 So it is 6 p.m. on Tuesday, January 2nd. I'm gonna call to order this regular meeting of the Liquor Control Board. Please join us in the Pledge of Allegiance led by Deputy Mayor Thomas Renner. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. Thank you. Thank you. All right, please join us, Jenny. For the first third, restaurant and outside consumption. And why they're all conditional because they haven't yet received their certificate of fitness. And for standing stones, Lily is here today. Would you like to join us again and chat about your restaurant application? And that's about it to start. We might bridge out into some, like a salad of the day or a sandwich of the day. But basically, the cheeses will be sold retail as well. And you pick which ones you want, bring them up to the counter, we'll charge you a plenty of free theater, bring it to your table. That way you'll get to choose exactly what you want. So I think it's the most streamlined way of rest of it. As far as the first-class license goes, it's not gonna be open late, at the very latest, I would say maybe in the summer, but that's pushing it too. And we're gonna have flights of lines that people can try things before date by them. We are also going to do hiring lines at a lower cost because then you'll still make the same amount for Bob, but the customer will be able to try better lines and we'll still make the same amount. So I'm waiting for the situation. I'm looking forward to it. Yeah, any questions for Lily? Okay. And no concerns from staff on any of these? Well, wait, do we have anyone online? I need to check first. Are there any questions or comments from members of the public on any of these liquor license applications? The only thing I'm thinking about is planning ahead. If you intend to have any sidewalk use timelines for that, you'll want to connect with Jenny to get an application in for that. I had Tom take her form into that briefly a few months ago, but I wouldn't like to have a sidewalk next time. I think I'll be back to see you again. Just every couple of months. You're all the time. Okay, hearing no concerns, do I have a motion to approve items A, B, and C? So most. Second. Motion by Thomas, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Motion carries. Thank you. That is the end of our liquor control board agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Motion by Bryn, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Motion carries. Thank you. Thank you. I'm gonna send a really quick text message to counselor judge. And then I will call the next meeting to order. Okay. I've got 6.05 PM. I will call to order the Winnieski City Council regular meeting. First up is agenda review. Any concerns about the order this evening? No. Okay. Next up is public comment. So this is a chance for, if you're here for something that is not on tonight's agenda, you can speak during public comment. If you're here for one of the agenda topics, and you can wait until we reach that, I'll invite public comment for each of the agenda topics. If you're attending by Zoom, you can use the chat or raise hand if you wish to speak for public comment. Oh, Judy, I didn't even see you sneak in. You're all set for now. Okay. Okay, seeing no comments online or in the room, we will move to the consent agenda. We have our city council minutes from December 11, accounts payable from December 28, and payroll warrants November 26 to December 9, and December 10 to 23. Any questions, comments about the consent agenda items? Nope. Do I have a motion to approve the consent agenda? So moved. Second. Motion by Bryn, second by Aurora. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries, thank you. On to council reports. Would you like to kick us off, Aurora? Sure, all right. Reach back to last year. So on 12, 12, Tuesday, we had our most recent meeting on the safe, healthy, connected people commission. At this meeting, the Winooski Library staff and committee presented an update on kind of their stats for the last year and what has looked like for the library. They highlighted that there has been some really exciting increased usage. There's been a 76.3% increase in in-person visits, as well as a 46% increase in e-book and audio book circulation, so both virtual and in-person, seeing some really high usage. And all this kind of great work and service, there are some extreme challenges that the library staff faces. Winooski ranks last in square footage, which I think we all know, and it also lasts in collections that it holds, so the number of books and items. The library's serving similar sizes, often average eight paid staff positions to Winooski's three, and that leads to these other communities can be open longer, so 43 hours versus Winooski's 34. I'm sure in the community services budget we'll get some more information, and I know that we have a part-time circulation assistant, so just thought these are some helpful things to keep in mind as we're looking at the budget, and I'm sure Ray will have more details. On 12, 14, Thursday we had our by-monthly inclusion and belonging commission meeting. We had a really in-depth conversation about how the ambassador role to the other commissions is and isn't working. We're still kind of looking of how to put that feedback into action, but some suggestions really included the importance of having ambassadors be in voting members to really help empower engagement. Ambassadors were also interested in finding time with or having emails from staff liaisons to catch up on meetings that they miss, both on the months when they have inclusion and belonging meetings instead, and if for some health or other emergency keeps them from attending the meeting that they would normally attend. So just having that additional context and the power to vote, it sounds like they are really hoping that would help ambassadors feel more empowered. So those are the main items there, and I'm sure with that last one, myself, Jenny, Elaine, and Chair Silver will have some additional information. All right, thank you. Sure. The Infrastructure Commission met on December 21st. We discussed the walk bike plan that came to council earlier in December. The chair and vice chair will be getting back to me soon on whether or not they have recommendations for any changes to the draft plan. We discussed additional public comment that was provided ahead of that meeting as well. This month, the Infrastructure Commission will be meeting on the 18th. We anticipate meeting in our regular location up in the community room at the pool, and anticipate the conversation to focus around the La Fountain Diane Street scoping and where the project team is with scoping that out in the next steps. The Airport Commission meeting usually is on the first Wednesday of the month. It has been moved to January 17th, so that will be at 4 p.m., the 10-in line room person. Recurring items always include noise exposure map updates and noise complaints as well as noise mitigation efforts. Their noise exposure map technical advisory group is meeting on January 18th, I believe, and that should be posted to the BTB Sound website. I don't know if there's a link yet to attend online, but I will be following up on that. The Winooski Bridge replacement public hearing will be occurring at the Winooski School District on the 23rd. I'm sure there was more information from the city manager on that. And they're currently, as it relates to the bridge replacement, they're currently is a public survey out. They're seeking input and feedback to help guide scoping and priorities for design. I'll leave it at that. All right, thank you. Last month, I was able to join Burlington Mayor Weinberger for a presentation to our state legislators around the priorities we have for state legislation, which we adopted in early December. And we also heard from state legislators there about work they already have underway. A lot of which is focused to address the overdose epidemic increasing crime and other public safety concerns. Last month's planning commission meeting included continued review of our zoning for updates necessary related to the Homes Act. Our zoning administrator presented adjustments to our dimensional standards, like lot size coverage, setbacks, et cetera, that would support the act as well as better aligned with the actual development that's already here on the ground in Winooski. The current standards actually don't match existing development patterns. Also should make three and four unit buildings more viable. The planning commission seems supportive and will continue to dig through those. And the chair, vice chair, myself, our housing initiative director and commission chair and councilor judges liaison will be meeting again to coordinate for the joint commission meetings. Planning commission has returned to twice monthly meeting schedule this month. So the second and fourth Thursdays at 6.30 p.m. And finance commission is on hiatus while we are focused on budgeting. Nice and short really. The downtown Winooski board hasn't been able to meet for a variation of different reasons. So hopefully next week, that said, Blingo continues as a monthly event. So this month it will be January the ninth at onion city chicken and oyster. Thank you. All right. Moving on to city updates. Elaine. City updates for today. Tonight continues our fiscal year 2025 staff budget presentations. Please stick around for the public safety presentation that will include the police department, fire department and code enforcement. Feel free to ask questions and provide input on how you think your tax dollars should be spent for the full schedule of budget meetings and information. Please visit Winooski.gov slash FY 25. You can also send questions between meetings to budget at Winooski.gov. We are hiring a new chief of police. Please take our community survey to help inform the selection process. This anonymous survey is estimated to take two minutes to complete. Visit Winooski.gov slash survey to provide feedback. We'll close the survey first thing Friday. So don't delay if you haven't responded yet. Please do. If you haven't responded yet, please do so before then. And only one response per person please. If you're interested in running for a local office, the following terms are up for election on town meeting day, which is Tuesday, March 5th, 2024. The terming seats are mayor for a three-year term, two counselors for a two-year term, that's for city council, three school board trustees and a Champlain Water District Commissioner. Residents must file a consent of candidate form and petition with a minimum of 30 signatures, more are encouraged, by 5 p.m. on Monday, January 29th, 2024. For full details and forms, visit Winooski.gov slash town meeting or stop by, call or email the city clerk's office at 655-6410 or clerk at Winooski.gov and note that any legal resident may run for these seats. Per state law, all dogs owned in the city of Winooski must be registered with the city clerk on or before April 1st. And with the new year upon us, now is the perfect time to update your dog licenses. Visit the city clerk's office Monday through Friday from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m. to complete this process. Please do be sure to have a copy of the dog's current rabies certificate. If you have questions, call or email the city clerk's office at again, 655-6410 or clerk at Winooski.gov. Thank you. We are into our regular items then. First up for discussion is the FY25 staff budget presentations for public safety. I believe Chief Audie will go first. You'll have the honor. Good evening. I think Paul's gonna share his screen for me. Yeah, so once again, thanks for the opportunity to present the FY25 budget. No matter how many of these we do, they're fun, they're nerve-wracking, they're challenging. But also it's a time to reflect, right? So I just want you to know that we do take that time to, I think all of us as department heads, it's a time to reflect and kind of understand fully what we've done and possibly what we need to do more of. And then I also, because I'm gonna talk a lot about staffing in this budget, I wanna make clear to you and or any of the staff that may be watching or residents, this isn't a reflection of any of our staff not doing a good job. This is simply about the demands for service and your part-time staff do a tremendous job of providing service to this community, unlike a lot of other communities. So I just wanna make sure that we all understand that this isn't a reflection of any individual or lack of their efforts. So I wanted to be clear with that. So the outline is who we are, our continued focus, Winooski Fire, Winooski Fire. This also includes code enforcement that has since moved to PD. So this will be really focused on fire and the code enforcement piece is our inspection, the inspection piece, the budget, a look forward and then obviously questions. Our work chart continues to slowly grow by design. On the left-hand column, that's all part-time employees. That's your part-time emergency response staff from the battalion chief down to the per diem folks. The fourth block down is one you're gonna hear me talk a lot about tonight is the part-time firefighter and again that dwindling number. Not a Winooski specific problem of region, local, regional, state, quite frankly, a national problem. We have in the middle column under myself added a part-time fire inspector. We're able to do this with the reorg of code enforcement and that's already bringing a ton of value back to the table as far as our depth and our available resources. Next slide, Paul. I will show this every year. I do the budget. I think it's important for all of us and this is part of my reflection and hopefully the community's reflection and this is really where Winooski really shines, in my opinion, with the community risk reduction efforts it does, the investments you've made, the leadership you've provided. And that's around the education, engineering, enforcement, emergency response and economic incentive and truly every day our staff is out getting ahead of the call. We will never get ahead of every call. You'll hear the sirens, you'll see the fire trucks, we'll be doing enforcement but a huge percentage of our work is ahead of the call or issue and we all should be very proud of that and it's an important part of how we do business here in Winooski. Kind of year in review for us. What have we done? And this is July 1, 22 to June 30th of 23. The public building inspections on the right, the lighter blue, 1179, that's a pretty steady number. Emergency response, 566, that's up over 100 calls from last year. Our reinspections is something that I'm calling out this year. We spoke about this last year and trying to understand how many reinspections we're having to do. So this is really our first year of being able to pull that data point out so from here forward you will see that. And that's as much work as an initial inspection quite frankly. So it's an important number to keep track of and really something for the community risk reduction. Are we doing everything we can for the property owners, the landlords, the tenants to understand what they need to do to be compliant or helping provide resources for those that need to make corrections. So that's a pretty important number for us to understand tonight and to look for you all to look forward to in the community to look forward to in the future. Certainly we'll be part of our workflow, our work plans. And then building permits. Again, that's something we do in conjunction with planning and zoning or public safety admin. That is quite a bit of work. How does that match up year to year? On the bottom, you're seeing a three-year run of emergency response on the far left, public building inspections, obviously the reinspections and then the building permits. And the purple is this year. So again, the numbers are, the data is showing us where our emergency responses are increasing, our public building inspections are increasing. And obviously the reinspections is a new one. Building permits appear to be pretty stable. If anyone has questions, please jump in as we go through this. Oh, John, I was wondering, is the reinspection data from years past lumped in with the 21, 20, and 22 public building inspections? That is just a one-year