 roll call. Commissioner Hart, Jones, Clayunas, Samet, here. Let's read here. We'll call the meeting to order and pledge allegiance. Pledge allegiance to the pride 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. I would need approval of the minutes for November 16th meeting. Is there any discussion? All in favor signify by saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carried. Go into items for discussion of possible action. 3.1 fire department letter of retirement. Assistant Chief Butler. Yep. Okay. So this will be effective January 4th provided everything goes as planned. So he put in his notice and really that's the letters attached. It was a very nice letter. He sent out an email to the departments as well and to some of the city members. So very nice. Any questions or discussion? I just want to thank Assistant Chief Butler for all his service in many ways to the past years. And he's been effective, especially in the emergency services part of the fire department. And I think we need to acknowledge his special role there. So thanks to him and all the best in his future. Thank you, Gene. I just wanted to echo what Gene said and also ask Chief, how long has he been with the department? So I believe he said about 28 years. And yeah, thank you. I'll make sure I pass that on to him as well because he has done a phenomenal job in his role as EMS and emergency management. So I will make sure I pass that on. So thank you. Thank you. Say nothing else. We'll move on. Sheboygan fire department update for the lieutenant promotional list. We're just asking. I think actually it has been approved, but we had not formally came come to you earlier this spring. We had run a promotional test had only one person passed the test and they were promoted and we had two vacancies. We waited several months. We ran another test. Again, we had a single candidate. We came to you for approval, which was approved. And at that point we were trying to get everything moving along quickly. I had not had an opportunity, which is normal practice for us to review the exams with each candidate, whether they passed or failed. After I went through the exams with the remaining candidates, we had found a couple questions that were that we just felt instead of arguing over them, we would toss them out, remove them from the process. And when we recalculated the scores based on that smaller number of questions and points that ended up bringing one candidate up into the pass range. So his name is Alex Ebert and we asked for your approval for him to be placed on the list. He's our single remaining candidate or person on the promotional list for lieutenant. I would need a motion to approve that. I moved to approve Alex Ebert to a lieutenant position. Candidate list for lieutenant. Any discussion? Everybody understand what happened? It was just some mathematical thing that he didn't have the scores, but then when they redid it, he did have it. So to be fair, they called me and they said, hey, we want to have the scores. And I said, go ahead, but bring it to the commission for approval. So understanding is just math? Once we review it, the questions change each time. And in this case, we went through the questions and they were questioning what the potential answers were. And as we went back and forth, while we didn't think we were wrong, it wasn't worth, we could see the confusion or the question that they had. So you know what, let's just remove the question from the process. So all the candidates, we recalculated their scores based on that new number, which ends up changing, affected everybody's score a little bit. That one individual that actually bought him past the line necessary to pass. So it wasn't special consideration? No, that number, those questions were thrown out. We applied that same thing to everybody. I'm fine. I'm ready for the vote. If nothing else, no more discussion. All in favor signify with saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carried. Review and approve updated job description for the position of police chief. Now that's what you just gave us, right Chris? It is. So we're being requested to update all the job descriptions in the city. These chiefs hasn't been updated since 2014. Primarily what they're doing is moving it to a different format. So I provided the last one that was run by you in probably late 2013. I've moved it into the new format, updated it a little bit and brought it to you so that you would have a chance to review it and approve it before I send it to HR. And they finalize it. I didn't change much in it, some wording in some of the different areas under some of the areas that you would have concerns in the past under education and experience. I kept it the way that it was with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree preferred. In the past it said at least six years experience. And it suggested a sergeant's position. So I took that out because it said management command level position and then it said sergeant in parentheses. In my view a sergeant is not a command level position in the police department. And I don't see any times when you as a board would be considering somebody in the city of 20,000 who's a sergeant as being prepared to do this job. It really needs to be command level experience at a similar size city. So somebody who's a sergeant in this department in my opinion would struggle if you tried to put them in that position. And I'm not telling you that there's not some person that might be able to do it. Pretty rare though. And a lot of that really just comes down. They might have the talent to be able