they're in trouble or we're picking on them so I try to give them a different outlook different approach someone they can talk to I'd say what stood out the most for me officer Parker is I don't know if anyone else noticed whenever we refer to the students did you hear what he called them every single time my kids my kids that's the perspective we want we don't want officers going to schools looking at students as suspects they are not their kids next I'm going to ask another friend gentlemen thank you so much I appreciate your time very very much so many of you may know this young man right here he retired from forward PD after 25 years as an assistant chief of a wonderful career with the police department and not everyone is as lucky as he is to go on to another successful career where it seems to me he's just as happy because he's taking care of people he's doing something important so I wanted to introduce my good friend here Danny Garcia to talk about the partnership between forward ISD and forward PD and he is the executive director of safety and security at forward ISD thank you chief and good afternoon to everybody pleasure to be here today and answer any questions that you might have but uh what I kind of wanted to highlight I know you got a lot of information today from the chief and his staff but I I thought it was important to kind of highlight some of the partnerships that this group may not be necessarily aware of because we really are connected as chief chief and I had an opportunity to speak this this morning a little bit more in depth about just the different partnerships that we have but you know even even your your forward PD intel unit you know I speak to those folks at least on a monthly basis you know through their through the information that they gather the crime analyst fusion center there's a lot of information floating around out there that impacts our school district a lot of it has to do with our school boards and activity and protests and different activity that that's connected to school board so that information is really vital to us because that helps us number one not to be caught off guard and to make sure that we're prepared for our school board meetings with the proper amount of police and security so that everybody stays safe the visitors that are coming to attend those meetings and also you know all of us are very familiar we got a lot of information today about the school resource officers and what they do and we're very familiar with the job they do the officer presence the arrest the reports the mentoring of kids officer parker did a great job explaining that but you know to me after spending 24 25 years here in this department and retiring as an assistant chief and even the support bureau over the the school unit I've learned so much being on the other side if I had it to do over again there's there'd be a lot of things I do differently but really the SROs are also very closely tied in duties to the way they carry out their job at the school of an NPO because they really do far more than just make the arrest make the reports to help the administrators really resolve really deep community issues as well like with neighbors they need a referral to a different department in the city whether it's tpw school zone streets traffic I mean just an array of issues so if you think about all the duties that an NPO does the SRO does it too besides the 101 thing that officer Judd just explained to you that they do so they really do perform a great service for us and we we really do value them and appreciate having them at our schools and officer Judd also briefly touched on the response team or the threat assessment team so I wanted to highlight that this team is available 24 hours a day seven days a week after normal school hours so most of the times that we get these threats these social media threats they're happening on the weekend they're happening after hours so a few years ago we did not have the ability to really react we were caught flat-footed when we'd get a social media threat on a Saturday evening what are we going to do come Monday parents want to know this stuff is floating around they're seeing it they're wondering whether we even know about it and more than likely they're going to keep guess what they're going to keep their kids out of school on Monday because we don't have a plan right so in 2018 after the Parkland and Santa Fe shootings this team came together with the support of the police department of course and what that unit really gives us the ability to do is immediately address a threat social media or otherwise and helps us develop a plan the officers come out begin an investigation if need be it's been really highly successful and made various arrests like officer Judd explained weapons confiscated suspects identified you know a few times it was just meant to be a joke but when you have an officer or officers at your parents door at 10 o'clock at night they find out it's not a joke that it's being taken serious and that it that it is being addressed so that's been a tremendous help to us because parents want to know three things in these situations when we have social media threats or otherwise they want to know that we're aware of the threat number one they want to know that police is involved in that we're working with them to address it and they want to be sure that there is a safety plan in place for Monday come school time and so with this after hours response team we're able to do all those three things so that really helps us because as you can imagine school attendance really is devastated when these threats come in especially over the weekend and and rightfully so as a parent you know most of us here are parents and we can definitely identify with not feeling safe about that but if you get a communication we're able to communicate with our parents and say hey we're doing all these things we're aware of the threat police is involved they're investigating and guess what we have a good solid safety plan for your kids on Monday please send them to school