 Dr. Bussell here. Mr. Brennan. Mr. McDowell. Mr. Duvall. Present. Mayor Rickamon. Here. Reverend McDowell you have saved few words before we break into this deep discussion and Mr. Drafts gets up there and shares some little words of wisdom with us. Created and most merciful. We thank you for this day and for the manifold blessings you bestowed upon each of us. You've blessed us with life, health and strength. And because of that we are eternally grateful. Be with us now as we brainstorm together, allowing this city to continue to expand and grow itself. We ask it. We claim it in your name. Amen. Mr. Mayor. Mr. Duvall, a moment of personal privilege. We have with us two reporters from the Carolina News here today and I just wanted to give them a shout out. These are the students that do a broadcast every day and seven years ago when I got on council I started getting these phone messages from weird zip codes and all for area codes and I realized that they were the students calling to get an interview and so now that I'm downtown living downtown I'm two blocks away from the communication school and I do frequent interviews. I did one this morning. You know how shy he's afraid of the press. He got my talking to him but these students are professional stations all printed. He's available at all times after nine. The reason I get all the press is because I answer my telephone and you're retired. Yeah. But welcome and y'all are as professional more than some of the professionals that we have. Who are they? Who are they? I can't remember all the names. I'm Lydia Blackstone. Nice to meet you. I know some of you also. Thank you for the shout out. This is Lauren. Welcome ladies and thank you Mr. DeVall for always being forward facing with the interviews. We don't even always know and so we appreciate you. I'm always accurate but we also wish our senior citizen a happy 80th birthday. All right. A couple of days ago. Yay for 80s. 80s is a big number. Yes it is. When was it? It's 30. When you reach 70 and they say 70 is the new 50. When you reach 80 they don't say anything. They ask who your insurance agent is. It's your insurance agent. Child's beautiful. Child's beautiful. New 80 looks good. Y'all are very active and that's a blessing. You know I just try to make it through the week. Me too. I'm looking to enjoy life like that one day. So, well, Mayor and Council, we are, as I keep saying, tracking on our budget journey. And today we are taking up the Columbia Police Department. We thank you for the attention you gave to Columbia Fire Department and a different set of issues and a different set of analysis and some decisions that are gonna have to be made with that Chief Holbrook sent a great memo to you all in preparation for today's discussion. I hope you read that because we're looking at this as kind of, they're a little, I would say, they're in the phase after what we went through with them, which is similar to probably what we're going through with Fire now, so we're kind of staging it out. And this phase of the Columbia Police Department journey is more about opportunities, we think. There are certainly challenges that they are overcoming and we all know the profession for public safety has its challenges nationwide. So our city, our capital city is no different, but I do think we're learning to think bigger, more creatively, put that attention on recruitment and retention and some different strategies. And so that's a big chunk of what Chief Holbrook wants to talk about today. He mentioned in the memo, we, I sort of look at it like this council helped us set the foundation, the infrastructure is in place, the pay plan is amazing, that's been implemented, the one officer program is well underway. Those are sort of the infrastructure pieces that need to be in place. Some of the things you haven't heard about that they've been doing since then has to do with these wonderful diverse faces you see in this room today that have become the face of Columbia Police Department's recruitment efforts internally, but we know as we're doing with our marketing effort in our RFP city wide that they need to have some value ads probably with some recruitment and retention strategies where they're bringing in experts in how to do this. And so they're gonna talk about some of that and how they complement what they're doing internally with these other efforts and how we can help them with that. And then I know the Chief has talked to you in passing and I think y'all asked for more about some other impacts that affect their workload. And some of those things might be policy driven decisions that have to change. So it wouldn't happen overnight because we need maybe the state legislature to embrace some new thoughts about some of these things but some could maybe happen overnight. I need him to talk about it. So I have a good indication, if y'all are ready to dip your feet in that water and us push forward with some of those novel things to include wrapping up a discussion on special events and how we handle special events in our city, I think you'll probably be enlightened about what all we do, not just the police department but city wide from public works to fire to parking services and the labor intensive effort that goes into a very active city that you all have helped build on weekends. The mayor was talking to us yesterday about his last weekend. I know some of you all are out about me. It is amazing to give you a snapshot of what happens in our city on any given weekend in particular. So we'll get started. Just here for the ride today, I'm gonna let everybody