to do it, but just that lack of experience and having to make those jumps in those middle management positions. You really have that opportunity to experience things and start to see things from a broader perspective. And so without that experience, the learning curve would be pretty significant, I believe. So I just updated that a little bit. I also added advanced training in advanced training school in there. Obviously that's not something that's necessary, but many of the candidates might bring some of that experience with them. And if they have that, that would be a plus. And so I put some of the programs in there. There's a variety of other programs. We send all our middle managers to either the Southern Police Institute, which is run through the University of Louisville. And that's a 12 week program. If they go down there with a bachelor's degree, it's right through the university. And it's a graduate, can be a graduate level program. So they can earn half of a master's degree by going through that program. And then they have the opportunity to complete that master's degree on their own online. So Steve Cobb has gone to the Southern Police Institute. Kurt Brasser, Scott Middlestatt before he left. Kurt Semple and Joel Kozinski, all of them have gone to that. The FBI National Academy is another one. It's a 12 week program run at the FBI Academy in Quantico. It's for middle managers of large departments or chiefs of very small departments. I went there in 2005. Jim Visor has been there and Doug Tennison has been there. It's also affiliated with the University of Virginia, so the same kind of thing can happen. I got a graduate certificate for the classes that I took through the University of Virginia while I was there. So you can get credit that way. There's a couple other shorter programs that are significant programs. But sometimes different qualifications. So the FBI offers another program. But you have to be a chief in a mid-sized city to be able to go to that program. It's a two week program. PERF is the police executive research forum. They offer the senior management institute for police. And they run a three week program through Boston University and Harvard. I went to that in like 2009. It's a case study program. So they have professors from Harvard that teach in the graduate and undergraduate programs there. And they do case studies on modern policing and management. It's really fascinating and it's a great experience to learn from. So there are those programs and they will again help broaden a candidate's perspective. And maybe even just as important is the networking that's built up through those. So when I went through SMIP, there was about 50 other either chiefs or senior leaders throughout the country that attended that with me. And so I got to know the future chief of Atlanta, the future chief of our superintendent of Chicago. Just really a lot of good connections at the FBI. There's 250 people from both the United States and around the world. So you're developing really a worldwide network through that and through Southern Police Institute. It's the same thing somewhere between 30 and 50 students from around the country. So having those chances to network and when you run into problems to reach out to people in other cities across the country and share that what's going on and how they're responding to things is really a key to leadership. So I think that's important. And so that's pretty much the major things that I've updated to it. I just wanted to make sure I brought it to you and gave you guys a chance to look it over and provide any input that you want before I send it on to HR because of some of the issues in the past that have happened between the commission and the council with developing it. What's the timeline? That's really up to you. You could approve it tonight if you want to look at it and put it back on the agenda for the next meeting or if however you want to do it. I just wanted to get it in front of you. I see nothing changed as far as the city with the position requirements and the schooling and stuff, right? Everything stayed the same. Right. The only other thing that I updated now that you mentioned that is where it talks about certifiability in there. I changed that from six months to a year. So it says current certification for a Wisconsin police officer or the ability to obtain certification within one year of employment. And the reason I did that is because the law enforcement standards board is the board that certifies officers in the state and what their requirement is a year. So if Eric was the police chief coming here, he would have a year to take that reciprocity exam and pass it. So I changed that from six months to a year just so it's consistent. Okay. What's the board's pleasure? Do you want to spend time to look at it or I think he's addressed everything he's touched? Are you comfortable acting on it today or do you want to wait? I'm fine with it. I trust the chief knows his job. And I just want to make a comment on the experience and training and things. I think that is so important right now looking at police work and how we have to really look at how our police forces are trained and what's the attitude of the leadership in the police department and what has to be enlightened and not regressive. I appreciate those specific mentions of certain institutes that we can't just say, you know, I did this or I did that, but we want certain kinds of training so that people are on the right page in terms of leadership for our force. And I think for the most part the issues between the council and the commission