look. Okay. We haven't tracked it. Our software is fairly new. I say fairly new, we're two or three years into it, but we're able to now start to, when they go to do a reinspection, that is a type of inspection that we are calling out. A data point that we all spoke about. There's a great question, I think last year or maybe the year before of how are we doing that? We're going back two or three times. And that would be the next data point of the reinspections as we dig into it. Is it one additional inspection we're going back? Is it two, three, four, five times? How does our enforcement line up with that? So that's a great. Yeah, so in 21 and 22, just public buildings, inspections, I guess what I'm trying to say, should we consider, I'm trying to see kind of how much, we are already seeing this 2023, there's an increase in building inspections. Should we be looking at the, trying to figure out how best to word this, 2021 and 2022, would those kind of be lumped together, building inspections and reinspections, or are they just the building inspections and you weren't tracking reinspections under any code? So that's a question I would have to go back and look. It may have included those all as an inspection, public building inspection. So if this was two years ago, and we may in fact be telling you we did 2,000 change inspections, does that make sense? Now that I'm saying that, that does show in the data when I looked at this, that 2,000 number and change is what we've reflected on, but we're able to, with the data now, start to dissect that old, understand it a little better. Okay, thank you. And a follow-up question to that. Do you, are you able to differentiate what categories for what the reinspections are for? Possibly, and you'll see some more data on what type of inspections I think in this next slide. So I believe we will be able to, we definitely know kind of what buckets we have for inspection types as kind of- And just thinking on the housing, so in order to try and mitigate some of the reinspection work, just thinking, and the time and labor that goes into that, if there's more of an educational opportunity with the housing side of things. There's certainly an education piece. We don't do nearly enough to educate, I say educate. But that's a two-sided coin, right? We used to put out a pre-inspection list, then people would get way ahead of us. And there'd be a change in the law that they weren't aware of. Oh yeah. You know, smoke detection's a good one. You can go to Lowell's and buy ionization smoke detectors are a hundred and something dollars a piece. But they're illegal in the state of Vermont. You can buy them because they're protected under the consumer products. But detection here in the state has to be photoelectric type. So you went and spent that money and now we're telling you you got the wrong type. So we were fighting a different battle. And something we need to revisit, but it certainly takes resources to be able to do that. So specific to the public building inspections, you know, the 1179 that were listed as initial inspections on the other side. I'll call your attention to the very bottom of this. You know, 845 of those were residential inspections. So that's our residential, just what it says, right? Our rental pieces, our commercial inspections are up this year. That will continue to grow. We knew that there would be a slow roll in that as we brought on the full-time fire marshal. That's an important part of what we do to support the liquor license issuance and overall just making sure our commercial, our restaurants, our other businesses are safe. The construction permits, final inspection, closeouts, time of sales are down. I mean, we would know that, right? I mean, the interest rates, the economy, that all, you know, those are down significantly. Property complaints is one we visit every year. You know, 83 this year, that's up 22 from the previous year. You know, and I think that's a lot of, quite frankly, the work you're all doing out as you're in the community, getting people to use the property complaint forms and really access. And that's called out in our work plan this year, goals to continue to advertise that. That's a huge tool. People can advocate for themselves. We can deal with smaller problems. So, you know, that isn't a negative number to see go up, in my opinion. That's really a sign of, again, you know, we wish we were ahead of those property complaints all the time. But if we can't, I wanna deal with those as quickly as we can for the welfare of those that are having issues. Brandon, hopefully to somewhat of your question, the four bubbles, you know, what types, what buckets of inspections, you know, what percentage of those on the top left, you know, 44% approximate. These are approximate numbers. I'm just looking through the raw data. 44% of the violations are life safety through the National Fire Protection NFPA. So, those are your smoke detection and your egress, that sorts of thing. Going clockwise, 24% of the violations are electrical in nature. And these can be minor. These could, you know, a lot of what we find is maintenance-type issues on the electrical. Winooski used to have electrical inspectors. So, for the most part, you know, the electrical pieces are compliant. They're just lack of maintenance. So, broken face plates, bulbs not covered, you know, GFI outlets, that sorts of thing. And again, those are, through the community risk reduction, you know, we can get ahead of, you know, get somebody to put in a GFI outlet instead of having a fire because of water and, you know, shorting circuit and that sort of thing. On the bottom right, 10% of the violations are authority having jurisdiction. Those are issues that just quite don't fit into the, you know, any one code. So, the staff is writing those. It may be violations that is specifically in our ordinance. And then lastly, is 22% of the violations are the Vermont rental codes. And I would like to say the Vermont rental codes are changing a bit on how the state does business with those. So, this health department will no longer manage the rental code. It's all moved to the division of fire safety. I have some concerns with that and how it relates to, they've assigned five people in the division of fire safety a deal of the state. So, through the department of health, if you called about a complaint in Manuski, it immediately came to us. And without having done a ton of homework, initially the division of fire safety is saying they want all complaints to go to the state and they'll filter them, review them and then they'll come to Manuski. That could create some huge delays for us. They're not gonna answer the phone on a Saturday afternoon like we do when you don't have heat. You know, they don't consider that an emergency. Sorry, when it's 10 below, that's an emergency. It's certainly gonna be here in Manuski as far as our staff will answer the phone and try to figure out what needs to happen. So, not throwing stones, just something we gotta work through with them. They're just rolling this out. This was through the legislature. I understand they're dealing with many communities that don't have any code enforcement. It's all gonna be reactive, no proactive work. It's all gonna be complaint-based for the state. So, we just gotta communicate with them. I just saw that roll out, I believe the 28th of December of the changes and they were saying they were rolling it out January 1st and I saw it on the 28th. So, it's on our list. Questions on this? Bryn, does that help answer a little bit of your questions as far as inspection types? Literally, there's hundreds of different types of violations that could happen. So, yeah, it was mainly categorizing the re-inspection side of things. So, I think this is adequate. And how it falls into fire safety versus Vermont Rental Code. Yeah, just thinking of like, there were some changes to the legislation and regulations and how much is falling over into that side of things. So, it was kind of just a categorization. How much of it relates to new legislation? And I know some of these standards are updated all the time. So, it is easier said than done to like parse it out. Nope, I just wanted to try to understand. Majority, it sounds like majority are, it may, the majority may be to standards or updated standards rather than some other, I don't know, ongoing issues that can be more easily addressed, I guess. Yeah, and a lot of, I know we're kind of going backwards a little bit. And a lot of the re-inspection is being driven by, we're still the supply chain from COVID, workforce shortages. People are truly struggling to get contractors to do the work. So, that's really extending, it's putting the majority of people over the 30 days. So, we end up with a, they're able to do part of the work, which we really appreciate, but it's generating a re-inspection. So, I don't know how long it will take to kind of get through that, or is it the new normal? I don't know. Well, it's good to note, because that isn't something that's reflected on here. Thanks. Next slide, Paul. So, emergency responses, again, 566 is up just over 100 from last year. You know, the biggest increase for us is false alarms. I'm thankful that fire instances are down by about six in the community. Fire-related type calls. But our false alarms are way up. So, I'm trying to, can't react to just one year of data, but it will certainly be interesting to understand. You know, we're out almost, seems like every day now for elevator emergencies. So, what does that increase do, right? I mean, if we see this spike next year, and Paul, if you go to the next slide, we can kind of see that in a graph. So, this is 2016, 17 to current. You know, the different types of calls that we go on. You know, again, on the left, our fire instances are down from last year, certainly. There's no spike there. EMS is up, which makes sense. You know, across the board, regionally, nationally, EMS is off the chart, as far as their call volumes. So, it makes sense that we're feeling the pressure of supporting EMS more. You know, we're being called to support them more. You know, our service calls are up from last year, and then our false alarms is a big spike, right? And a lot of that, again, is elevator emergencies, you know, false smoke alarms, those sorts of things. So, you know, as we look at, as we're gonna talk more about buying service, right? You know, buying coverage demands continue to grow, and you know, what is mutual aid? What is auto aid? You know, on the right, the fire instances, there isn't any community around us that isn't gonna come in our time of need. Whether it's a fire or, you know, a big event, you know, I relate that to fire. When you start to get into service calls, good intent calls, false alarms, that's really the cost of doing business as a city, right? As we build out, you know, for every building that's built, whether it's, you know, EMS demands, fire demands via service calls or false alarms or PD calls, you know, each one of those facilities over its lifespan will generate calls. And, you know, again, I don't wanna overreact to one year of data, but if this continues, we, you know, this community will understand the build out it's done and the cost that is, right? I mean, we all want grandless growth, but that comes at a cost, eventually. You know, the building's downtown when they're brand new didn't generate a lot of costs, right? But as we, as those building age, those components age, the usage, you know, everyone's feeling the pressures of the economy maintenance may be lacking. That will generate, that will push service calls, false alarms, that sort of thing. So, yeah, questions on that information presented? Helpful to kind of see a several year kind of reflection? Yeah, I found this slide really helpful. I was just wondering if you could kind of define like what is a good intent versus a false alarm? So good intent may be you called because you heard your neighbors smoke alarm. We get there, there's no longer alarm going off. There's a good intent. I guess that's the simplest way to put it. A false alarm is we're gonna go and your detector's beeping because it needs batteries or it's end of life and it's beeping, that sort of thing. We do a lot of cooking, stove top fires, those are considered fires, those are categorized. And that's all done on the national, these all fall under different national pieces through NIFRS, the National Fire Reporting System. It's not something we kind of put in a bucket, it's done nationally. Thank you. Yep, other questions on that? I'm curious about the elevators. So I'm assuming you're getting calls as people are getting stuck in elevators. But is your classifying that as a false alarm? So we were just talking about this today in the firehouse, right? Some are categorized as a service call. Some are as a false alarm. False alarm, someone's hit the call button. It's called nine and one, it's called downstairs. We go, elevators working fine, no one's in it. Service call, maybe the elevator isn't operating correctly. And if someone's stuck in it, it may be the EMS rescue. So again, very specific. There's a couple of things that could change it pretty quickly. Sure, okay. If you were to go to an elevator called, that had been broken or whatever, and I'm assuming all the business, all the bigger apartment buildings with the elevator inspections in town? Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that's part of our annual inspection is checking those. Another part on the false alarms, and we'll see this a little bit, is our auto aid that we do to Colchester and the college campus at St. Mike's. And I'll talk a little bit more about that, but I'm just, that explains another part of the spike. Thank you. So we do this every year, is the calls by day of the week on the top left, calls by month on the right, and then calls within our kind of breakdown. And for those not familiar, zero is kind of midnight for me. And we get past noon or lunch, 1,300 is one o'clock, 1,400 is two o'clock. This is just done in military time. So again, these are interesting trends for me to look at. I wish, whether it's calls by day of the week or calls by month or calls by hour, that there's more significant rises, if you will, because it would help us staff. And again, I believe you would hear from PD, it's fairly consistent for them in years past too. So it's good to keep our thumb on this and to review this on an annual basis to watch for those trends. That's a good part about data, right? And it does help as far as our staffing and where we wanna invest or where we recommend we invest. I have a question about the chart on the top right. Is that fiscal year? So this is all July, yes. Any numbers you were seeing or July one to June 30th? So I'm just not quite following the purple line for, so in theory that would be FY 24, right? No, so this was 21 or excuse me, 22 July one of 22 to June 30th of 23. Okay, it looks like you're missing data for May June of 23, is that for June? Oh, possibly for June, yeah, I didn't catch that. There's no spike there, I can tell you that when I looked at it, but yeah, now that's a good point. Yeah, I just, that was contributing to my confusion. Is this fiscal year 23 or fiscal year 24? And then with the drop off, I was like, yeah. No, I did not catch that. Sorry. Okay, thanks. If no other questions, Paul next slide, please. So then we get to talk about service demands and really about our staffing. We have for a few years now really looked at our staffing in three different blocks. So our daytime staff, which is your fire chief, your fire marshal, your assistant fire marshal, and now our part-time fire inspector, our public safety admin should be added in this, but not included in the call response, but that position is certainly part of our daytime staff, right? And typically we try to cover Monday through Friday, six a.m. to six p.m. We've tried several different iterations of how we do that. We've been fortunate that staff understands the need for us to be flexible. It works for me, but I'm in the city by 530, certainly by six a.m. undressed and on the floor, ready to respond to calls. Why do we try to cover those? Cause we know that most of our valued part-time folks are headed to work by six a.m. or thinking that we're not gonna get them to come in unless it's a really big fire. And they're usually not back from their full-time employment till the six p.m. hour. Is it right on the button? No, but those are the blocks that we've kind of, we call daytime staffing. The paid-on-call staff, which is in red for a reason, this is really where my concern is. And again, this is no reflection on the current paid-on-call folks. They do a tremendous job. Our service demands are up. And this is, you know, we rely heavily on them, right? I mean, it's in the bottom, you know, it's 194 calls that the paid-on-call folks answered during the six p.m. to six a.m. hours. But as I sit here tonight, I don't know who's available. No one's, we don't have a mechanism, we don't pay them to sign up. If the tones go, and the majority of the time they do. But I don't know if anyone's available. I'm responsible for protecting this city. It's 8,000 people. I don't know if anyone's available tonight. 