they're going to be safe right so that's the message that we want to send the real-time crime center obviously Fort Worth PD has an extensive camera system throughout the city many times there they capture data and information that is relevant to the safety of our schools they share that the police the school district also has an extensive camera system there's hardly a week that goes by that there isn't an officer or detective in my office recovering video from from a school camera where crime has been committed and so that assists them with their investigation it was a couple years ago where one of our cameras actually caught a homicide that one of our school cameras captured and and of course we have a MOU in place between both organizations that gives Fort Worth police the power to access school district cameras so you say well how is that going to be helpful well in an emergency situation if your real-time crime center officers are able to access our cameras then guess what that emergency response is going to be enhanced they're going to be able to send the troops the officers where they need where they're needed most and so we think that it is a really big plus for all of us in the district and and within the city and then going down to to the patrol support what I tell all my principles is every one of your schools is with it is on a beat it's within a police division somewhere in the city of Fort Worth so get to know your patrol officers get to know your beat officers get to know your commander you know because when you call 911 these are the officers that are coming yes your SROs may be there they may be out of pocket they may be down at juvenile processing and arrest whatever but when that emergency happens it's important that you have that relationship with your divisional police staff and they they know your staff and they know who you are they know what your school looks like the layout of the school all that is going to greatly enhance when there is an emergency and they do have to respond to your school and actually know how to get around and the fact is the commanders want to get to know them and they want information from the school principals and the administrators they want to know when are you having problems is it at lunch when kids go off campus and at our secondary schools high schools is it after school are you having fights at certain you know community centers or what have you and then the commanders can go back and they can incorporate that information into their crime fighting strategies so all the way around getting to know each other building relationship is going to have a positive influence on all that and then the last item on here again going back to the active shooter training so as you know this summer the police department developed a very specific active shooter training specially focused for teachers and for school staff so they they opened that up this summer I know there was hundreds of Fort Worth ISD personnel that went through and we're currently coordinating with the police academy to identify some dates that we can send all of our staff through there and not just not just teachers but teachers principals custodians you name it all of them will surely benefit from the training the better trained they are the better they're going to be prepared during an emergency question yes you know thank you for this and I hate to bring up such a difficult subject but I think it's really impetus for why we're talking about this today what happened to Uvaldy as professionals that have been doing this for a very long time if you look now that you can look at two different reports in the Senate and the House DPS reports lots of news reporting how did you evaluate what you already had in place and make changes for our students and families here in Fort Worth um and importantly where were you really proud that you already had different safety nets in place that maybe were not there in Uvaldy yeah no that is a great question because that's the first thing that I did I'm sure chief was doing the same things and luckily for us there really wasn't anything that I would change really other than I guess our our focus on making sure all our safety related equipment was in better operating conditions our cameras our access control our doors and of course we were we were mandated this summer to conduct a partial summer safety audit an exterior door access control so I think if anything I think we needed to tighten that up but as far as the way we communicate and the way we would respond to an emergency you know that's pretty tight I'd have to say and so fortunately for what for us there was not a lot of things that needed to be changed there was assistant chief sparrow and one of the training officers down at the academy officer Sean Harris came and addressed our safety and security committee a few weeks ago and the reason I brought him over is I wanted to put our school board members at ease basically saying what happened there would not happen here and this is why and they did a great job explaining that and explaining the emergency response procedures from the police department and how they would have handled a similar situation how they train how they prepare and so all that to say I think we're in very very good shape and chief I think it was on our previous slide just recently you talked about the other officers that are paying visits especially to maybe our elementary campuses where there are not SROs is that a recent change or is that something that you were already doing previous to what happened in Ubaldi that's something we were already doing but we're enhancing okay and one of the enhancements is the uh the call sign so we're tracking it and the uh co-blue members being a part of it and we don't necessarily expect them to be the ones to engage a shooter but they are our eyes and ears so frequently and having that deterrent effect with anyone watching sometimes is all it takes but we're making sure again not just MPOs and patrol officers but anyone else in either specialized units are in