have come back in those educational requirements in the past where the council wanted to push to mandate a graduate degree where the commission is in favor or prefers to have a graduate degree but wants to have the leeway that if they get the right candidate who doesn't have a graduate degree but has significant experience and can demonstrate that they have the qualities that they're looking for that you want to be able to exercise your right to hire that person. And so I left that and I agree with that. I think there are going to be some people that don't have that graduate degree although it's starting to become pretty rare I think. So if you look at the candidates that you interviewed in spring, at least one of the three captains in our department has a graduate degree and I think every lieutenant does. So it's really up to you though. You're in charge. Andy? Chief, I think you just answered my question. My question was within the current department and your top command staff, do they all meet these minimum requirements? So we could consider almost all of them for internal candidates? Yep. And then secondly, one of the minimums is possession of a valid Wisconsin motor vehicle driver's license? Correct. Would an out of state candidate have that? They would have the opportunity to obtain one. So I wonder do we need to add like you did or the ability to obtain to the end of that? You could but I think that you can ask Eric. I think the timeline is to be able to switch is so fast that once they establish residency here. But I could do that. I could put it or equivalent if you want it. I think what you're really looking for though is once they move here that they have the ability to drive to get a Wisconsin driver's license. Yeah. Thank you. Yeah, I was going to go. Sorry, go ahead Larry. No, Jerry, I'll go in after you. Thank you. Please continue. Okay. Yeah, I was just going to put forth the motion to improvements presented. Well, Larry, let us hear what you got to say prior to Jerry's motion. Certainly, I'm going to abstain obviously because I can't vote on something I don't have in front of me, although I certainly respect and trust the chief and my other four peers on the commission. So I don't think that'll be a problem, but I do have a question for the chief and it's more just of informational chief do national politics influence the training that occurs in these many fines educational opportunities you talked about. In other words, there's an administration in the White House dictate how how officers might be trained based on the philosophy of the department, ongoing Department of Justice under that administration or is it pretty consistent. And particularly, I'm using an example of de escalation techniques, for example. First, any thoughts on that please. For the most part, I would say no it doesn't and the reason that I would say that is because the only programs that that really would be influenced by the Department of Justice for for the most part would be the FBI programs. But but just by the very nature of the type of agency that the FBI is. Most of the classes that that they're going to be presenting in their programs are more leadership classes and then investigate investigation type of classes. And then if you go to the to the other programs. The University of Louisville is going to is just going to be a progressive eight university that does a lot of research in in the area of policing so they're helping to develop some of the the research base that forms policy. Purse programs Purse is is again the police executive research forum so it's led by and made up of police chiefs. So some of the things we've implemented I can't as part of our our training program and so that stands for integrated. Now I won't be able to think of it integrated communication and tactics. And so that's a de escalation course that that we've integrated into our defense and arrest tactics. And that was developed by the police executive research forum. And then once they developed it we sent three of our people to a train a trainer session to learn the curriculum and then bring that curriculum back and integrate it in into our programs. So I think most of those programs especially SMIP and the Southern Police Institute would really be some of the progressive things that are that are sharing much of what's being learned through research. So that's where some of these best practices are really coming out of so be able to be connected to them. Really I think gives agencies kind of a like up. All right. Thank you very much for answering my question. Otherwise, as I said, I'll abstain from the vote. Thank you. Jerry. Sorry, and I was unaware and Larry did not have a copy of this. So if we wanted to hold that I'd be in favor of withdraw the motion. But at this point I'd still say we should move forward and I'd like to make a motion to approve as presented. We have a motion to approve it. We have a second. Second. Any discussion? All in favor signify with saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Motion carried. All right, we'll move on to 3.4. The approval for promotions of the Sheboygan Police Department to the rank of Sergeant. Okay, so I provided you with two letters that pretty much just lay everything out. What I'm doing is nominating two people today for your approval to promote to the rank of sergeant. And so I'm asking you to approve those promotions, but I don't anticipate them taking place until February. And so what we have going on is we have one sergeant's vacancy that was created in June when Ryan Schmidt resigned to go work for Acuity. And because