who's listening don't tell us there's nothing happening in Columbia South Carolina. That's right. So Chief Holbrook and I know he's gonna introduce his team. I will. I was gonna do that later on but Dr. Bussell's already chided me for not introducing so I'll just do it right off the bat. Major George Drafts, Major Drafts long time member of the police department over 30 years. He's the major of administration, Rebecca Robinson. She is one of our faces in recruiting, Ashley Maddox. Another beautiful face in our recruiting unit and maybe not as pleasant to look at but equally important is Sergeant Harry Delage and he also goes by Trey. They're doing a great job and they're a big part of this presentation today. I think Ashley deserves another shout out I forgot cause I hadn't seen her but I love me some Ashley and she, I wanna say retrieved a wedding ring several weeks ago. They got a little bit of press for a young lady that was in distress. So y'all do all kinds of things, right Ashley? Yeah, that paid it forward right there for sure. That was something and not many people could fit in a holder like that either. So that was good, yeah. That's the most we'll go around. So Miss Wilson, thank you for that. Tea Up, great introduction. Mayor, council, it's a pleasure to speak to you today about three really important areas of focus for us. I wanna echo what Miss Wilson said first and foremost, you know, this is my ninth year. The support that I've received in our departments received from council and from the city managers, just it's been unwavering and through the good, the bad and tough situations and it's just, it's never faltered and I appreciate that. Absolutely, foundationally, you all have given us everything we need to be successful and it's really, it's the balls in our court, I think to capitalize on that. Whether it's the incredible pay plan that is well underway now or our fleet improvement, which is, you know, continues as quick as we can outfit them, they're coming in. We're waiting on, we've already ordered another 28 and we're well on the way to one person, one car and we're really getting rid of some aged fleet and that's a, you know, we've talked about vehicles for years and years and that continues to be an important area of emphasis for our officers and we think that, again, helps with recruiting and retention. You've helped us leverage technology. As we know, we have to do things smarter and better and with less resources so that technology has been a huge shot in the arm and then I always try to put things in perspective any time I speak to you all and thanks as we're having this discussion today that I really just don't want us to ignore is we're still recovering and what I mean by that is as a profession, we're still recovering nationally from some national issues involving law enforcement. Really everything following the George Floyd incident. We experienced our own setbacks here with a couple of days of riots, but how it's impacted us between the 60 additional days of protests we have in conjunction with COVID. You know, the nationally law enforcement just hasn't recovered and we've kind of followed that trend nationally. We've seen 47% increase in resignations and 19% increases in retirement and we've kind of followed that trend. So it goes, I think it speaks to what we're talking about today and then as Ms. Wilson stated, you know, and I always use the line, we're a capital city. We need to look like a capital city and act like one but with that, we're very unique and it's hard just to compare us to another city of our size. We've got the university of five colleges and universities, trauma hospitals. We've got state government, which brings just something new every day it seems like an incredible amount of events and sporting events and again, it goes to our discussion about special events and then a growing homeless population that has been a strategic focus of this council and we're still tackling with gun crime. That's a lot. That's a lot to do with the department that has been struggling for staffing. So with that said, we'll jump right in. Chief, that's your transition and I think one of our council members is curious about the titles of these other individuals that you have working with or criminal. You introduced them and I don't think you said their titles. Oh, I'm sorry. So Rebecca's a corporal, Ashley's a master police officer and Delage is a sergeant. There's a lot of institutional knowledge there with them too. Very much so, if you start here and go around the horn, it's gonna be over 100 years. We didn't want that to go under spades. Just a little bit older than Howard. They wouldn't take one other to make 100. We'll have to use all five of them with interviews. So I'm gonna start with staffing with an update and I'm gonna hit on our current staffing. I'll talk about this war quote analysis in some way and how that impacts region realignment and some alternative solutions. So a snapshot of our sworn personnel, as you can see, we're this shy of 100 positions short and that's a very alarming number, a staggering number. Some good things. We, our diversity stand is about 41%. We're very proud of that. Our lady representation, our women in law enforcement is about 20% and we were very committed to our 30 by 30 initiative, which we hope to have a representation around 30%, about 30 and that's tracking well. We just recently hired two certified officers and again, acknowledging the pay plan. I think that's had an impact and we know that as we continue the hiring process, anytime we can snag a certified officer, it