the area or stopping by schools and being a very visible presence thank you yeah and and and one other thing that you guys may not know about but and it just happened recently so we have security staff basically in all our schools and we have a position called campus monitors and I guess the way I would explain that position in a nutshell is that they're kind of like paid code blue eyes and ears for the school in regard but they're totally focused on safety issues so we actually had 33 elementaries that didn't have this position or any safety staff and that has now been approved by our board so we're working hard you know now to to fill all those positions so the good news is at least there is some form of safety and security staff at every or will be at every single school within Fort Worth ISD and even after hours so we use about 150 police officers that we hire on a part-time hourly basis and we use most of which are Fort Worth officers and we use those to staff and secure all our athletic events after hours and our special events so that's that's another thing that everybody may not necessarily know or think about thank you thank Chris and this whole row had a question yeah just go on down thanks first I want to say thank you for being here thank you for what you do sure and I do have a concern and and I'll kind of explain it to you I think the mayor had a good question when she asks after evaluating our measures versus other measures um and I'm sure there are some things that have changed because you just stated that you provided uh staff into the elementary schools right but when you say that I think we're good no major changes need to take place that's kind of scary because it's always room for improvement and and I want to make sure that we do I do diligence to check again and one of the questions I have with you is for our security um because I think some of the issues with the shooting and other shootings was it was a staff issue or staff didn't shut the door we don't know the all of all what happened but maybe left the door propped open X Y and Z so have your office uh do you guys do annual trainings for the teachers to provide security measures for them you know you don't leave the door propped open you make sure the door shuts behind you if there is a door jam uh whatever do you do annual training for school teachers do y'all send out emails or reminders or to make sure to help keep things safe I mean you did a a walkthrough but things happen along the way for year out no you're exactly right and you're 100 correct I think the way I was trying to come across I wasn't trying to come across to say we're perfect we don't need to do anything you're exactly right we can always do better and should do better um and so in regard to training our staff yes we do we meet with them as often as as possible you know part of the mission of of my department is for our staff to provide some of that training but we also rely heavily on our SROs to provide a lot of that training and I think you saw some of that uh they they work with uh with our administrators and our school staff and uh and actually uh so a couple of of things were already in the works before Uvaldi even happened and uh this school year we launched a new mass emergency notification system which it we didn't do that because of Uvaldi it was already in the works obviously it takes a couple of years to even appropriate that kind of new technology but it's just another tool it's not anything that's going to totally solve all our problems but it gives administrators and school staff another tool to be able to communicate with each other during an emergency which that's one of the challenges that we have during an emergency is communicating you want to send a message to as many people as possible in a shortest amount of time and this new technology which can be launched from a computer at the school a phone at the school over the PA systems over the digital displays on a phone app in case the principal is away from from campus he or she will know that something's going on their school's on a lockdown on a hold on a secure whatever the case might be so you know we we're constantly looking at trying to make enhancements like that yeah i just wanted to get your opinion uh about um i think it was the Dallas ISD and there may have been a couple others that are requiring the clear clear bags yeah what what do you think about that you know there's a lot of pros and cons i i don't necessarily think it's a bad idea i mean again so many of the things that we do it's not a silver bullet right clear bags isn't going to solve all the Dallas problems but it's another tool so i think you have to it's hard to make a generic say hey i think it's a great idea i think it's a bad idea it's really upon the individual district is it something that will benefit that district so just to answer your question i think it's a good tool i think it would be a good tool for that district it's twice the size of ours you know anything that any any other mechanism that can help there's always a way around it even a clear bag you can put other things to you know where you can't see and um you know there there is other issues that that that maybe somebody may not like that idea because of that but i don't necessarily think it's a bad idea okay something that you all creatively may have discussed or thought right right and it's just like for instance this school year we're mandating that the kids in the secondary schools middle schools and high schools wear id badges so that's something that we had not done district wide before so so that's just another enhancement there and we're kind of rolling it out just very not being restrictive not not turning it turning it into a discipline issue in any way but just trying to send a message to the parents and the kids that we're doing it for safety we need to know who's on our campus who belongs on our campus having everybody wear an id makes the job a little bit easier for our security staff to readily be able to identify hey you don't belong or why don't