6 p.m. to 6 a.m. I hope somebody answers the call. The majority of the time they do. But as our service demands go up, my comfort level and hoping someone answers that call, certainly my comfort level drops tremendously. The weekend duty crew, which is unlike the paid-on-call, it's the same staff, it's the same paid part-time folks, but they are signed up. I know through the weekend, for the weekend duty crew, that there's at least three people on those hours. They're available, they're committed. They're gonna answer that fire call. I know someone's gonna answer that fire call. That is much different than Monday through Friday, six p.m. to six a.m. when I don't know anyone who's gonna answer that call. So that's really the message I'm trying to send to the slide. And there were seven times we didn't answer a call this last year. I had a question about the training. So we know for the police department, we need the academy. What type of training is needed to be on-call, so? Yeah, so if you're coming with no experience, we call it the county class. It's a Chittenden County class. It's done typically by St. Mike's. It's a 80-hour class, that's what we require. It teaches you the very basics. It's not a state certificate, excuse me. It is a local mechanism for us for area departments. When I say area departments, certainly Colchester participates, St. Mike's, Essex, Underhill, Richmond, Shelvern, they all contribute to providing instructors for this Chittenden County class so that we can get people the very basic training that they need to, number one, be able to function and most importantly be safe in doing so in their said departments. And then each department kind of works through that. So you go and get the county class, which we just started paying for. Previously, it was 80 hours and we expected you to go do it on your own. We now pay for those hours, which is a good thing. That's part of the investment we've all made. And then annually, the department requires 72 hours. So you get that through your Wednesday evenings. There's always the opportunity to go on to state certifications. Those numbers grow tremendously in the 200 plus hours commitments. Those are generally done over six to eight months time frames. We try to catch the local ones. The majority of our folks do pursue that state certification. It's done on their own, we do not pay them for that. That'd be about 3,000 bucks, you know, $3,000 a person for Winooski to pay for that. We just simply can't afford it. And is there an age limit? 18. Chief, no response. I want to say it was like four calls last year and two the year before. Yeah. So small, but a growing trend. Yeah, and I don't know specifically what block that would fall under. That's fair. Those calls were answered. I want to ensure the community, this is the same Winooski didn't. So that means St. Mike's picked it up. We have mechanisms in place that we do not respond to the dispatchers downstairs in a certain time or pop up on the app, on their TV screen, if you will, on their screen. They immediately tone a neighboring department. But we want to, you know, we owe it to others. We owe it to this community to watch that number. Question about the salaries. So for the part-time on-call is that if they respond or is that just, since there isn't necessarily a schedule where it's like I'm on tonight, Tom says on the mom night. So, number one, you're paid for call. So one hour minimum, you're paid for call. If it goes over an hour, then obviously it starts to roll. And then the weekend duty crews are broken into, those are not paid hourly. Those are paid by chunks of, whether it's a full weekend or just a Saturday, Sunday. And you all have made tremendous investments in that. So in 2017, you got like 20 bucks to be on call for the weekend. It's now over $120 that the officer gets. Is it enough? I'm not pretending to say that's enough. That's what, 36 hours of coverage you do the math. It doesn't add up that much to hours. And these folks are not complaining. But it is part of our retention, right? The one thing we do here is, boy, it's a big commitment. So how do we soften that and make it worth their time? We don't require them to be right at the station. So they're home or available. You can't go to Williston for dinner. You're really committing to be available for these calls. Next slide. So again, kind of on the same thread, the challenge of the daytime, and again, no one's complaining, right? Including myself, maintaining a minimum of three, the chief plus two on duty with the demands. We're often at two during the daytime, just due to time off, vacations, that sorts of things. So what does that do? There's days where I'm working on the truck one hour. I may be in the short term rental regulation development, the next few hours, I may be bouncing back and be at council. I enjoy that, but that will be a challenge moving forward for Winooski. And the minimum staffing, we go to Hawkees building, a six-story building. We show up with three, sometimes two, sometimes one. That same column, Burlington, will draw 12, 10, 12, 14 firefighters. There's a reason, safety in numbers. Again, 90% of the time, we're fine. We're dealing with false alarm, those sorts of things. But there's other times, it starts the demand, service demands start to increase those occurrences. Therefore, our risk goes up. And I worry about the safety of the firefighters. It's no fun to pull up in Hawkees and not know what's going on or know they're smoking the building and be just two of you. It is no fun getting in that ladder truck by yourself trying to navigate through the circle, back up, set up. It's challenges we accept. Again, no one is complaining. It's just a fact of where we are. Other challenges with the daytime, how do we cover that? I mean, you have two exempt employees. You know, work in 94 to 96 hours of pay period. And as the service demands go up, can we do more hours? Can we be expected to do more hours? That's the question. And certainly, whether you're exempt or not exempt, we value our part-time on-call staff. They're here Wednesday evenings. So myself, if I want to be here for the paid on-call staff, I'm in the city at 6 a.m. And to be here till nine, we're here at seven tonight. I've been in the city since 5.30 this morning. And again, no one's complaining. But sustainability is, we're in a good spot as challenging as it sounds. We're in a good spot to be able to finally be talking about sustainability. And how do we continue to utilize our part-time staff, retain tremendous staff, and we start to look at these very things. You know, you're paid on-call folks. You know, again, we've talked about, we don't know if anyone's available. Delayed response from firefighters based outside of Winooski. And you'll see through some of our hiring practices. We try to save five minutes of the station. You start to get, it's not real scientific, but if you put in an application, we Google Matt and see, and I do it four different times during the day. So you, John Audie may say he lives five minutes from the station. But when I run that during the four o'clock hour, that may go to eight minutes. Nine minutes. So it starts to get, you know, you're relying on that person, you know, that person to get here for an emergency. And those times matter. You know, the dwindling numbers are concerned. They have been a concern. We spoke briefly about the demands on the staff as far as the certifications, the trainings. The weekend duty crew, again, declining staff, work-life balance, you know, they all work a full-time job. And it amazes me, I did it for years, but it amazes me now being on this side of it. Just, you know, knowing that they left, as I was getting in the city, and sometimes I'll wave to them as they're leaving for their full-time job. You know, watch them come in at, you know, six, seven o'clock at night. And work hard training until nine, 10. And you really gotta pretty much tell them to go home. That's pretty amazing stuff, to watch their dedication and that sort of thing. But the dwindling numbers have affected, we used to, they used to be required to do one duty weekend a month. Due to dwindling numbers, they now do one plus a Saturday or a Sunday to make up for that fourth weekend that we're unable to cover. And then on the bottom, we're just watching this number, and, you know, how many times are we leaving with four, three, two, or one? You know, the four, it's kind of level. I'm a three, two, one firefighter. Again, I've been doing this 30 years and there's zero comfort of getting in that tower truck and being the only one, trying to operate it with lights and sirens, navigate, talk on the radio. It's just, it's not safe. And again, as your calls for demand continue to grow, you gotta understand the risk factors of that. Questions on that? Again, it seems daunting, but I sit here telling you that we are in a good spot to be able to be talking about this and to be considering this. Nothing bad has happened. God forbid something bad happens because that won't be a fun conversation. So I think I got one more on service demands. Thank you, Paul. This is auto aid received, given, mutual aid. I spoke a little bit on the right-hand side, you know, auto aid received and given. Auto aid is when, you know, you're automatically dispatched or others are automatically dispatched into your community on any call. So like we go to parts of Route 15 and 7, specifically the St. Mike's South Park Drive because we're the closest fire department. And so that's auto aid that we give. Through the arrangement with St. Mike's in the trial run, we received auto aid 24-7, 248 times during this time period. That's when St. Mike's was, we were piloting with them, trying to buy their service, if you will, responding into the city. Mutual aid received 16 times that we received mutual aid outside of our, the St. Mike's and that sort of thing. So Burlington, you know, we hadn't had since where there was 15 departments in here one morning on Main Street. South Hero, Shelburne, you know, that's part of the broader mutual aid system that came and helped Winooski that morning. We provided mutual aid as far away as Williston 26 times through the year. The majority of that was in the Colchester. So they had a bigger incident. They had a house fire that we responded to that sort of thing. Strategic vision accomplishments to date. You know, we continue to work with the state. I don't know if I should have listed this as an accomplishment yet, but we certainly have been trying to get plans review here into the city. You know, we, the accomplishment has been, you know, we've put that notice to them that we want to change in the memorandum of understanding with them, the MOU. You know, we have not had a good line of communication with the Division of Fire Safety in that regard. And the manager and I need to continue to talk about what the next steps are. I think we have a plan in place to kind of move that along. I suspect you will all be involved in those next steps. The municipal infrastructure reinstalled whole stations within the existing parking garage. So again, with minimal staffing, how do we create efficiencies and improve safety? If you can imagine going to the parking garage and having to lug a couple hundred feet of hose with you, going seven stories in the parking garage. Again, pretty daunting, pretty taxing. Don't have enough bodies to get that done. So we installed metal boxes and there's hose that's dedicated there. And any new parking garages that are built or large structures will have those boxes. Again, it's just an efficiency safety thing for us. Housing, obviously the public hearings on the public building registry. We've done follow-ups with Winnieski Housing Authority in regards to the public building registry. A small part for us, again, more for you folks that have been out in the community more. As they increase awareness on the housing quality and minimal housing complaint form, that's paying off in those numbers. Again, it's not a bad thing that we're seeing more numbers, in my opinion. That's given people on Avenue to advocate for themselves and to deal with issues that they have going on. Safe health and connected people. And we continue to do the part-time recruitment. That's kind of open enrollment, if you will. We did participate this last year in the statewide Make Me a Firefighter recruitment effort. Unfortunately, we did not have any takers on that. Because part of our effort was to do an open house. I shouldn't say we didn't have any. We didn't have any new takers on it. We did get a member who had relocated back. And again, the numbers were pretty low across the state, as far as what those are. The Knox box, the new E-keys, the security boxes on the building, that's a big thing for us to offer to the properties. Obviously, we hired the part-time fire inspector and seeing some value in that. We were tackling the standard operating procedures, SOGI's, this department, we updated those several years ago. So now we're trying to get into a kind of an annual review of those. That's what keeps us compliant, if you will, with federal laws, regulations, employment, how we do business, as Winooski grows, what changes, it's just really how their department does business. And then we started to work on the implementation of carrying Narcan. Our inspection staff, especially, is in houses, several houses today, is in the community. And we spoke about this being part of the OP settlement funds. This does require us to become licensed as a first responder, which will further prepare us for further supporting the EMS demands here in the city. Next slide, please. What are our goals moving forward? Obviously, plans review comes up, I put, if approved by the state. That's why I say your involvement will be warranted as we move that forward. We are part of creating more housing. Being part of, we're pretty well known as being friendly, problem solvers in the development world. So that's important to me, to us, that we continue to do that. I think it's important, as we see our demands go up, service demands, and knowing that there isn't a community around us not dealing with the same issue to host internally, or locally host, a fire EMS delivery model, see what's out there, see what others are doing, and see possibly where we fit in with others. Again, our demands, I think the city of Burlington will see 2,000 extra calls this year annually. So, again, there's reasons for all of us to get to the same table. The housing, the public building tenant, landlord education, we know we need to do more here. We have history in doing this. It kind of tapered off, if you will. Certainly we didn't do any during COVID. I remember when I first came here, there was a landlord education piece that we did, and there's like 36 people. And then the last one we did there might have been six. So, it's time to revisit that for sure. We're part of the short-term rental regulations. As far as how we're gonna do those inspections, that's on the future gender for you folks. And finalize things with Winooski housing. The infrastructure piece, the ladder, delivery of the ladder, that's gonna become pretty challenging. So, that was supposed to be April. It's now December of 24th. I am cautiously optimistic that we will not see increased over the general kind of repairs, increased repairs on our tower. Our current