has an immediate impact for us. The bad is, as I mentioned, is our 99 vacancies. We are seeing some good trends and I'm gonna get to this in some of our next few slides but our applicants are better. Last year, it took 17 applications to get a hire and this year we're on a ratio of about nine, nine to one. So that's good and it really comes down to math at this point and that's why we'll talk about the importance of applications. Earlier this year, we embarked on a workload study using our staff along with a consultant. It's called the ISS Agency. They're out of Charlotte and with the help of our crime analysts, our GIS folks and our 9-1-1 center, our IT department. We've really been doing a deep dive into how we're policing our 137,000 people and 100 plus square miles. We have four regions. We have, are you doing that or me? Well, you didn't move aside. Oh, I'm sorry. I just want this to slide. We have four. Is this the slide you want? Yes. We have four patrol regions or four regions and 30 patrol zones and that's that our current staff is responsible for. We've examined our call data. So we're looking at calls for service, the types of calls, the time spent on the calls, the response time and we're factoring in, the number of officers, their time off, whether it's sick leave, annual leave, their time in court, their training time and the results have not been surprising. If you factor in all that time with the current staffing, as we've talked about a lot, they're going from call to call to call. There's 7% of their shift work is downtime, allows them to do something other than just going from call to call. That impacts morale, that impacts performance, obviously with this mental and physical fatigue and that impacts retention. The optimal ratio is one third answering calls, one third doing your reports from the calls and then another third being proactive community policing. So we've got to, as we finish this analysis, we've really got to figure out how we manage the current workload and look at some alternative responses. Chief, real quick, so where are we, if the optimum's a third to third to third, what are you saying, where does our percentage just fall? I'm saying we have no free time. We have 7% free time versus we need 30%. 90% calls, yeah. So we've got to look at some, kind of out of the box thinking a little bit on how we might be able to ease this workload and I have this slide just to kind of illustrate, these are what categorizes our top 25 calls. I'll start with the special property check. So you've heard me talk a lot about the property checks we do every morning, especially in the business, the downtown corridor. A lot of that deals with the homeless population clearing, parking lots and porches and just nicks and crannies and parking decks and so that has a huge impact on workload. Our alarms, the next when you see circled, we answer just over 11,000 alarms, 95% of our alarms are false. So that's residential, that's hold up in business. What's the difference between residential and commercial? It's right now. It's about half. It's about 50, 50. So I'll talk about that a little bit more on the next slide. Our mental responses to people in mental crisis is 3,400. That does not include our, it is inclusive of mental transports. We'll do between 800 and 1,000 mental transports a year. That's where somebody has to be taken from the hospital to a mental facility. Autobrake in delays, that's somebody has their car broken to if they find it, they'll call the next day or sometimes a few days later, that's over 1,600. Most of them are unlocked. We respond to 8,000 collisions a year. You've heard me mention that. That's a responsibility that we have along with the highway patrol and that's just for comparison, that's something that the Sheriff's Department doesn't have to respond to. They don't do any traffic responses or investigations. We do 8,000, 2,000 of those are on private property. And what I mean by that is you're at the grocery, you're at the Publix with tight parking downtown and somebody backs into you and minor damage, no injury. We respond to 2,000 of those. Because all of these don't need sworn personnel to handle. Correct? Correct. And I know we've had this conversation, maybe helpful for those who don't know. I mean, we've had conversations about what we can do to take some pressure off our sworn personnel and alternatives and especially the points you circled seem to be, I mean, most of those are time, very time consuming. Yes, sir. So my thought process for this discussion really would be, what are we statutory required to respond to and do and then what can we have, look at from maybe a shared responsibility with our public, a social contract with our citizens? And the first and foremost, if you look at just the alarm calls, we have to change that behavior. And it's not about being punitive or being heavy-handed on fines, but that is the way you, I think is the only way to change that behavior. We have looked at some software recently that we've worked with IT that's compatible with our CAD system. This would be a little to no lift for us in terms of resources. It's going to require a modification of our ordinance to really reestablish what triggers certain notifications, like how many alarms do we want to give a business or a resident before they get sent a letter? And then it would be a graduated fine system. Obviously, the goal is that they just correct the faulty alarm or they hold their employees accountable. A lot of times what you see in the, especially in the morning and in the evening is people come to work, they