you have a badge sure you know and as you all are thinking about your strategies and plans do you put it in in a context of reactionary which i feel like is a lot of what we've heard today and and what we see there versus preventative right and do you look at the the the threat or the fear of of an incident in that way and strategies of course we've seen reactionary strategies but the preventative strategies the backpack is one are there are there others and because i just to give you a sense where i'm coming from is you know as a parent and there's many around the table in the in the room and listening the reactionary stuff we have to do and it's great to know what's what you're planning but a shot has been fired right and you may be the unlucky one right and so that's the that's just such an incredible fear so what what are we doing to hopefully prevent that from happening well and and i think our sros really help us a lot in that area because they're a big piece of making the kids feel safe they really get to know their sros and uh and really our administrators do a good job as well you know most nine times out of ten um the students from what i've seen feel very comfortable coming forward with information and sharing that information you know the you know some of the some of the things that we promote like see something say something you know those kind of trying to build that culture of hey if you've got information related to safety or otherwise it's going to harm anybody let somebody know and uh so it's been my experience that if a student doesn't directly tell an sro or a teacher or a school staff member you know they'll tell a parent uh again crime stoppers has been very effective friends for life which is another uh program within crime stoppers that kind of opens it up to any subject at all that's been very helpful and successful and the fort Worth officer that runs that program uh Paula Gibson she comes out to all our schools and does presentations to to the staff about the importance of reporting anything that may be a danger to themselves personally or to the school so there's a combination of things going on and to to address that so i i was curious you talked about the um the school monitors and then earlier in the presentation there were some trainings that were specific to our sros now i understand those are probably law enforcement courses but do the monitors is there the opportunity for those school monitors to receive if not that training that the sros receive some sort of similar training while they don't act as an sro they have that knowledge base and ability right they and those staff members don't receive anything formal through the police department but we train them ourselves internally okay yeah and one thing that's great about the relationship and the partnership is at any point it was determined we could be of assistance we would definitely be willing to work with uh any ISD on training any staff member they may have and with this new uh active shooter training for school staff that has just been developed we'll send our campus monitors to that so we will take full advantage of that yes uh daniel a question for you follow up to what uh the councilman vick mentioned about the monitors not all the port worth ISD campuses have monitors correct not yet but they're fixing to are they okay like i just stated we okay school board approve for all schools to have them okay good and is that at elementary and middle school include yes sir okay and high schools i guess oh yeah well they already have them they have several they have multiple yeah okay thank you you bet thanks you all right you bet thank you oh sorry well go ahead no good to see you so chief thank you yes sir um so during the course of the presentation now i was uh reached out to by the superintendent of keller ISD uh wanting to get with your staff and uh maybe change the narrative from the question that council member nettles asked you earlier and uh i think they're going to be reaching out asking for more SRO at their middle schools uh i'd like for you just take a moment i appreciate everything you've done uh and and we've had conversations with keller ISD and uh yeah yeah i know that's a different discussion for another day i think but um could you just take a brief moment and and uh express for the public where we are with keller ISD and where you'd like to be absolutely uh we value our relationship with keller ISD just like we do all of our ISDs we value our relationship with dr westfall and his staff the school board members and everyone else who has a genuine vested interest in the safety of the campuses the students the faculty and staff and keller ISD and as we have said before and had a recent meeting about and i thank you for calling that meeting council member we are willing to work with any ISD when it comes to staffing when it comes to increased staffing obviously there will be conversations that need to be had with this group with the city manager's office but we are more than willing to work with ISDs when it comes to providing the appropriate number of SROs in their schools based on their budgeting and their needs yes sir what uh question were you referring to that i asked you had asked earlier if any districts had pushed for increasing their staffing oh in SROs outside of today outside of today okay okay so the next step for the process there is an m and c that's scheduled to be voted on on september 13th authorizing fy 23 school resource officer contracts uh one thing i want to just close with and before i take any final questions as the mayor so eloquently stated uvallity is the reason a lot of these conversations are occurring there were already things going on with the department not because of me but some really smart people in the department to actually improve our breaching tools which we're now working to provide to all officers we think we have about 500 of these improved breaching tools one of which i got to use during some training recently we have training going on with our officers we have training going