truck. We are having electrical issues. It will be going for some repairs. Those, when trucks start to have those types of issues, there's thousands of electrical components. And when you start to have those issues, they're not easy to solve. So, I was in contact with our dealer today from E1, talking about different options of how to secure, make sure that this doesn't continue to slide, meaning the delivery of the new truck continues to slide out. And again, it's supply chain, it's shortage of workforce shortages, that sort of thing. It's real. And if you order a truck today, they're telling you three years. Amulances are three years. Used to be able to get those in like six months. It's a, it's pretty, it's real for sure. You know, if we get to vehicle replacement, you know, we, I really want to talk about and consider replacing one of our gas vehicles with a electric hybrid or a completely electric vehicle. Safe, healthy, connected people continue the dispatching conversations. You know, we, it's another vulnerability in this community is not having fire and EMS dispatched together. Accordively, public outreach, that's something that working with the city manager, doing quarterly kind of get out and talk to folks. We attended one at the high school, not too long ago around housing. It was a great meeting. And then, you know, start to really expand upon our community risk assessment and get into the details. And you really start to do that by conducting a community risk assessment. It's a formal document that really get out and talk to stakeholders, developers, that sort of thing and start to understand reoccurring events through some of our data, underserved areas. And it really starts to shine a light on what we should be trying to do community risk wise. And the ladder truck, that's under capital, right? The capital budget, ladder truck, of course, I guess. Well, you did a bond. Any questions? What's in this budget? And again, this numbers with the combined fire and rental registry remind you that the rental registry has been viewed as an enterprise fund. We've talked several years about kind of pulling that together as an essential service. And as far as, you know, the increases in this year's proposed budget is adding a fire captain at night. Gonna be honest, there's not many other fire departments that have a three to 11 person. You know, I'm pretty confident we can pull it off as far as recruitment and find the right person, you know, being full-time and benefited. And this would be the first time we'd be really hiring somebody to focus on the fireside and really focus on supporting our part-time folks. So being here these hours would reduce the reliance on us having the daytime folks that are doing 15, 16 hours a day on those Wednesdays to really focus and support them, better than what we're able to do today. And that's really the training program, making sure if there's trainings that folks wanna take, coordinating the Wednesday trainings, those are very coordinated, very scheduled, if you will. You know, cause again, I'm trying to capture a couple hours of someone's time, so we wanna be very efficient in that. And it really equates to safety on how well we do our training, really in our efficiencies. How can we continue to do this with minimal staffing? Is investing in the training and making sure people are efficient and safe in what they're doing. It also brings the operational continuity when our staff leaves at 6 p.m. Again, we really don't have a handoff for any of those extra hours. They, our part-time folks don't know anything that's happened during the day. A lot of times we don't know what's happened overnight. So it does close that gap by about 45% just by virtue of the hours that that person's gonna cover. That's where that percentage came from. And then the rental registry is called out as coming over into this year's budget. And as a reminder, a majority of that is covered on rental registry fees. And then Angela called out the net impact to the taxpayer for that. I wanna raise an issue for you and Elaine. I think this, first I think there's some compelling information here about this request to add another position. This is a trend we've been talking about and I'm pretty sure last year we even said like we should really seriously consider next year. But I wanna say that the fire captain is probably a 2% tax rate increase. And as you've shared with growth and grand list and housing in units, like this is impacting service calls, we had a conversation last year about permitting fees and potentially increasing those which we had to table. So when we looked at the permit fees for new development, there's like three tiers of a flat rate. So if you develop up to X property value to cost something, it was higher for the next level and then higher still. But it was sort of like a discounted rate as the developments went bigger. So I think there's an opportunity there to increase those rates so that the permit fee is higher for these larger developments and then use that revenue to offset these increasing costs. Also wanna make sure that the public safety impact fee hasn't fallen off the priorities to explore even if that is only specifically for the tower truck we saw last meeting that our capital plan is pretty concerning in future years. Do lean on it. I can follow up with you tomorrow and on the permit thing too. Yeah, let me know if you want maybe and then my conversation doesn't have to. Obviously Eric also is. Next slide. So this is our rollup that you see every year kind of pulls together. Obviously salaries and benefits. You know, a couple of the bigger ones, the vehicle and equipment maintenance is quite a bit rolled up in there. Again, I really wanna highlight too that we've really made an effort from 2017 to current to right size this department. You know, we went from a three truck to a two truck set. And you know, a lot of these numbers have stayed pretty stable because of that. You know, number one, we're not replacing a 30 year old vehicle to the tune of a million dollars. We're not putting tires, we're not changing oil, we're not doing fuel, all those sorts of things. You know, right down there are self-contained breathing apparatus. You know, the numbers in which, you know, what's the appropriate number? And that's what I mean by right sizing. You walk into our firehouse, we do not have 10 or 12 extra SCBA packs. They're very expensive to purchase, they're very expensive to maintain. And we've really looked at what needs to be on the trucks, what we can staff without short changing Munozki. But, you know, 10 or 12 of those units, we let go. And that's what I mean by right sizing. We've done that with a lot of our equipment. You know, we used to have two complete sets of JAWSA life. You know, again, that has a shelf life. That's, they're about $55,000 a set to replace. And there's no need for Munozki to have two of them. We have one, that's appropriate to what we can staff, what this community can afford to have. And those are just a couple of examples, but what I mean by right sizing the department. So, you know, those, there's quite a bit rolled up into those numbers. You know, it's not just the tires, the oil, it's we buy three or four sets a gear a year, because those have a shelf life. They're only good for 10 years. So no matter if you're, you know, you may have never been into a structure fire in 10 years. That probably wouldn't happen, but the gear is very lightly used here. But once it has 10 years, I can't use it anymore. It's a federal standard. So there's a constant roll of, you know, we don't want to see those spikes. We want to, we try to keep it pretty consistent. Question about, you know, this is the separate from the capital. But I'm going to ask a capital budget question. Do you happen to know or evangelism what the estimated cost is for the fire department facility improvements to add what's necessary for dorm for bunking? I would be lying to you to say that I know an official number. I mean, I kind of have a number in the back of my head, but again, I think there's some, some work, some homework to do to realize, you know, there's, do we do a full second floor renovation that building design to go up? That's how it was designed and do save costs at the time they did not do that second floor in that station. That's going to be quite a cost because it then needs an elevator. So there's quite a bit of cost. That station is not sprinkled either. So that's a new standard. Any firehouse that's built has to be sprinkled. There's firehouses. There's been a couple in Vermont where they've lost all of their assets because of fire in the firehouse, not being sprinkled. There are, through the process of doing a space study, having an architect come in and that sort of thing, there may be, may be opportunity for us to capture some existing spaces, to again, right size and create a couple bunks, make some other improvements to kind of. Yeah. I guess I'm curious about like, if you had to say, like the ideal would be building out a second floor and having like a full space for dorm, dorm use, additional classroom use, et cetera. And on the other end, don't worry, I'm getting my point. And on the other end, it being a smaller, like if we were to take and renovate a smaller amount of space, I'm thinking about like the cost to do that and the ability to have more on-call staff on site and to draw further out than the eight minutes that we are restricted, you know, our self-imposed eight minutes, is that renovation cheaper than adding a fire captain? No, I'm very confident in saying no. It's still one-time fee versus year-over-year incremental increase in costs with benefits and salaries. Right, that's a different look at it for sure. Just thinking about like, if we're able to add more on-site space to increase our range of drawing in on-call from outside of the current radius, could that help offset the need for an evening night captain? But what I would say is you still have the problem of how I support that part-time staff. You bring on more part-time staff, there's more support needed. And who does that? I'm gonna go out on the limb and say, I don't have any more hours to give Winnieski. You pay me well, but I don't have any more hours in a day to be here. Sure, just thinking of different models. Yes, no, it's a great- And trying to think outside of the box, I'm like, are there ways to incrementally meet our needs without using this as, and again, exploring what have staff, what has the city manager thought about in terms of what are our full range of options to help reduce, to help ensure that our public safety needs are being met while decreasing the impact to our tax base? We actually started with that first, is getting to the building so that we could draw from a wider shed, but there's the problem. We have a very spindly structure, so to speak. We're the opposite of top heavy in the fire department. So it's really about supporting them. I went with this proposal because we can support more quickly our current valued members who are already trained as opposed to waiting until we've built it and then potentially losing folks because of sustainability. They can't sustain the schedule forever. And then once we have them, we would still need to support them like John was saying. I believe it will prolong, and I could be wrong with this, right? I don't know, I guess let me say, it will prolong the need for this community to have 24-hour, seven staff. And once you do that, you will have a minimum staffing requirement. It won't be you have just one person in this firehouse. There'll be employment regulations, your NFPA codes will kick in, and you will end up with a staff of two to three full-time employees here 24-7. So the captain allows us to support this part-time staff, probably recruit more, right? It's gonna allow me to go outside and bring people in. This is trending like a community of Williston who went through this. It was all volunteer, then it went to paid call. That started to dry up for them. They made improvements to their facility and that allowed them to have people from outside of Williston come and give time to that community, and it bought them time before they had to do the full-time 24-7. I don't know exactly how that happens, but history tells me that these investments will prolong how soon this community has to have that type of coverage. And then for the city manager, do we know if there's like a cart and horse effect with impact fees that the mayor was just asking about? Like if we do something before exploring the impact fees, does it omit our ability to access impact fees? I want you to ask a pre-cursion of this question and Christine's draft answer was correct that it shouldn't affect, we can still consider them. Yeah, and I guess that's just like with the ladder truck. Like essentially, I don't know that we're able to use impact fees to help offset the cost of our new tower truck. Sorry, tower truck, not ladder truck. That's actually what we discussed it for and when we looked at impact fees related to traffic, we were able to, if we had implemented them, apply them to projects that weren't complete yet. But can I, specific to fire trucks? I mean, so you have an engine that's 2014. It has a 26 years shelf life, if you will. So your impact fees could immediately start to be put in reserve for that replacement. Anticipation of, okay. I would encourage you to think about, if you're trying to do it specifically for those big ticket items with fire, it'd be apparatus, not just the ladder truck, but I mean, you have an engine and a ladder and then your breathing apparatus are probably your three biggest ticket items, if you will. So it could immediately start to lessen the impact in the future. The bigger timing concern was that you can't retroactive it to development. Right. Okay, I should actually, see if there's any public comment as well for questions. None for me, anyone on Zoom? You can use raise hand or chat. I would have Angela barely out, yeah. Okay, please proceed. Two more slides. So, again, the emerging issues we've spoken mostly about this. The shortages are not Wynuski specific. The hiring of staff outside the area were limited. We are critically low with the part-time on-call folks, I think, and list in here eight applications, eight to 10 applications. Just, we're trying. Those are a lot of work to go through, obviously it's work you gotta do. And again, my major concern is just not knowing who's available. And kind of reflect a little bit on kind of the workload that they are pulling. I have one household that's covering 110 to 120 weekend duty hours a month plus calls. That's a lot. And that's, we're pretty vulnerable in that. If they decide to buy a house somewhere else, boom, that coverage is gone for us. And I don't have a big pool. The days of fire departments having huge numbers are gone. And if they do have huge numbers, there's a very small core that they're pulling the load. So obviously we need to continue the recruitment efforts, supporting the current model, continue to invest in ways to retain the staff. That is part of what's in this year's budget, minimum wage when staff come on. We've been able to look at the budget and allocate it. So it's a $15 minimum start and then they're incentivized certificates, that's huge. And then obviously, the renovation to the station. And again, knowing that that's gonna trigger some code upgrades as far as the sprinklers and we just gotta do that homework and understand what that is. And then next slide, Paul, unless there's questions on this one. Supplemental coverage, there was a very good question of can we buy coverage? And we really tried with St. Mike's this last year. We were headed down a path where it was kind of think rentally, kind of buying that coverage, if you will, knowing that they're contractually connected to Colchester. So the thought was to make sure that Colchester didn't feel like they're paying for service here in Manuski and just that proved to be very difficult. They're still contractually connected to Colchester. So they're funded through Colchester. But more so is the calls generated in Manuski. Again, not the fires, but the false alarms of service calls. The students just couldn't academically keep that work sharp and then be running into