set off the alarm, new employees, they set off the alarm. A lot of times it's a hold up alarm which requires an emergency response, which is dangerous. It's putting our officers at danger and the public at danger in that response. And again, it also, in my opinion, human nature creates complacency. If the officers are responding to an alarm, 95% of the time it's false. When they get to that one, it's not false and your guards down, you could have a tragic outcome. So I think that that is something that is in front of us to, I think we can deal with it responsibly and fairly. And I think it's time we really considered doing that. I just had a question. So as far as the false alarms, those are more repeat offenders? Is that what the both of the numbers are or? Repeat offenders, yes. From a, is that something you could outsource where private security could handle? I mean, right now if I did quick math, it's about 200 calls a week. So, I mean, is that something that based on where we're challenged in recruitment and hiring because of the atmosphere that we're still in, is that something that you could relieve? I mean, I know putting in this for the repeat offenders, but you're still gonna have a bulk of calls. And it sounds like a lot of those, is there a way to maybe work with a private contractor to handle that? As far as a response? Yeah, checking the property, because you got property checks too. So if you took those loads off, would that be an alternative to keep our guys and gals that are, you know. Sure, I don't know if, I don't know that we could necessarily do that on an alarm call. I think if, you know, so with the ordinance, once you hit a certain threshold, you know, obviously there would be a fine, but it's some threshold if they're failing to correct a problem, then there would be a no response. You're not gonna go anymore. So that would eliminate that. You're still gonna have all those others, because I mean, it just seems like this is an age old issue. It seems to be to me, even with all the technology today, seems like we've had this discussion before. I'm just trying to think out of the boxes, is there a way to relieve some of that? I think with property checks in general, absolutely. I think that is a shared response that we could come up with some probably creative ways with some of our partners on the mental health side. Yeah, yeah, yeah. You know, I think that is certainly a- I just think we gotta add more things to your toolbox to give you all the flexibility as we continue to push to recruit. And I'm hoping that there's a period of time where people understand and they wanna get back in law enforcement. The 2,500 escort calls you have, are those for funerals, or are those for taking people to the bank or what? Both. A lot of it is bank runs, or maybe walking employees to a car at night. Some of it is funeral, but it varies. Chief, is the code enforcement team, are they sworn officers? No, sir. So they're not, but they do a lot of the functions of law enforcement as it comes to obviously responding to. There's some limitations to what they can do, but they are a multiplier for us in a lot of situations, especially with events now in traffic. What defines their limitations? Really arrest powers and not carrying a sidearm. So could they do reporting for some of these circles you have here? Vandalism reporting, delayed auto-breaking reporting? Well, my goal would be that we go to like a mandatory online reporting, like a portal where if you wanna, most of that is insurance related reporting. We already have some online reporting, but I really think in some of these crime, these no suspect, no solvability factors, more insurance reporting, we need to look at a, just a mandatory online reporting. I think that's why a lot of people call the police in because they feel like, if it's not documented, they're gonna have a problem. Right, and honestly, we wanna know about it because that, we want people, it may even indicate better crime trends for us to be able to have different deployment strategies. You know, a lot of times you'll hear at community events, somebody's car got ransacked or whatever, and they're like, they didn't take anything, I'm not gonna call. Well, we really need to know about that because that's not gonna be the only one on that street or... So, sir. Chief, let me ask you a question relative to your mental health issues. Is that all inclusive of all mental health issues, not only the transference of folk from the hospital into a mental health facility? Is that all inclusive of the Pallet community? What's involved there? For the mental health call for service? Yeah. It does include our mental health transports from hospitals. It's not gonna capture our transports to the rapid shelter. That we wouldn't classify that. We would classify that as a transport for homeless services but not for mental health. Recognizing that probably most of those clients are suffering from some type of mental health related issue. So kind of along the lines of what the mayor was mentioning. So what are some things we could potentially outsource? We're looking for privatizing or outsourcing our mental health transports. There is some models of that that are underway in the state now. We're talking with one of our vendors that helps us with the facility securities and that's something we... Yes. I just wanna, you're talking about outsourcing. I wanna make sure everybody's on the same page. Yes, sir. I appreciate that. So the mental health transport, private property collisions that I mentioned where there's no damage, there's a