on with our schools but what i want you to know maybe is the most important thing of all is we have officers who are empowered to make decisions in emergency situations and all training for years when it comes to responding to active shooter training said you do not wait for an order you arrive on scene there is an active threat that is your order and you will go in alone if necessary and i'm telling you right now that's what for pd will do god forbid if we're ever presented with such a situation i'd be happy to take any other questions any questions for chief notes thank you thank you very much chief we appreciate you thank you chief is everybody ready for the last presentation who wants to talk about affordability of community centers i'd like to he's there he's there oh i have to leave but i do want to leave a couple of questions about this on the table if you all still have a quorum when i leave since jerry's gone he's still here well he's not here uh what uh the the two the questions that i want to raise are how we handle mobile recreation summer day which is funded by the rainwater foundation compared to cummo summer camp summer day camp i should have mentioned this to you but the question was raised specifically lion's heart which does not have benefit of a foundation and if you get money from a foundation somebody has to apply for it and you know what what would happen or how could we address getting the same kind of treatment at a cummo summer day camp i know a few people in cummo so that's it and i'll let you take it up from there yeah and okay why don't and even if you have to leave these gentlemen are going to address that and and michael is going to handle it yes we have victor turner and dave lewis take it away guys okay i'll start off good afternoon mayor counsel will be as brief as we can long as necessary uh i think that question did come up about affordability community center programs but we're just focused on two the afterschool program and summer day camp uh be the focus of our presentation so some of the objectives that we look at as part of the program is capacity of course uh and that would be one of the slides to afterschool program summer day camp financial assistance current underwriting opportunities i think that uh touch on what council member bivvans talked about and then a brief summary as with any program transportation is an issue we do have vans with the neighborhood services program part uh rents vehicles for transportation the facility size obviously is an issue that we have to take in account for the number of kids that are there we have an exemption for uh it being a licensed child care facility and then of course ratios having the proper number of staff and students as you can see the program is money through friday or dismissal at six o'clock we do offer discounts for families that have more than one child in the program and also there's an employee discount you can see the fees for without transportation and with transportation so you do see a difference there but we have already have plans to put in place to uh level those two between part and neighborhood services so it would be the same fee uh regardless of what center you go to and what department is uh administering that afterschool program effective january 1st so you'll see the impact there uh as far as revenue i believe uh the 21 22 school year we had 767 students that participated uh generated a little over 330 thousand dollars uh in fees uh victor do you know what the fee will be if it's going to be the same it will be the 40 or will be it a drop down to the neighborhood services rate the 30 without transportation and 40 with transportation for both both departments so we did some benchmarking you can see how we compare with some of the other programs other cities and then local programs in fort worth um we're in the bottom half as far as uh rate so it's uh fairly affordable uh in comparison to other options uh locally and around the state here you can see our capacity we were not maxed out in regards to capacity uh you can see this is for 18 sites it would have been 19 but north side community center was closed due to construction uh so over nine month period you can see monthly capacity is almost a thousand and uh we served uh 830 uh individuals uh this past school year at the bottom is a breakdown between neighborhood services and part and that difference is mainly because there are more centers uh operated by park and recreation than neighborhood services can i stop you for just a second to get a clarification what's the difference between monthly capacity total capacity and total capacity yeah so if you take that monthly capacity and multiply by the nine months you'll get to this so that's like the annual so because they pay monthly we just want to put what the monthly capacity is okay so some kids don't would not every month so i may not go so we're like a three about 3000 we have capacity for about 3000 more yeah and we expect these numbers to grow this is still post covid where kids are just coming back to joining these programs we expect to be in a 75 to 80 range next year okay thank you so i believe next is coming up summer day camp you're gonna have to control the minds off but i got you moving on into summer day camp and some of the questions we've had on this i think we've um answered on this slide you can see the base rate without field trips is 60 this is nine weeks money through friday seven a.m to six p.m it includes a meal it's about 52 and a half hours of programming per week on this so the base fee five days a week is 60 we charge an extra 25 to go on the field trips averages out to a little over a dollar an hour for that with fee assistance you can see it goes down 25 on the base rate we don't currently offer fee assistance for the trips and that was one of the questions that we're addressing here another question was why are we having them pay ahead of time when not everybody can afford either the 475 or 315 ahead we provided an opportunity to pay ahead of time but you don't necessarily have