the city. Today was three calls. So if you think about being a student, trying to do college work, being in class, that's their model. They leave and kind of go on the calls. And then those students are covering the evenings and weekends and holidays. We experienced, for the first time in their history, they experienced. And then we, being Colchester and Manuski, experienced several rolling outages for St. Mike's where no students stayed for the holidays. The latest one was Thanksgiving where it was like two days. Just very short notice, no one around. And her community's rely on them. And they, again, do tremendous work. But it's just a sign of the demands. Again, I've said enough about them Monday through Friday. I think it's pretty clear there that's really my concern. And I also added, again, there's a lot that goes on here. And again, no one's complaining, but six P, again, we do a rotation as chiefs. So every third week, I take call so that if dispatch has a question or the people responding have questions, they're calling that comes with kind of the job as fire chief. So take me out of the equation. It's certainly not part of the fire marshal's position or part-time battalion chief position to give those types of hours for coverage on a weekly basis, not being able to really go do a whole lot knowing that that phone could ring. It is part of that, again, demands. Yeah, I guess the last piece for me is the last three and four. You'll encourage the community to continue to look at dispatch, talk about computer-aided dispatch. That would be, that helps when you have limited resources, it takes a lot of human elements out of decision-making. It's kind of automatic. So a call comes in for XY building that tells the dispatcher what needs to be sent and that may be through an agreement that we have another community. Today, we rely on a human to process that information and try to make that decision. And it puts them in a tough spot some days. And then our per diem staff, which is a model that we use where we hire folks that are already certified from somewhere else. We don't have to worry about them being here for training and that sort of thing. We have them do a set shift. We try to do three of those a week to get relief. We've never gotten it to 100% and we average about 60% of the time being able to do three shifts a week. So it's not insignificant, but it's certainly not as high as what we want. And those are usually short term. Someone who's saying, well, I want to buy a house in a year and they're able to earn this money or whatever they may be trying to do. So it's usually short-lived. It's not a career doing per diem work for sure. With that, I will ask if there's any questions. Any last questions, folks? No, I don't think that's a question. This is the second year I've heard you do this presentation and just like last year, I just come away feeling something has to change for the fire department. That's obviously up to us to make that decision of what that will be. But I think about one of your guys or gals showing up to Keene's Crossing and literally being one person. I do not have your job to me. That sounds like that's not safe and shouldn't be allowed, but I guess it is. But as a resident of Winooski, I think some of the minimum things that people expect is that they can pick up the phone, call 911 no matter what the time is and somebody's going to show up at their house. And it's great that Colchester shows up. It's great that Vessex shows up, but when you're paying taxes, you expect that Winooski's going to show up with a crew that's going to be ready to do whatever needs to happen. So I always appreciate your presentation and the challenges that it presents to us. Thank you. I'm going to call a recess before we do PD budget. Eileen, did you want to add anything or you want to hold? Okay. Thank you very much, Chief Audie. Thank you. I've got 7.37, we'll reconvene at 7.42, five minutes. We're all back and ready, 7.42. Let's bring this meeting back to order and continue with the police department presentation. Do you want to kick us off the line? Yes, oh, okay. Now we're back in business, back in session. Eileen. Yes, so note that I notify Justin Heisinga here on November 2nd that he would be appointed interim chief in that he started that role on November 26th, where his budget development began in early October. So although all of the departmental budgets you're hearing are the city manager's proposal, this year the police department's budget could be considered a bit more so than the others as compared to if a permanent chief was behind it from the beginning. And so I just wanted folks to be aware of that. Okay, thank you. Thank you. And I have with me Lieutenant James Charcalas. We're gonna be jumping in and out as we go through this presentation. Try not to jump on each other. Sticker. And then we'll go from there. So our outline, who we are, our organizational chart. We'll start there. And then a brief overview of the president's task force report on 21st century policing. Then we'll get into some statistics, update on school resource officer, our community outreach team. And then we'll hear some Winooski PD, community care taking stories, outreach events. We'll get into the budget, the strategic vision, staffing needs, analysis, and then emerging issues. Our organizational chart, police chief, which is vacant right now. That's why James and I are here. We have two lieutenants on the police side. Under that, three sergeants positions, one of which is vacant, a detective that we have filled, seven officers position, one is vacant, an SRO position, and then one on-call part-time officer. On the dispatch side, we have the dispatch supervisor, three dispatchers, one dispatcher position we just learned today is now going to be vacant, and then two on-call dispatchers. Any questions on the chart? So circling back to the president's task force report on 24th century policing. This is something that President Obama did back in 2015 to really strengthen community policing and the trust between police departments and communities they served. In that report, they identified these six pillars that were kind of the building blocks of building that trust. And that's something that Chief Heber took to right away and implemented in our department and kind of gives us the foundation and the building blocks for our strategic plan and how we go about our day-to-day operations. So kind of a five and a half year look at our calls for service and trends that we're looking at as far as numbers. We see a little bit of a decline during the FY20-22 area and we've kind of held steady since there. Last year, FY23 calls for service 6,630 calls for service compared to FY20, which was our peak of almost 9,000. Any questions on that? Do you think you're trying FY24 trending more towards the recent bars or the fact to the higher level? I think we're going to be closer to the recent bars. Yeah, I think we're going to be right around that 65, 6,600 area. Do you have a sense of what's been bringing calls down in the last few years? That's a good question. I think it's a combination of a lot of things. I think that part of the answer is staffing. We become a very reactive police department just based on staffing levels when there's one. Sometimes one, two officers on. Again, you become very reactionary in just your calls for service or just the calls for service that come in. You don't have any proactive police work as far as your traffic enforcement, car stops, directed patrols, foot patrols, that kind of stuff. So I think that pushes our numbers down a little bit. I think also the conversation around police reform and what we're expecting our officers to go to for calls and what we're punching calls for service has gone down. The usage of the community outreach team more. I think all that is part of why those numbers are going down. I had a question kind of similar to that. So these do not include the calls that go to the community outreach team? That's correct. They do not include those calls. The only, sorry, go ahead. I was just gonna ask when, could you remind me when the community outreach team started? What year? It started, I think it was 2017. Okay. The 2017-2018 window. All right. I was wondering if that was part of the decrease, but that's interesting. Thank you. Yeah. So it would show if it was a mutual response between us and the outreach. Okay. It would show that. That's helpful to know. Thank you. Yeah. Paul. So our top 10 calls for service here, traffic-related calls was number one. Then we get into suspicious events, public assists, agency assists, wellness checks, alarms, domestic disturbances, animal problems, lost property, and noise complaints. So outside of those top 10 calls, to go back to why some of our call volume may have dropped. These are some other calls that we go to, mental health calls 182, larcenies, 58 overdoses, 35 burglaries, and 13 suicide attempts. With how we're doing police work now, a lot of these calls that we're going on, they take more time too, and they're more than just one officer response call. So if we have two officers on, and we're going to any types of these calls, these calls can sometimes tie up officers or hours out of a shift, which again, when your entire staff is tied up on one call for service, you're not generating more calls for service in the proactive area of police work. Overdoses, one thing I'd like to point out, 58 overdoses in FY23. We can all agree one overdoses is too many overdoses, but in FY24 so far, we're down to six, and we're trending towards 12 overdoses in FY24 compared to 58 in FY23. So I think that's great. That's a good stat. Questions on that? Paul? So other police work that's taking more time. We've had one of the most successful years in criminal interdiction. Again, this year, we had a great year last year, but these are some numbers that we were able to put together this year, which includes five federal indictments, and again, FY24 so far, only six overdoses to date, and I think that says a lot about the interdiction that we're doing. We're getting this stuff off the street and also with Narcan becoming more available. I think that's a big part of the overdose thing, so questions on that? So with the perception that violent crime and youth crime is up, some of the things that we've done in-house in response to that is our SRO teamed up with another officer from another agency, and they came up with this youth-organized crime team, which is comprised of county members working to slow down the organized crime amongst our youth, specifically related to car thefts, motor vehicle thefts are up throughout the state, particularly the county. That's one thing we're working on. The EATF has developed a gun violence task force that we have an officer committed to. That's on a non-call basis, so again, using the resources around us and providing resources to that team, and we do now have an officer in the Homeland Security agency that's focusing on narcotics and human trafficking. Any questions on that, or any questions on statistics before I pass it over to James? So by an officer on Homeland Security, are you saying you have an officer from Homeland Security or you're one of our officers is partnering with them? Good question. So we have one of our officers is partnering with them and works on an on-call basis that we get reimbursed for when they're spending hours over there. So he fulfills his shift obligations here where he's needed and when we have an extra person on, or if it's his day off, he goes and works that HSI task force time, yep. Okay, no more questions? All right. So I'm gonna talk about the community caretaking aspects and then the strategic vision. That's gonna be kind of my section for this budget presentation. So first one we're gonna talk about for the community caretaking is the school resource officer and just a quick background for everyone who's not completely familiar with it. Because sometimes I think we take for granted just kind of assuming people know everything about a position. The school resource officer began probably 20 to 30 years ago where the Munoziki School District and the Munoziki Police Department partnered saying it sounds like a good thing to have where we can have a full-time officer up at the school, embedded at the school, build partnerships and relationships with members of staff, students, families, and DCF department children, families and have that good nexus between the PD and the school. That being said, 20, 30 years is a long time to have the same model. And about three-ish years ago, don't quote me on it, but about three years ago, some discussions were being had throughout the community within the school, some concerned residents that, hey, maybe it's time to kind of refocus and relook at what the SRO program is and is it necessary to continue with? And as part of those kind of like ongoing dialogues kind of decided that, yes, we still think there's a need for the SRO, but what's that gonna look like going forward? And kind of where it's settled, I know nothing's finalized, but where it's kind of settling is kind of like this hybrid of, they're gonna call like a liaison position where instead of the SRO, the school resource officer being at the school full-time, having like an office there, walking the hallways all the time, being very present that the SRO will be more of a reactive or kind of stationed at the PD, but when there's an incident that requires police, they will be the first to go, they will still have those relationships, still be doing the outreach, still doing like their safety and the classes and still having those connections, but it's gonna be a little less, I guess, present at the school. So that's kind of like the background of where kind of we're at today. So for fiscal year 25, as Lieutenant Heisingas kind of pointed out, there won't be any financial impact for if they do decide to go to this liaison position, but part of it or the part of this, if it does go to the liaison position for the SRO, is that there's gonna be like a school safety coach, which is gonna be a non-spawn position, so not a police officer that's gonna work closely with the SRO, but obviously money kind of drives everything and from what I'm being told, until there's they can figure out, benefits, salaries and that stuff, it's still kind of the limbo, but that's the direction where I think things are trending as a community and with the school and the PD. So it's still gonna be very much an important aspect of what we do going forward, but it's gonna look differently and we've already kind of transitioned kind of experimenting with some stuff where the SRO is spending a little less time on campus, so maybe like one hour a day back at the PD, just kind of getting a feel of like what that could look like going forward and we already is wearing like a softer uniform, a little less tactical, we've been having like an unmarked cruiser, so trying to, you know, there's already things I think in progress to kind of see it transition a little more off campus, but still very much a viable resource as far as having those connections and partnerships and not to lose that. Yep. Does that shift impact the role, like would they be adding some capacity to actual regular coverage? As far as for the PD itself, like patrol? Yeah. I would say, I mean, yes and no. I mean, obviously they're gonna, that whoever's the SRO or the liaison's gonna be responsible to respond to calls too if they're not at the school full time. They said in a perfect world, it's gonna be, hey, the SRO, you know, school's calling, they're available in real time and then you go up, but the reality is that we can't control when accidents come in, we can't control when domestics come in and so it's not gonna be as predictable, I guess, the position, being honest. The superintendent isn't, last time we checked in about it, maybe a month ago, it wasn't totally sure how it was gonna play out. It might be helpful to hear the way he was thinking about it is there's no more unstructured time for the SRO at the school. That's the difference. So the amount of time that they're not actually working on school matters, it's unclear how much that will be. So that will affect how much time they're available for our non-school stuff. Okay. And just