requirement to exchange information. That could be something that, you know, I wouldn't wanna stand here and say we're tapping code enforcement to do that but that does not necessarily need to be a police officer for sure, it could be some civilian entity that would respond to facilitate that exchange of information. It's literally just a standard form, correct? Correct. Is there an agreement in place that we, there's a lot of state roads in the municipality as you know, that we as the CPD, if the state roads within the municipality boundaries, then CPD's gonna take it and not the troopers? Yes, that's a tourally we have to. Okay. And again, that's where, you know, I think this body would potentially be able to, you know, impact things that might mitigate that. But at the county level, that requirement's not there. They're exempt from a statutorily. Right. And then, you know, I mentioned we have 8,000 collisions a year and in the 90s, we had 4,800. Now, you could argue we have, you know, the population is a little bit more than it was in the 90s, but I would suggest that it's, you know, we're driving behavior. I know the mayor talks about this frequently. I'm a super champion of this. We, you know, we, if we could somehow pile of a red light program or a camera program, I think it would be a game changer for our city. And I mean, I gotta say, I mean, I think it's time for the state also to look at the cell phone. I mean, look, in Georgia, they will pull you over and give you a ticket if you're on your phone while driving. Mostly, yeah. We don't have that. And I've guaranteed you can relate the majority of these collisions to people on their phone. You could tell the person in front of you when they're on their phone at a red light, you know, exactly when they're on their phone for there's a late reaction, yeah, this and that. And they gun it through, they're not paying attention as the lights change and this and that, but, you know, I do think that, but these are type of things that we need to advocate as well. But, you know, red light cameras would be helpful. I know there's people against it, but I mean, when you work an accident, is it safe to say you spent an hour and a half just working one accident? It varies. It's, you know, some of our, you know, traffic unit officers, I mean, a lot of that's been automated that has helped speed that up, but I think that's, you know, 60 minutes to two hours, depending on the difficulty of the intersection and the number of cars and all that stuff. And how much court time is wasted because I've sat in traffic court and almost 95% of the cases before the judge get dismissed because nobody shows up because the insurance companies have already settled it. So our officer just spent the whole morning on that day there to just watch everything dismiss. Right. That's, that is certainly not an efficient use of time. And again, that factors into the whole formula of court time and how that means there's not an officer in the patrol zone. So again, these are things that are underway. This is in many jurisdictions. So it's whether it's a fossil law in ordinance, it's outsourcing some of these services. You know, it wouldn't be something necessarily unique to Columbia. It would just be us, you know, making some policy decisions, you know, at the direction of the manager and then tweaking in ordinance. And then, of course, any influence we can have from our state elected officials to, you know, for some consideration for the red light camera project, I think would be, again, a behavior changer. And it's, you know, the programs I've seen, they're civil, they're not criminal. So it kind of takes that argument off. It's the person responsible is the person that owns the vehicle. It doesn't matter who's driving it. So... So with these outsourced, y'all have a plan that you present and could look at, because the one thing I do want to make sure is that as we plan to look at some of the, especially private property, maybe property crimes and other things where you're using a non, that we have that person also making sure that they're responding. Because I know it's easy to put in on the computer to report it, but people still want to know somebody got it and saw it and how we have that second part to it, because no sense creating more phone calls, but we need to make sure as part of whatever your plan is to address that, that there's follow-up. There's a way that people get acknowledged that it's been received. And if something comes up, hey, thank you very much. You know, you're helping to solve a neighborhood crime or whatever, which is why that information is so important. Good point. I think that's why it's important, the portal system developing some type of consumer city portal system where things are, you assign a ticket, you assign a work order, whatever it is, things come in, they get assigned certain things and then you can follow up on your own. And make it easy for people to track it. Yeah, no, I think that's the important thing is, and I think you're right, that you gotta, people, if they don't want to be involved, they need to be involved. And so, but I think most people want to be involved, they just don't know how. And they do want to know that what they've done is being followed up on. So I think the software that you use, is there an additional layer to unlock that capability? You know, we talk about the wisdom stuff that Columbia Water uses and all the capabilities there. Is there, how difficult would that be? For online reporting or the software? Whatever we all bring forward. I don't, you know, I'm probably