to pay for the entire summer at one point again if you just took nine weeks time 60 that would give you the 540 we give a discount to 475 if you are able to pay it once but you can pay it once and get a scholarship so it would be $315 per child if you can pay all at once we just require a six dollar deposit and then essentially paid in full before the camp season starts we do also offer a 10 percent multi child discount and a 10 percent employee discount so you technically could get the 315 and then minus 10 percent as well if you have multiple kids that are attending the camp as well do you have any idea you don't have tell me today but I'm just curious if there's probably a price hindrance for families especially if they do want to go on the field trip we don't offer a scholarship I would love to know citywide what the gap might be on average per summer because I would venture to tell you some of our foundations in town be more than happy to fill that gap if we could tell them a number yeah we have another scenario that we haven't necessarily made a formal proposal to do that but it could be that we offer scholarships right and if just for instance if we offered scholarship down to even 10 dollars per child on field trips that would the revenue decrease on that would be about 17 000 dollars okay so that was a good question ma'am my other question add to that if they do not attend the field trip are they not allowed to go to the camp that day they still do go to camp that day they just don't go on the trip they go to the center but not yeah yeah they're still programming at the center again talking about the benchmarking when we do our fall benchmarking for all of the fees within the department we always try to strive to be right in the median you can see this is pretty much right in the middle some of those fees do include camps within it and it's hard to break it out each scenario is slightly different but again we strive to be in the middle and that's pretty much right where we are a little bit about the summer camp data again 18 sites for nine weeks again the weekly capacity because we have them pay weekly we have spots for 50 to 145 kids each week the total capacity if you times that by nine for the entire summer is just under 14 000 last year in 22 we had 11 683 capacity on that and we served 1671 individual unique kids over summer and you can see that's an important number is to get into some of the other data down the road here and looking at the budgets you can see broken down by department that you know in total the revenue brought in was 627 000 with the estimated expenditures because they're not all calculated yet for this summer is just over or just around five hundred sixty five thousand dollars we do have a cost recovery philosophy for camps to cost recover at 100 to pay for those and not subsidize those that's currently it's obviously a policy decision but that's where we are right now and then moving on into the field trips the fee as I mentioned before is 25 a week destination such as six flags epic waters fortwood zoo some of our own pools transportation is included in that as I referenced earlier there were 1671 unique campers this summer 1390 of them went on a camp at least once during the summer again right around 83 went on a camp or on a trip at least once talking a little bit about the fee assistance eligibility these are all the programs that families are are able to show us proof of being a part of to enact that scholarship the free and reduced lunch is the top one the most common scene just need to bring proof from a school they have documentation for that that they apply the assistance data currently in the park department we have a 75 000 cap on the scholarships we're actually proposing to just remove the caps even though we don't get to the cap um in the interest of being affordable and not limiting access both departments are talking about just not even having a cap at all even though they were under it um again with that 1671 individual served 508 used fee assistance so about 30 that go to camp are using a scholarship to do it the interesting stat on that is of the total registrations that we saw for camp about 50 of those are on scholarships so 30 of the people are taking up 50 of the spots which means people on scholarship are going more frequently than those that aren't on scholarship talked a little bit about earlier about the underwriting opportunities these are some opportunities that are happening currently the rainwater foundation is funding the swim less than portion of the mobile recreation program that happens in four sites they also use neighboring parks on fridays is kind of their mini field trips komo summer day camp is also getting funds from lion's heart that pays for those field trips and makes that no cost to the families we do have a program donations are accepted for a send a kid to camp it's not widely and proactively promoted that that is an opportunity as well currently it's used to get those who do not do not are not eligible for scholarships to get them to the scholarship level it's not used to waive fees at this point but it could be used in a number of ways if it was desired real quick some of the takeaways we talked about the afterschool programs at 61 capacity we expect that to grow to 75 or 80 percent we have a plan to align fees for the same programs we don't want there to be fee differences based on what center that you go to we've talked about that summer day camp is at 84 capacity in 22 it's actually 83 percent of the registrants went on at least field trip summer day camp 30 percent received fee assistance and i also mentioned that about 50 of the total registrations come from those 30 percent of unique disputes any questions well i think we all have questions let's go ahead um the afterschool program is there any for like scholarship the need for scholarships so i heard i just want to make sure i heard you say that we still have capacity to provide some scholarships correct correct yeah the 75 000 and the 40 000 we showed for department only applies