to highlight that there's no financial changes for FY25 as far as the school's gonna be paying the same amount that they already paid for that SRO position so it won't impact our budget currently. Next slide, please, Paul. Maybe remiss we didn't talk about the community outreach team when we were talking about community caretaking and again a little background, just in case people don't know what the community outreach team is. It was started back in 2017, 2018 as time frame survived about six this years ago. And really I think the point of the outreach team was to help offset the ever-growing and ever-present mental health issues that we face as police officers and to provide a more structured, professional and to be able to provide better services in real time with boots on the ground, mental health clinicians who are coming out to help offset these issues. And then what that also allows is police officers who we're well-trained but not always well-trained in everything well to allow us to kind of take a backseat and be able to go do more police related incidents, you know, domestic criminal activity, be more proactive with the traffic work while the outreach team members are able to deal with the mental health issues. So it's really a good working partnership as far as allowing the residents of Winooski to have, you know, premier mental health services and also allowing us as law enforcement to focus on what people expect cops to be doing. I'd like to point out 158 calls for service that's been going down every year. I'm sure you get everyone here has, you know, seen that trend it's been going down. And I wanted to kind of like highlight maybe why that's taking place because it is a really important function of what we do. And I just wanna make sure that you understand maybe why this is happening. So for one, I think the program's working. So I think when it first started, we had a ton of individuals who had been maybe repeat callers, had mental health issues, not getting services. And as time has grown and the program has grown, those individuals have now received those services and they don't need to call us all the time anymore. So it's working. So that's a good thing. I think also when it comes to mental health individuals, it's a very transient population. It's a very fluid population. And what was Winooski's issue in maybe 2022 is now South Brooklyn's issue in 2023. So I think that also kind of helped explain maybe why calls are down a little bit for Winooski specifically. Another thing to take into account is just the longer that we've worked with this team, the more comfortable we've become. And so maybe what was a call to have them come to the scene five years ago, like we know now that, okay, that's not worth a call for them to come here. We will have an offline conversation to say, hey, can you connect with XYZ? Or maybe that's an email. And maybe we're not tracking that as well because we do everything through a system called Valkor. And if we're not telling dispatch to punch an incident, I'll be honest, if I'm calling someone on my phone, I might not be saying, hey, can you just put an incident to say this? I might just say, hey, you know, they're gonna, so we could maybe be a little bit better about our tracking mechanism too. So I think those factors along with the pandemic, I'm not gonna lean on that too much because I think we're out of that, but that still, they weren't immune to it. It lowered the numbers, it just did. But I think that kind of helps explain maybe we're painting a better picture of why maybe the calls have kind of gone down throughout the years, but it is a valuable resource. I don't wanna lose sight of that. Paul, next slide please. And this is just the financial aspect. So we pay 7% of the total contribution and we represent 9% of the calls. So it's pretty close. And again, I think that's maybe not where it's been in the past, it is shrinking, but it's still really good value. So if Winooski was to break away from this model and we were to say, hey, let's have our own in-house mental health clinician worker, now we're looking at, so the way outreach is set right now, it's 8 a.m. to 8 p.m., money through fry. So 12 hours of service. You know, for us to have a full-time clinician with benefits and shorter hours, we're not gonna have more 12-hour shifts. So look at nine to five. It's just a really good model to make sure that we're getting the most, I guess, resource available to the people. And again, like if we had only one or two people here, person calls out, who do we have? The outreach team's five, six members, and if one or two are out, we still have two or three to draw from. So it is a good model. It does help us in many facets, and it's also not just exclusive to the PD. I know the fire department, code enforcement's used outreach. City halls use outreach. Outreach workers do everything from getting individuals housing, crisis services. They deal with people who've lost loved ones in overdoses to get them services. It's really all-encompassing, and it's been a really good partnership for all the communities within Chittin County. So just wanted to kind of explain things, because like I said, things do look like they're trending down, and maybe it's a little less important, but it is vital to what we do going forward. Next slide, please. Okay, so this is, I guess, a little more, when we kind of get to brag a little bit about what we do. You know, we respond to over 6,000 calls for service. Some of them are very basic, but Lieutenant Isaac had put together this list of just kind of more outstanding work that was done by the patrol officers in our department. So kind of back to the 21st century policing model, there's a big emphasis on de-escalation, and we just happen to have an individual come to the lobby who was armed with an edged weapon, threatening suicide by cop, which basically is looking to have us shoot that person because they're despondent in crisis mode. And this officer who's actually an ICAT instructor, which is kind of like the gold standard for de-escalation for police to kind of follow, it's a lot of verbal skills to make sure that, to de-escalate and on how to say it. So this individual came to the lobby, officer was able to use these ICAT tactics and was able to have the individual put the weapon down, put him in protective custody and got him services. So what could have ended, and a justify ending of maybe having used deadly force, ended up being no force used whatsoever, and got this person to the hospital safely. So just want to recognize that, and that's a big part of what we do going forward. The next one, as Lieutenant Heising had mentioned, huge spike, anyone who's reading the media, huge spike in gun violence in Chittin County, and we're not immune to that. So one of the officers, there was a shooting in a neighboring town. One new scout officer got to the scene, located the gunshot victim, and provided life saving measures, applied two tourniquets, chest seals, was able to stabilize the individual before rescue was even there, and that individual thankfully lived. So just kind of like a life saving moment. And then these next two is just really kind of good old fashioned police work where the officers understand criminal trends within the city and understand kind of where the hotspots are. And so the first one was an attempted homicide, it was an attempted murder using a firearm. The officer was listening on the radio, understood who the suspect was, knew where that suspect tends to hang out in Winooski, was able to intersect that individual and apprehend them before that person was able to elude police for a long time or cause any more harm. So just really good kind of police work to understand criminal trends within the city. The second one, same thing. An armed robbery that happened in another town, again understood who the individual was, where they tend to kind of hang out in the city and got to a short pursuit, but ended with apprehending the suspect as well. So just some really good piece of work by the team downstairs. Next slide, please. And not to go in too much, but we go to the malls all the time, along with the fire, and usually we're there before rescues because we're just around, we're 24 hours, full time. So also perform successful CPR when the suspect falls away. And then one of the biggest things, I don't know if just if you're a part of this, but we've added three AEDs, the filibrares, which for what I've been told, is the highest success rate for any kind of cardiac defense having an AED at your disposal. So we now have every patrol vehicle that's active. So usually two, I think we have three total, but usually we're gonna have two in the cruisers. So anytime we're going to a medical event that we believe CPR might be needed, the first thing we'd be doing is putting AEDs on that person. So hopefully we start seeing more successful CPR because of that. And of course, just the multitude of Narcan deployments, de-escalation, and of course outreach team, which I already talked about. So next slide, please. And then again, just with, I know we've talked about the strategic plan that we have as a PD in our strategic vision and certainly a big part of that by the 21st century policing model is our outreach that we do. And again, we're gonna try and continue to do it. Our staffing is limited right now, just being honest. So we haven't been as able to perform the coffees with the cops. The public safety camp was a big success for us. I think originally we were gonna do like a citizen's police academy, but the school resource officer was able to put together a fantastic week for a lot of the children in the school system and incorporated, he got volunteer vans, I think from the Army National Guard, EMTs, fire, police. I think we even board patrol showed up for one of the days. So a lot of just good interaction for these kids during the school year to kind of see what we do first hand experience. I think it probably left a good impression on all of them and certainly made us proud as a PD. But like I said, that's what we do throughout the year and we're gonna continue to do that best we can. But staffing does play into our ability to be out in the community as much as we'd like to be because we're trying patrol is gonna be paramount. If we can't staff patrol, I can't ask an officer to do four hours to have coffee with someone just to have a good conversation, which is what we wanna see happen. But those are the limitations with our staffing currently. Next slide, please. Well, actually on that note, how much of that is with the, is vacancy based versus or people on leaves versus like if you had everybody that you shouldn't have right now? Right now we have 12 or 13. We're, that's 18, 15. We have 12 right now. And that's, yeah, that's just what we're at because no one's technically on the books anymore. That includes the SRO and the detective position. So we're really running patrol with 10 right now. Okay, yeah. So these events, I think to answer your question, these events are, it's about a time commitment for our officers. And when we're already asking them to work, you know, over time to cover shifts, it's really hard to get them to come in to do these extra events that are, you know, equally that's important, but it's hard to be everywhere at once. So now it's kind of just shifting gears a little bit to strategic vision. Again, I think we've already talked about the, for fiscal year 24, we've already talked about kind of like the school resource officer. So I won't probably go into that too much. We're gonna continue and we have diversified our workforce. I'm proud to say again, I think we mentioned it maybe last year a little bit, but a quarter of our workforce is a person's of color, which is fantastic. And actually, I guess you can say a third of our workforce currently because we're down. So, and we're gonna continue to hopefully be able to, you know, through social media platforms and other things to hopefully reach out to those communities going forward. But then Hyzenga and some of the officers were able to get us some positions or some slots in some career days or career field days. I know we attended one in Norwich recently. So now we have like a little display, got some like poker chips hanging out, handout that has our link right to our hiring page for information. So we're hopefully gonna be able to connect with more people and diversify and get our recruitment up. We've, like Lieutenant Hyzenga said, we've promoted one new sergeant. We're gonna continue to get specialized training for leadership, whether it be through Roger Williams or the FBI leader, make sure we're doing everything Ken to keep us moving forward and making sure we're doing best practices. And then we just sent two officers to North Carolina to be trained as instructors for kind of like less lethal. We don't have a lot of less lethal tools right now. We do have the taser and pepper spray, but a lot of neighboring agencies have like pepper ball or bean bags. It's just more stuff that we can use at our disposal to make sure that we are doing everything Ken to make sure that things end safely. And the more that we have on our tool belt, the better we're gonna be going forward. So hopefully we're gonna start getting more people trained with that, getting more equipment to make sure that we have the best tools to make sure that things end peacefully. This next one, there's been a lot of concern with the building downstairs. I think the buildings built in the late 60s. And I've been at the PD for 17 years and unfortunately I hate to say it, but we've had a lot of people get sick with various types of cancers. And so there was a lot of trepidation, I think with patrol, I know myself included, just wanna make sure that the building was safe. So the city allowed us to get a company in and to check for radon, PCBs. We checked the flooring for asbestos, mold. Anything that we think that could contribute to poor health was tested. And it's kind of a mixed bag. We do have asbestos in the flooring, so that's something we gotta kind of figure out. We do have spores like mold in the vents that we have to abate at some point. But the PCBs look good, radon look good. But that's something that's kind of weighing on us for a little bit. So I appreciate that the city was able to accommodate and get us that testing done speaking. At least feel, we have a dangerous enough job on the road that the last thing you wanna do is come back to the PD and feel like you're breathing in something toxic. So hopefully we can come up with something going forward with renovations that happens. This next thing we've, we're talking about like community like forms and stuff with this next one. I just don't wanna, yeah. So I know we, between the two of us, we probably had three or four community forms where we have multiple concerned residents. If it's a problem house that we're willing to always come and set up meetings to have discussions. And I can say, I think we're three for three but the three have done it. With having some good outcomes within, I think a pretty quick turnaround. So I know we partnered with the fire department for West Allen Street. And that was, yeah, within days. So continue those conversations going forward. And not to jump in on you there. Go ahead. This kind of goes back to the original slide of police reform and also what our community expects from us as a police agency and a police department. And I think it's important that we continue those conversations and have more of them. I have attended two of those, one by invitation, one because it was on my street. And there, it is a really good outcome for residents with concerns. So having the time to, and taking the time to do that is important. And we'll continue to always have an open door because it actually makes life easier for us too because knowing how people feel and really does help us to how we're going to react. So yes, we'll definitely keep that dialogue going between the two of us at a minimum. And then this last thing, this is actually good news. So we are back to pre-pandemic numbers for our DUI and traffic enforcement. So it says it's up to 165%. That's from like the pandemic years, but we're back to 2018, 2019 fiscal year numbers you're saying. So that's just really good