of our current state of manpower with the number of people that we had in training, I decided not to fill that position at that point, because I believed essentially what we would be doing is taking somebody from the police officer position and moving them up to sergeant, which would be good for our supervisory ranks. But when we're already short of bodies on the street, it still is my belief that we're best just holding the vacancy at the sergeant position until we got those people through some training so we would have less impact on our response to calls for service. So there's already that one vacancy. The second vacancy I'm anticipating, and we've talked about it a little bit in the past as part of our succession planning, but Kurt Brasser has announced that he's retiring in the effect of January 29th. And so he's a captain, so by him retiring, it's going to cascade and open up all kinds of positions. We've tried to get ahead of the curve and run these tests to identify who to promote and seek approval for promotion before we get there so that we can put it all together and promote everybody at one time. So for the vacant position, well, I'll tell you, so we ran a process like we always do. The process occurred between October 6th and November 1st, and it consisted of an internal staff evaluation and assessment exercise consisting of an outside oral board, a written paper, and an in-basket exercise. There were three police officers that participated in that process, and the two that I'm nominating to you are Officer John Ropnick and Officer Joel Hendricks. So the second vacancy would come when Kurt retires, and my plan at this point would be in the first two weeks of February to promote them both. Larry, since you're not here, John Ropnick was hired in April of 1993. He works in the patrol division. In the past, he was a leader for the Shoeigen County Dive Team for over 10 years. During that time, he was responsible for the safety of dive team members, and he developed and maintained the training program and performance standards for the team. More recently, he has assisted in tracts training. So tracts is the software that we use to write traffic citations and move all the data through to the state. So John has stepped up and helped lead and train the use of the tracts system. He's also one of our key leaders of our Spillman software, which is our records management. So there's always updates and things going on with that software. So John's one of the subject matter experts and trainers that really models the way and coaches some of our people that are struggling with it to be successful. He, in the past couple of years, he's also assisted with our dementia awareness training for the entire department. And most recently, he volunteered to be a member of the field force, the county regional field force team. So they're the ones who went to training for crowd management. And then last year, we had John and two other of the officers actually train the whole department to get them back up to speed as part of our insurface. John also assumed leadership for the Coffee with a Cop program and helped plan that the last two years. And then most recently, he served for the last two years as a police training officer. So he's one of the guys that are taking our new officers and spending time with them and helping to develop them into being successful officers. And then Joel Hendricks has been with the department for 17 years. He has a bachelor's degree from Marion University. Again, he's a police training officer prior to that. He was a field training officer, so he's been training officers since 2012 for us. For the last 10 years, he's been an evidence technician. He's on our emergency response team. And he's a firearms instructor, I believe. So both of them have a background in training our officers and both really have significant experience to become supervisors, one 19 years and one 17 years. So I would say it warms my heart, but there's better words to say it. To see two guys that have spent significant time working day shift, being willing to go back to third shift and take on the responsibility of being leaders in the department. And so that's exciting, might be a better word. I'd like to make a motion to approve the promotion of Officer John Rupnik and Officer Joel Hendricks to the rank of police sergeant. We got a motion and a second. Is there any discussion? I'm just impressed with the training listing that both of these men have. It's very encouraging when people do this stuff. You know, they do it on their own time with the expense of maybe, you know, putting other things aside for the sake of it for us. So very impressive. Any more discussion? If seeing none, Larry. I'm waiting for the vote. Thank you. All right. Seeing there's no more discussion, all in favor signify with saying aye. Opposed? Aye. Motion carried. We'll move on to 3.4. Approval for promotions in the civilian police department on the rank. No, I'm sorry, 3.5. Promotions to the rank of lieutenant. So again, you have a letter from me nominating Joel Kaczynski. Sergeant Joel Kaczynski to be promoted to the rank of police lieutenant in February of 2021. The position was posted between October 28th and November 10th. There were nine potential candidates and Joel's the only one that applied. I did not run a process because we had recently run a process in November of 2019 when we promoted Mike Stelter to lieutenant. And at that time I talked to you about how close I thought they were and really how well both of them did. I think the reason that only Joel applied is because everybody else