not the expert to ask that. I don't think it would be difficult because it's in place in lots of jurisdictions. I think it would just be seeing what some best practices are, some of the, you know, top software and see what's compatible. And I mean, our IT folks, I mean, they're solution driven. I know they'll figure it out. They've been great to work with, you know, with our false alarm discussion. I mean. Well, I think there's so many jurisdictions that are in the same situation and have done some of these so we can learn from them. It's not like we're reinventing the wheel. There isn't, I can't restate the numbers to you, but when we, this software is called CryWolf. Probably one of the largest jurisdictions it uses in our region of the country is Charlotte. Their number, their numbers dropped dramatically after they've been using it for I think 10, 11 years now. It had an immediate impact on their alarms. So would you say the prisoner and mental health transport, those seem like pretty low hanging fruit that we can make that change pretty quickly. But from a budget perspective, is that where you would need us to consider or have you all kind of started working that out? Well, outsourcing does have somewhat of a budget impact. So we would certainly, you know, do our due diligence on that, present that to the manager for some consideration. This is the perfect time to do it. And that's why we're talking about it today is because it would have some budgetary impact, but it would, the question would be what would our return on investment would be and that would be, in my opinion, increasing that workload, decreasing the workload to increase the percentage of time to be able to do proactive, which gives you the officer a better quality of life. Yeah, I think that's... 100% agree, but the mental health transport is a state law requiring municipal governments to do that. Yes, sir. We might have to go get some legislation. But does it say that it has to be a sworn officer? Right, I don't know if it's... Or it could be like someone that represents the local law enforcement agency, right? I don't know the answer to that question, but I remember when the Sheriff's Association tried something alternative, but I have to look it up. Where's our house attorney? I think it would be worth pursuing that this cycle, if you can, and seeing what city manager thinks and bringing it to us, the two transport things, because Albinglen is far. Takes a lot of time, so. The alarm situation, I think we can require that if you have an alarm system, it has to be answered first by a private company before it comes to us. That's usually how it works, though, isn't it, Howard? Well, yeah, a lot of people have AT and ADT or whatever it is, or a CS, CS... I know a lot of it already goes through that vendor that the resident or the business is with, but they still dispatch on it. If that homeowner or the business doesn't call and say, tell them that I'm not there, or that was an accidental trip or something like that, then they're gonna go ahead and dispatch. So you're saying they don't actually come on the camera and tell the burglar to run away, to get out of here? I'm sure. I'm not gonna say something like that. I don't know that all the bombers are listening. Yeah, that's the problem. It's not covered in your $25 months. It's not covered in your $25 months. So the next area I wanna talk about is recruiting. I already introduced our recruiting team, and I did have their years of service. Trey was 20 years, Rebecca was 11, and Ashley was seven. Great balance. They've all had different assignments. They really just bring a good balance to the different personalities too. Every person that we hire, I've interviewed before, before we inked the contract, if you will. And one of the things that I always ask is, tell me about the process and how are the recruiters? And I'm not just saying this because this was our hand-picked new team, but I have not had a negative comment yet. They really talk about how they stay engaged with the applicant from start to finish because they really gotta push some people along. It's the oddest thing. Somebody's applying for a job, and you're having to really push them to get paperwork in, or they haven't heard from them. And that engagement is what we're seeing as more critical now than ever, especially with our younger applicants, but they're doing a great job. I've always asked about the process. Was there any delays? Is there any areas of improvement? And I think we've really kind of hit our sweet spot on that. And again, it's just getting more applications to be busy. And I think a part of this time that we were sort of laying the foundation or the process changes was seeing where you could streamline. I mean, you don't have to go into all that in great detail, but I think a good bit of that occurred working with City HR as well, where they can help. But also, you're pretty chief, there's just certain things for the nature of this job that you have to get back from applicants. That's different. I'm gonna hit on some of that punch list and things that we've identified, especially with our certifies that we can waive. So any time we can identify a way that we can speed up the process we're doing that, and I think that's important for you all to know. We also have two full-time investigators that do backgrounds in-house. They're both former police officers that are retired and came back and operate in that role. And we have two part-time people that do backgrounds and they're former police officers too. So they know what the... When we get every