to camps we actually don't have a cap when it comes to the afterschool program so those are those can be correct as many correct scholarship and then um and so for the camps we're also not at capacity for those right like we still have additional yeah there's scholarships that are not being used from a funding perspective and actual capacity in the camp as well okay uh i will say i my children went to both um fire station afterschool camp and their summer camp and it was great and i lived in the neighborhood several years before i even knew it existed and when i found out how cheap it was i was like why am i paying for all of these camps when you know the city of fort worth has something that was really great and really reasonable um and so i tell you that kind of anecdote to say that i think that we can do a better job at advertising this particular camp this program and the cost associated with it because i mean i i was floored and it was it such a great opportunity because their community centers they're local you know they they're in your neighborhood you're not driving across town to drop them off at whatever the 27 different camps we sign them up for every summer and so um i think maybe it would be behoove us to to do a more targeted campaign maybe with the um schools or neighborhoods thank you michael well just echoing that um you know i i'm glad i i think i started this conversation just not understanding the difference between the community centers that we have but i i want to say i put the focus again and kind of what may or saying but also echoing the little somewhat of what elizabeth said um the people that are using these are the people that can't afford really the camps to send their kids to all these camps um they can't send them to camp longhorn or name your 700 camps that you can do it that this is really for the most part their lifeline to be able to continue to have their job especially during the summer or after school etc so they need a place for their kids to go so i want us to continue to look at this and i don't think and that's what it was brought to my attention to i don't think it's fair that some kids get to have to stay and some don't go on the the the field trips that the kids get to do so whatever that looks like and i'm glad you asked that question i think that if the foundations knew about or other people or other organizations they're willing to step up to make sure that no kid gets left behind if you want to use that terminology and i think one option might be for you and staff to explore on both sides is what would it look like to have just an opt out so everyone goes on a field trip this is the cost and for families might not opt out for a variety of reasons a certain trip is just not something that they want their children to go on and then what is the gap based on our costs that we think we would incur by creating that model and trying that next summer and my second request would be a longer term conversation there are a few camps in Fort Worth that i know my kids have really enjoyed one in particular a zoo camp another one is museum of science and history has traditionally done camps these are just two small examples there are others is there is there a potential to do maybe not just a pilot next summer with some of these camps in partnership with the zoo to do a zoo camp integrated with their model but there would be kids that are on our cost model for um Fort Worth camps and i'm sure the zoo would be more than happy to explore that option for us and there's just still i consider affordable but um they have a gap in care especially in the afternoons for younger kids so yeah that's a great idea we'd love to explore them i just can i i want to draw something michael said um i think you're right that the affordability absolutely makes it a lifeline for some people um i also think that there's a lot of folks particularly like the fire station community center where Fairmount really sends all of their children right like there's a good majority of kids from the neighborhood that go there and so i think we've already captured those the folks that need us because they probably sought us out but the the people that haven't are kind of who i feel like we should be also letting know because it's not just a it's it for me it wasn't a last resort it really was one of the best summer camp experiences that my kids had sans the broken arm but that wasn't the community center's fault that was my kids fault yeah yeah interesting enough fire station is actually the lowest percentage of scholarship participants it's like seven percent but to address your point earlier one of the things we thought about was just having it it's a fee for the week that includes the camp even the perceptions a little bit different if you're adding on to it where if that's just the base fee the perception is different so that may be something that we look at as well where you could say i don't really want to go to x field trip so there may be a chance to reduce that and opt out rather than opt in right okay thank you this is great thank you gentlemen very much appreciate victor is a man a few words today all the time thank you thank you thanks guys that wraps up the presentations for today i will refer that there were a number of budget responses that are also in your material we are also available anytime after this meeting and before our next budget work session which is sometime in september that if anybody has any questions we don't have any further presentations planned as part of the budget process so if there any need for any presentations or questions of getting additional information just let us know how many more budget cycles that we look uh meeting sessions that we're looking at too scheduled in september okay i can't remember the days off hand and if you can just give us a hit a heads up on when we're going to bring fire back so we can be really prepared for that and that they have adequate time to deal with us all right all right perfect any other questions council nope okay meeting adjourned thank you