understands that or maybe that's the wrong word. I think a lot of people believe they can't compete with him at this particular time would probably be the best way to say it. And that's saying a lot because we have some, I think some really outstanding people that have potential to do this. And they're being encouraged to step up in the future. But just off the top of my head, Sarah Blodgett is an outstanding sergeant that really has a lot of talent and has a bright future ahead of her. Andy Cunninghur really has a bright future in front of him. I think I'll say too, I don't want to just say that they're afraid to compete with Joel because that's not what I'm saying. But part of it I think is because of the path that we've taken in the last 10 years to try to move people around and broaden their experience and give them experience in all different areas of the department. They're doing that and they're seeing the benefits of it and enjoying their time in the different places. And so I know Sarah's in the MAG unit and has been really growing while she's there. I think she understands that and values it and figures the time she's putting in there is really going to help her in the future. So there's some of those things going on. Hey, Chief, I have one question. Maybe you can't answer that, but like you said, of the nine eligible candidates, only one, why is that? You see that so much in the city and departments. People don't want to get promoted. For us, I think it's really rare. We always get multiple candidates, but I think it is we ran a process in November of 2019 for a lieutenant. And we had two really good candidates. Mike and Joel really had stepped up and had leadership roles in a lot of different areas of the department. And so if you look at Joel's resume, so I talked about it. Joel went to SPI and so part of that is a sacrifice. So Joel went to school for 12 weeks in Louisville. He left his family and went down there and earned 15 graduate credits. So he's not out party and he's writing 20 and 30 page papers doing research and all of that. So that's a big sacrifice. And Steve could talk to you about the program because Steve's the first one that I sent to the program in 2011 or 2012. And I think kind of blown away about all of the things that they learn in the program. And then what, yeah, I could talk about this forever, but watching them bring that back and teach it to our department and seeing how it affects our department in comparison to other departments. And then even when we send people back. So every one of the candidates that we have sent there has been a dean scholar, which means they've graduated in the top like 3% of the class. Kurt Sembo was a class president. I don't know what Joel was like the secretary or something, why he was down there. So they all come back with accolades. I didn't bring all Joel's letters of reference, but Joel has about seven letters of reference in his package. One of them is from the head of the program at SBI that talked about the impact that he had on the class, why he was there and the influence that he had in really selling some of these best practices to the other students and helping the professors. Really teach and kind of cement some of these things based on the stories that he had from some of the things that we did. And so mirroring that up. So Joel has been continuing to work on his master's degree while he's come back. And so I think in the summer is when he's supposed to graduate. Like Kurt Sembo, he'll put things together. So this past in service that we just did in October, he put together a two hour class on procedural justice and talked about procedural justice to everybody in the department and got them to understand that letting people have a voice and say their piece and following the process really makes a difference in how we're viewed and how people accept the actions that we take. So just really important things that they do that way. Joel has been in charge of the drug court program. So he's represented the department in the drug court program and has really helped me sell it to the officers. And so he's recognized for that. Yeah, just so many things. They're seen really as leaders in the department. And because of that, people don't want to do all kinds of work and then go through a process that they believe that they're not going to come out on the top of is what I would say. Okay. Anybody else? Any questions? Larry? Move to approve. I'm good. Thank you. Yeah. I moved to approve the promotion. Second. Sergeant Kosinski to the lieutenant. All right. We got a second to the motion. Any discussion? Say none. All in favor signify with saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Aye. Motion carried. Now I need a motion to go into closed session. Andy? I move that we go into closed session. We have a second. Second. Roll call. Hot. Aye. Jones. Aye. Clayunas. Aye. Salmon. Aye. Retrie. Aye. We are now in open, going in closed session. All right. We're almost done here. Yeah. All right. We're back in open session. First action. We need action to the fire department eligibility list. I would like to make a motion to extend the current fire department eligibility list until February 28th. Any discussion? All in favor signify with saying aye. Aye. Opposed? Aye. Motion carried. And as far as the action related to police department candidate interview, we are going to delay making any recommendations until the meeting on the 21st. I believe it was there. Anybody got any comments? I make a motion to adjourn. All in favor? Aye. Opposed? Opposed? Motion carried. We are adjourned. Thank you.