once in a while, we can get a backlog and we outsource that so we don't have any delay in our background investigations. But one of the things that I think is very, very important about us doing in-house backgrounds and having that capacity to do that is they know what you need, what they're looking for for a Columbia police officer. They have that institutional knowledge. They know the neighborhoods in the city and I think it's just a better background package. This slide is not so much about the pay plan, which is absolutely exceptional. This is a snapshot of what we're advertising to encourage lateral transfers, to encourage people that are sworn with another agency, whether it's a Midlands agency or somewhere else in the state and even out of state. This creates a pathway for that lateral hire. They can look and see based on their tenure, their type of certification, their education, where they would come into our pay plan. Our pay plan in general and this, this took a minute to construct, if you will. And we wanted to make sure that we were valuing our current employees, not devaluing that, but also recognizing work history and certifications outside. So we have found a good balance there and that's what this slide looks like. How does the, how do you deal with the out of town and folks from different regions, Midwest, Northwest, Northeast, where we're seeing a lot of influx? How do you sell that to them? Because obviously their pay scales are different, but their cost of living, everything's different than what we do. How are we projecting that to those, instead of a sign on bonus, are we saying you got to move bonus? We haven't done a move bonus, but I'll also say that we have not, we have not taken anything off the table. Like if we have a situation where we have several people from a certain area, we try to get them in town, do all their business on one in one weekend while they're here. But one of the things that we've talked about is we go to this next phase of recruiting and marketing, which is some of the pop-up recruiting we're gonna do up north. I think something that we are considering is helping facilitate financially a trip down for somebody to do the process, to create some incentive. And we've also got some really successful examples of officers that are currently here that are from up north. I hate to keep referring to it as up north, but they can't be everywhere. So we're gonna have to create some ad hoc travel teams that can go do that, whether it's Philadelphia or New York. Up north, up north, so why start there? That ought to be your thing. Right. But what we see with our applicants from up north is they do their research too. They know what our cost of living is. They know what our weather's like. And oftentimes they've had a family member that has retired south. And so they've talked up just the region. And as soon as they get ahold of them, they close the deal. They do a great job of personalizing that. So we gotta increase our some opportunities there. And I know that's something that you've- Well, I just want to continue to encourage y'all to do things that are out of the norm because that's what sets us apart. And also to ask us for whatever you need. Yes, sir. I mean, y'all don't hesitate. And I think every chance you get an opportunity to touch somebody and they understand about Columbia I think they're gonna want to come here. This is a snapshot of how busy they've been with career fair this first quarter. As you can see, they've been all around. We've really tried to capitalize some of our recruitment and some military installations. Right before Christmas, they also did a visit to Camp Lejeune. They've hit Fort Benning. And they've been down to the Citadel. We talked about putting VMI on the next trip. So I think, and we've hired several people from the Citadel to always keep Mr. Duvall up to speed on that. And that's a great homegrown- We'll start doing private property crime reports when he returns, right? We've got a place for you. I gave you a recruit. I'm gonna talk to the ladies about her. When you go up North, have you looked at like Naval Academy and some of those other military schools as well? We have not done Naval Academy. I know they're good. We've got a good hook here though. Big hook, right? That's West Point, I'm sorry. There too. So this is kind of a buy the numbers look. And as I mentioned, if we look at last year and the number of applicants, our ratio was a 17 to one ratio from applicant to hire. This year we're tracking at a nine to one ratio and I anticipate that to continue to improve. And I think that's the trend I wanted to point out to you. I think that improvement is because we're competitive with pay and some of our incentives now. What we've got to figure out is the departures. Just to give you an example of the 14 departures, three were retirement, three left law enforcement, one was a termination, one was a line of duty or one unexpected death. Officer Ryan Hart is one left to be the deputy chief in North Myrtle Beach, one of our inspectors. That was a big loss. And then we had one in Highway Patrol, one in York County Sheriff's Department, one in Richland and one in Lexington. So really four to other agencies. The other ones are those things that we can't control. What we potentially can control is those four. And again, the overriding reason is I can work, I can do something, have more time closer to home, less work. I told you that... How many of those are from North Region? North Region takes a toll on us, no question about it. Yeah, we've... Two. Two of them? Yeah. Not as