work by the individuals downstairs to start being more proactive again, getting out and making sure we're keeping the streets safe. Next slide, please. I have a question. Okay, go ahead. Yep. It's okay, you can change the side. A question you were talking about, additional recruitment efforts. Are you, I know the school does some like career days, workforce, fairs, work fairs. Does the police department participate in those? That's what we're going to be. Just barely went to our first one this year. Okay, awesome. I have scheduled to go to another one at least two more this spring. Okay. So yeah. Wonderful. I have seen the school post on their social media having members of the National Guard into the classroom. And so it seems like at least a really awesome opportunity to partner with the school for career development and opportunities to hopefully recruit from our own graduating students. Agreed. So yeah, and that actually kind of goes into our next slide with the recruitment. Lieutenant Zenget actually just assigned to police officers downstairs as kind of like official recruiters. So hopefully they'll re-energize the position or and create more opportunities for us to at least attract hopefully more valuable applicants. And then just kind of return. Like we've talked about this, the community outreach back to pre-pandemic. But again, everything kind of comes back to staffing. And just like the chief said, we're having them staffing right now. One person calls out. Now we have to have someone hold or for at least two, four, eight hours. So it's a challenge for us. And that has to be, that's definitely one of our priorities that they're going for is making sure that we not only recruit but retain who we have and do everything we can to keep people energized, healthy because that's what the residents of Winooski need. Like you said, people pay good money to have good services. And if we're not our best, we can't give you our best. And really, it all starts with recruitment and retention. I just can't overstate that enough. So again, we also, Lieutenant Heisenget also just assigned one of the officers is being like a traffic safety liaison officer. So you'll see more, hopefully be more visible with like some of the federal grants like the state grants, like the SHARP, the GUI campaigns, the clicker tickets. Hopefully start seeing more of that in the coming months. And then the last thing is hopefully getting some renovations for the police department downstairs. And I kind of want to just take a moment on this. This kind of goes back to the recruitment retention also and having pride and our PD, it's not anyone's fault in this building. It's just, it's very dated. We're decades behind I think our peers throughout the county. If you were just to put us in a vacuum and have three people applying to a PD and get a blindfold and you walk into each PD, we're in dead last. And that's just the reality. We're kind of starting off with the wrong foot when we're trying to attract talent. And like we want talent, you as residents deserve talent, but if you look at the PD just in the vacuum as well for what we have, it's a real challenge. So this has to be a priority for us to, to make sure that we're keeping up with the South Burlington's, the Essex departments, the Willisons even every PD, all the major towns in Chittin County have resources that are just able, they're able to, to attract viable candidates. You know, our detention cell doesn't have a bathroom. That's a safety concern because people aren't usually happy when they go in handcuffs. And then for us to have to usually alone, get them out of a handcuff to take them to a bathroom that's now they shut the door and we don't know what they're doing in there. You know, they come out, they can take a swing at us. You know, we just, we have, we need things going forward that it's not only attract the right people but to keep us safe. So those weak conversations probably for FY25 and beyond, but we need, we need to have, we need to have that. I have a question on that. I agree, I went to, I met with the interim chief and the former chief recently and I wouldn't want to work down there. So you, I forget the name of the funds that you get from like when you confiscate stuff. Asset forfeiture. Are you able to use the asset forfeiture funds for renovations of the PD? That is something that the funds do qualify for. Yeah. I forget how much there is in that amount. I don't think it would like give you a brand new police department, but are you considering as well like a partial refurb instead of like. You need to be careful with those funds. There is a restriction on them that they may be used to supplement not supplant. So if we're replacing things that already exist, they could be perceived by the federal government as supplanting existing funds. So we have a bit of a process going. The first step was creating the staff committee to have a say in what happens with the renovations. Then it was the testing. Now we're looking at what it's gonna cost to remediate that and then compare that to desires of what we would renovate. That would be based on some criteria of like what's most important in renovations. So yes, there's tap. There's possible money we could tap into, but we're not sure yet what we're gonna spend it on. So it's a bit of a process that we're going through to get there. Okay, no, I'm sure that's completely understand. I know, again, we've been talking about this, the renovations for a little bit too. And I think you've been talking about them since before I came on council. So just wondering if we can start to look into how we can make that possibility. I think the testing was a good step. Yeah, and to be fair, that was, we wanted to make sure what we're working with is worth keeping, I guess, because we had PCBs or something that was so catastrophic, we're not gonna put, you know, $700,000 to something that, hey, you gotta leave anyway. So at least we've cleared that hurdle, I guess, at this point. Yeah, a lot of those lines, I just think about the, like does that fall in the capital improvements? Yeah, so we have some money set aside there that's sitting there waiting. We can go into asset furniture potentially. There's an equipment that the department wants to prioritize, which we wanna have a permanent chief to have a sand before we cut too far into that for building versus equipment. So yes, and it's just the total amount is a bit amorphous right now. So we're just taking our way through that, yeah. Yeah, just tagging onto Thomas's thoughts of the one-time renovation funds versus recurring funds. It seems reasonable that equipment is a recurring funding need where the infrastructure side of things are, I mean, there's some maintenance, but refurbishment would be more of a one-time. So if we can pull from unrestricted reserves to do some refurbishments that seems to feel like that makes, maybe a good option to pursue. Yeah, again, it just depends on the amount that we're gonna need. So we've got to figure that out first before we decide what would happen for that. And I would want to make sure that refurbishing something doesn't fall under the criteria of supplementation that they put on our asset furniture. If it's something that already exists, it may not be something that we're eligible to replace using this funds. And how long will it take to determine that? It would be something that we need to reach out to our reps for equitable sharing. I wouldn't know how long it would take them to respond. I've never had to reach out to them before. We've only ever used asset forfeiture funds for criminal investigations or training or new equipment. The CIP that was presented to us last month include a line item for the study, like the capital planning? Yes, so again, the next bottleneck is out of the things that we want to need downstairs with the voice of the building committee, what is it that they really want and what are the criteria? Like that, what they want as an estimate shouldn't have to be what happens, but at least come up with a criteria that are important to them and then see what fits into those. So for example, is a toilet more important in the holding cell or new lockers? Like that, I don't need to have an opinion about that, but I want to know what they think. My financial question is, can the asset forfeiture be used for that study instead of raising taxes to fund it? Back to you, I believe. That's it for me on that. Yeah, unless there's any more questions on that. I think this is a slide that you've seen before with the staffing needs analysis. When you're talking about a full year's worth of work, 2,080 hours, when you factor in sick time, vacation time, injury time, and training that we go to, that number comes around 1780, and if you break that down, we run three shifts in order to get three officers on at least two of the shifts that comes down to that 16th officer need. Officer need. So we have two officers, that's minimum staffing per the current union bargaining agreement. Again, when we have a significant call for service that requires two officers, that takes up everybody on the shift. If we had the three officers on, at least two of the shifts, that would leave one officer to A, respond to calls, and B, also do some of that proactive police work we talked about in the beginning, as far as traffic enforcement, directed patrols, foot patrols, that type of stuff. As far as having that padding for the third officer on, it gives you a little bit more room to stay at that two officer minimum shift when somebody calls out sick or something like that and cuts down on the overtime. Coming back to the previous question, though, if we actually had our 15 positions filled, would this be a challenge? Would there be ongoing overtime? Would you have that capacity for more proactive patrol? I think so. I think to answer your question, yes. I think we could do more than what we are doing now. The issue is when you start talking about retirements and people that leave, that keeps bumping you down to the point like now, instead of that, if we were at 16, if we had a retirement and somebody left or somebody was out on sick, instead of being at 14 or 13, we're now down to 12, 11, 10, and it just keeps pushing that number further down. So the goal would be, if we could build up to that 16th position, we wouldn't necessarily go as low as we are right now with that 15th. We'd have that one position of padding. And we were at 16 for the majority of my time here. It was actually 20 years. There was only one other year it was dropped to 15. Yeah, so that's kind of been our standard. So it feels like we're asking for something that's getting us back to the past, not even going forward in some ways. And that's a really good distinction that I'm glad that you said, because I don't think that people have understood that. Yeah, we've been 16. On the financial side, Angela, probably, if we have all these officers logging over time and in this scenario, they don't need to do that anymore. What does that compensate for some of the new salary and benefits costs? Unfortunately, not right now. We are overexpending the overtime line. We are offsetting it with the savings from the salaries and benefits right now, but it's basically backfilling. The amount we're spending on overtime now is the equivalent of the positions. I might have to have one to one time, but I'm not following how we need to increase this full amount into the budget when I'm gonna take that offline. I need to think through that. The 16th officer was lost in the FY24 budget when the COLA was so high last fiscal year in order to afford that when we had an officer step down, we did not fill that position to be able to fund the high COLA that we had to pay out that was not included in the budget. That's reminding me that in recent years, Chief Heber, when we approved bringing it back to 16, it was like not going to have a budget impact because of vacancies. Like, I'll have to dig it up, the memo he wrote us. But what I recall is we went back to 16, but didn't actually increase budget because the goal was just to, because we knew there'd be a vacancy. The last time we moved up to 16 officers from 15 officers was when we hired Shauna Crump and that was funded with a COPS grant. And the way that we have drawn down COPS grant funding historically, the first year is covered 100% and then we phase in the officer fees into the tax rate over the course of the three-year grant period. I think there's also savings when you have people who are at the top of the pay scale who are gonna be retiring, myself included, within a few years and then you bring someone in who's five years or less. I think there's always gonna be a savings there as well. So it's not always one to one. I guess that I'm having a broader concern with the approach. The pivot from where previous budgets anticipated vacancies and worked that into the cost, where now we're raising taxes for a new position when we probably will not have 16, the expense of 16 officers. We stopped budgeting for vacancy savings the year that no vacancies occurred. Because I had to magically find $50,000 to cover the budgeted vacancy that we had, which was the equivalent of a penny on the tax rate. So we stopped budgeting for vacancy savings because we cannot count that they will occur. I have some questions. All right, so one of the things I just wanna name is that we're seeing an increase in say usage in fire. We're seeing an increase in usage in our library and we're seeing a decrease in usage in PD. So I just wanna name that I wanna think about how are we best investing the tax dollars that are being paid, where is that usage? And I appreciate that some of that might be that you're not doing as the proactive, but I might argue too that having more hours in the library might also be a reduction in crime. So I think I just wanna name kind of that in my mind or even fully staffing our senior center. So I'm just thinking about kind of the departments as a whole, you have the most money, a lot of the others do not and just kind of the fairness of where that usage of our community is actually kind of showing up in the statistics right now. I think I share the concern with the mayor that it sounds like there's been those consistent vacancies. So I am worried about increasing the tax rate for something that might not happen. There may have been vacancies, but there were not vacancy savings in the department's bottom line. Okay, that's helpful to understand, but that to me too doesn't justify increasing, I don't know, increasing a budget in this way. I think some of the other things that are coming up for me too is kind of what are those, what are some other ways? Like it sounds like you have that on call, one on call officer, are there room for more of those? Especially considering it sounds like some of these vacancies are coming from people on leave, which legally we need to keep those positions filled so they get their benefits. We need to make sure those people are protected, but that those are also positions that are not currently helping you all on patrol. So are there other ways that we can substitute? Again, maybe a slightly less high cost to the tax rate, because it does look like if we did this without the COPS grant, that is a 1.6% increase to the tax rate, just holding that PD line. And I think that, again, is kind of concerning compared with kind of the data that we're being shown of where usage is coming up in other departments. The other thing, and this is something I emailed Elaine about is what happened to the admin support position that we budgeted in FY24, assuming that we would get the regional dispatch, like are we carrying, like is that open position that doesn't have a purpose continuing forward? Yes, because we don't know when and whether we will need that money. But we have now that money budgeted from FY24, even if a position came online in FY25, we have that money already to cover it, right? Right, but there's also the matter of what we do if it doesn't come online. We still have the same reason, we still have the same issues that cause us to want regional dispatch in the first place, so there'll be expenses associated with trying to address that. Right, so we're begging that money. Yeah, but where is the, like we're hearing, so one of the issues is that you're saying we need more officers to make sure there's time for administrative tasks, why not administrative position instead of another officer? Right, so we'll be preparing more detail of the answer to that question on the top line. Oh, right. Which is certainly welcome to come up in another public meeting, just we'll be answering that between the meetings. Sounds good, and I've already asked, like what are the alternatives considered to a 16th officer? Yeah, I'm trust, and I'm also thinking again, like the SRO, like that is another question up in the air where there might be some additional capacity coming online, there might not be, I'm just worried that we're seeing this asked, but I'm not feeling like I have enough information to feel comfortable being like, this is where I want to see our tax dollars. I want to see this 1% increase, but I'm also seeing this desperate need for fire to have those services, and I want to make sure they get those. And I'm also seeing, again, I brought up the numbers with the library because we are seeing a desperate need there. And those are two other departments that, those are ones that are most closely interacting with our residents along with the PD. I think those, I may be the city clerk as well. So I'm just really thinking about who are currently serving our residents. And with all due respect, like I really do appreciate all the work you all are doing. I just want to make sure that, yeah, comparing the data with the other departments. Yeah, it's helpful to hear what information, more information you need to make a sound decision. I do want to flag the discussion around the SRO as the amount of work that that position is currently doing with the school district potentially decreases and could allow some capacity to shift back to the city. That could impact the amount of money that the school pays the city for that position. So there still could be a tax impact from that position shifting back to the city as well. Okay, that's a good reminder. Thank you, Angela. I think, and you can correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't know if less calls, from what I understand, you may have had more calls, but I think you were more stretched to respond to those more calls. You continue to be stretched to respond to the calls that you have now. There's less of them. And so I'm assuming there's less of a stretch. I don't think it means that you're getting to everything well, or as you would like. Again, no disrespect to you all. We've had this conversation. I've unfortunately had to call you all to my house because of the legal activity that happened on my property. I wasn't happy with the response time. I've heard from other folks who have had stuff cars broken into, their homes broken into. A good friend of mine reached out recently whose TV was stolen. You guys weren't able to get there to what residents feel is a good time because you don't have enough officers at the moment. So I think I don't want to say and put it out in public discourse that just because you're receiving less phone calls means that you're getting to those phone calls in a way that people feel safe. Are you gonna be getting into more detail about the regional dispatch, funds, and plans in this conversation? Maybe. It's gonna depend a little bit on the permanent chief's position. But I'll see what we can develop in the meantime. So I'm not sure about the timeliness for budget. Can you remind me, is that allocated funds in escrow? Like is it an interest bearing account? We, the Chittin County Public Safety Authority of which the managers are the board members recently put it into a CD. Okay. Sorry, I had a little bit of trouble. I'm again, just trying to think creatively of like we have limited funds that we can pull from. We have in some cases, unallocated reserves, some existing funds that might be utilized for some immediate needs. And also we need some funds that we've put aside for some intentional use that we're waiting to see come to fruition. And we've been waiting for years. There's been a pandemic, there's been changes, many staffing changes, to say the least, among other challenges. So again, I think just trying to think creatively about how we can best utilize the amount of available funds that we have to meet the demands that our community needs. And I wonder, have we thought or looked at the budgeting of adding an additional part-time police officer to put you guys at 15.5 instead of up at 16? Yeah, that's something that we currently do recruit for. It's just tough with the, typically your part-time officers come from other agencies that are already pre-certified. And they're looking to just get more hours, but every agency around us has unlimited overtime hours just because of staffing shortages. So it's easier for them to just stay and work for overtime hours as opposed to going to a different agency and working part-time hours. I wanna come back to the regional dispatch funding. So to be clear, the original amount that was set aside is sitting in escrow with the group, right? But we still have, we are now funding that line item ongoing. And that money is just sitting in our budget unused. Right. So if we don't know what we wanna do with it related to dispatch issues, that money could offset increase for a role, for a public safety role, until we know what we need to do and then have that conversation. The reason why I'm unusually holding these pots of money, which is not a lean thing to do, which is really what the city needs usually, is because of what the school district has anticipated to do with their tax rate. Normally I wouldn't, okay. No, keep going. It's strategic to say. I'm anticipating that sooner or later we're gonna use all that money. So why would I cut into it now and then the tax rate would have a, probably a much bigger impact in a different way. I understand that strategy. And I have heard disbelief from residents about how much tax rate increase we're considering. And I have not heard a single positive comment about it. Like given the financial situation that people are facing. Oh, smoke. Yeah, yep. This thing is a. Is it this? Oh. No, it came from this way, I thought. Yeah. It does look like theirs. I can see it in the light. Yeah, it just came through from this way, I think. Oh, yeah. You can see the sheet. Yeah. I thought I could hear something over here, but. Good thing I was here. Is it coming from the? No, I think I saw something this way. No, it's just. I've been in noise over there for a while, but. Thankfully the fire chief is here. Yeah. Yeah. 910, 900. I think that's just picking up the smoke in the room. Right. Yeah, I think the light is. Yeah, it's like it's smoky over by over actually. I heard. I heard something coming from that vent. And then. They're really smoky. She's smoky. I don't know. It's a first. It's a first. It's a first. Oh yeah, I really smell it now. Well, now it smells like, not what I was smelling before. No, I smelled that too. Yeah. I'm not a detective, but. In any case. Did we bring the smoke? Smoke, fire, smoke. Sorry. I just think that you're hearing strong concerns from us about the proposed tax rate increases and a desire to see some way to offset some of these. If we move forward the budget that you're recommending, there's got to be some offset in that the rate that goes to voters. Yeah, because I feel like all of these things that are putting forward, and this is considering this community services line, are all items that feel really, really important. And that feel like I want to fund those. And it feels like hard to be like, yes, we really need to fund these. And we're holding this open position. So I think that I think that's where some of my feeling is like, yes, the tax rate is really high. And I'm just looking through. I was playing around with it, right? We have to for level services have five or so percent. We're holding a position that doesn't exist with the funds for that. So the COPS grant, if we decided to explore that route, it's $125,000 over three years. All the things we talked about that we can achieve with that 16th officer as far as community oriented policing, community outreach, crime prevention, more police officers on the street, officer wellness as far as less overtime for the current officers that we have now. A little bit more about the COPS grant. Paul, next slide. It has become more competitive than it has been in the past. FY23, 60% of the applying agencies did receive it. I think that's lower than normal. I think more agencies are applying for it. You do have to be at full staff to pull from the grant. Therefore, it can only fund the 16th position. So we would have to be at full staff to pull from it. If you drop below that 16th position in our case, you don't lose the grant. It just gets frozen until you're back up to that 16th spot. At the conclusion of the grant, the city would be committed to remain at that 16th officer position for a four year period. If you reduce the 16th, do they call back the money? Say that one more time. If you didn't retain it for the four year period, would they? So I think that four year, I think it's really a one year period. So it's three years during the course of the grant, and then one year period after the grant is over with. OK. And yes, if you don't maintain the 16th officer, they call back all grants. OK. Are there exceptions? For the client, but? Yeah. Like, I would think that there would be some type of parameters around under these conditions. Like, I would be interested to look back at the grant agreements, but they were very clear in the past that you had to maintain for the one additional year. So if you had a vacancy, you had to be actively recruiting for it. Because we've received a COPS grant in the past, and there is a 60% success rate, do we know, do they tend to fund previous awardees? In my tenure here, we have received two COPS grants. Yeah, but I've never done one, so I'm not sure. Thanks, Angela. I think I want to name that a 60% chance of receiving a grant in any other department would be amazing. So just like naming the amount of money that is out there for COPS versus the amount of money that's out there for community service with very tiny amounts of money for very, very, very, very competitive things. So I do want to name that, too, of just thinking about where do we, as a city, where can we get funds? What departments can we get more funds for? And what departments are going to really struggle with that, especially as we don't have a grant writer position? So FY25 what it includes, this would be with the 16th officer and the contractual required increase in full-time salaries, benefits, line items. So a snapshot of FY25 with the 16th at the bottom there, and then without the 16th in the last column, what it would look like. No, can't smell any more, either. Other than the smell, yeah. Do you still smell it? Emerging issues. We have three openings, one more anticipated retirement in FY25. It currently takes 12 to 18 months to interview hire and train a new officer to have that turnaround time to get them solo on the street. This is not exclusive to us. This is everywhere. There is a, like the fire chief indicated, there is a national shortage as far as the public safety sector on recruiting and hiring. The other issue, Lieutenant Charcallis talked about it, the building, what that looks like going forward, and then career development, preparing our next generation of leaders. We have a very young staff. We've had a lot of turnover in the past two years. We're getting younger and younger and younger. So preparing these people for these positions prior to taking the positions, as opposed to putting them in the position and then trying to train them up to the position, I think, is a good practice that we've got to look at. And that is it, unless there's any questions on that. I do just want to really, given that we're really digging on the 16th position, appreciate the work of the team and that I had a chance briefly to sit down with almost the full team when Elaine met with everyone and just heard a little bit of the stress or the, I don't know, feeling of being overtaxed or not supporting enough. So I do hear the need for the role. Well, we appreciate that, and we also appreciate the role that you folks play. As hard as we think it is to sit in this seat, I understand that everybody is coming in front of you with some pretty big asks, and that puts a lot of pressure on you all sitting in those seats, and we appreciate the work that you put in and the time that you put in for trying to figure out what's best for the city. So thank you all for that, too. Thank you. Chief, do we need to go? No, we're just getting the attic and stuff disbarred. OK. Were there any questions from folks that are coming in front of us? They're really cute. Also, there's a step down. It's not ADA, so. OK, thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Let's move on to item B. Yeah. That's all we're at. Elaine. OK, so this is for. I just got up. Sorry. This is a relation to downtown Winooski for those of you who weren't aware of a related agenda item from the Council's December 11th meeting. At my recommendation, downtown Winooski's new executive director asked the city for a $36,000 to pay off all of its IRS debt and have some working capital so that it can actually apply for grants and do the things that is otherwise capable of doing. The request was for a five-year, no-interest loan paid monthly, paid back monthly. And Council did approve that. Since that approval, I learned that permitt municipalities are actually not explicitly empowered by state law to issue direct loans. So therefore, we are not allowed to. However, the city attorney did advise that the intent of city council in their December 11th action could be achieved by a prepayment arrangement. And prepayment arrangements would be allowable. A prepayment arrangement is possible because the city provides payments to downtown Winooski annually from sidewalk permit fees and local options taxes. The amount from local options taxes alone has always been much larger than the $36,000 requested. And I am advising council that you rescind your December 11th, 2023 loan approval and approve a prepayment arrangement with downtown Winooski, where $36,000 is authorized to be issued tonight and $2,250 be deducted quarterly from our payment as the city to downtown Winooski out of their allotment of the city's local options tax revenue. Any questions? Nope. Great. Do I have a motion to rescind the loan and approve prepayment as requested? Authorizing a check for the requested $36,000 and for our city manager to sign off. So moved. Motion by Brent, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you all. Thank you, Melissa. Thanks, Melissa. Okay, item C, we are in the new year. So per usual, the city manager annual review process should be completed before town meeting day when there are potential changes on the city council. I've included a memo, just recommending the same process that we've used in years past and suggested schedule, which I ran by the city manager. I am looking tonight for approval of the schedule and for someone to volunteer to coordinate. I think Thomas is right for a turn. Sorry. Open look very different than it has before. What is our? I think councilor heard did an excellent job this past week. They did do an excellent job. I am not sure. It is updated, there's a template. You just need to copy the template. It's a survey monkey. We've automated the majority of it. We're cleaning up all my mistakes. Too many other conversations about this already. Oh, that's just great minds think alike. I move that Thomas takes. All right, so I think, wait, do I have any concerns about the schedule though? I think that's it's standard for what we had last year. Correct? Yeah. Yeah. Okay, then do I have a motion to approve the schedule and Deputy Mayor Renner as the implementer? Second. Motion by Brent. I'm gonna let them know. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. All right, motion carries. Great, we are all set. That's the end of this evening's agenda. Do I have a motion to adjourn? So moved. Motion by Brent, second by Thomas. All those in favor, please say aye. Aye. Motion carries and meeting adjourned. Thank you everyone. Aye.