bad as I thought. Well, that was this year. We lost several last year from North. I mentioned two of our most recent hires were certified. I hope that is a trend that continues, but the ones that we've seen it have left for another agency that average ages, or average 10 years, three years. Just a little bit over three years. So they're young. I mean, it's, you know, there's a desire to advance and do new things very quickly. And sometimes based on our happen, three years is pretty quick to advance and go to special units. But that's the trend we see with a lot of our young officers. We have a lot of opportunity. With every move that we make, there's a consequence to it or a reaction to it. It's, you move somebody here, it affects over here. So we really have to kind of forward think on that. Is there a minimum age for a sworn officer? 21. I also mentioned how we stay engaged with people that are in the system, 60 that are in process or we haven't heard from, and that's what they've done a really good job to keep that connectivity and keep people engaged. You know, what we also see a lot of times with the folks that enter the portal, we're not the only application they've put in. So we're on the clock. So we recognize that very much as far as being efficient from time from application to hire. We know we're competing against, you know, other agencies. Sometimes they're upfront and tell us and sometimes they kind of keep their cards close to the vest because we're just kind of leveraging, you know, see where they fall. A quick look at just the hiring process. It takes 30 to 45 days. Depending on the experience and the certification levels, we can shave that off. There's some things that are required that we can't waive. Background investigation is one of them. The Criminal Justice Academy requires that. Your analysis and medical screen, the city requires that. And things that we can waive depending on the situation as a written examination, a polygraph and PT testing. And again, that's not gonna get waived for people that don't have any experience of certification, but there are situations where we're hiring somebody right back or whatever we can waive at and speed that up. So what you're outlining here is for a new recruit, not for a transfer or certified. Correct. What's it take for you to get a certified officer into the system? It depends really where the certification is, but just for example, let's just say it's just a neighboring agency. It's as quick as they can do the application. We'll do the interview and get them in the hiring cycle, either the very next hiring cycle. It's a pretty quick process. They do a great job expediting. I'll come in some mornings and stand there waiting for me to sign a letter. So it's weeks, not months. This next slide is kind of a start to finish snapshot of our onboarding with the Academy. So we have what we just shared with you is four to six weeks, then they're hired. We do an eight to 10 week BCS class, meaning we in-house BCS, and then during that they do the four weeks. The Academy is allowing us to do four weeks of training in-house now, which is expedited. How quickly we can move people through the Academy. And then they enter the Academy. So your people are trained? We do. And they give you the credit for that four weeks? Yes, sir. So what used to be a 12 week Academy class is now eight, and a couple of things have happened with this. It's created more frequency for running people through the Academy, so it increases capacity. It allows us to do some of the prerequisite testing and preparation, so they're more successful on the testing. And then of course, when we, based on how we do our BCS, when they go to the Academy, we rarely have a failure. It's not completely unheard of, but it's very, very low, and we get a lot of compliments from our, from the director and the Academy about the quality of the applicant we send, just how they're prepared for it. It's a waste of everybody's time if we send somebody there, and they're not gonna be able to cut the mustard on testing and performance. And then when they're done with the Academy, they come back out, and they have another 46 business days of work to do field training. The one thing that I would say you mentioned, you asked about the training staff, they do a remarkable job with how they move people through this process because we don't have the luxury of, say, in hiring 15 people, training 15 people as a group, sending 15 people to the Academy. It's just not the way our hiring is. We're doing onesies, twosies, four, five at a time. We average about six. So every two weeks, every couple of weeks, I mean, we're always inserting somebody into the training regiment. So it is, it's really a logistics challenge for them is getting them plugged in, getting them prepared and ready for the Academy. And they just, they do an exceptional job. They're like any other unit in the department, they're tasked with, or they have a tough time with staffing too. So they're doing more with less. But I just wanted to say that. I will say the Academy is, they're doing a great job. They recognize this shortage throughout the state of personnel and with 15 classes a year, they have capacity to handle anything we throw at them. And they, so it's, once upon a time, you would hear a lot of, we can't get people registered in the Academy and through the Academy. That's not something that we can honestly say now. What do you do, you have training at the headquarters or Bluff Road? We have an offsite River Hill. We want to improve that by the way, but we have an offsite that has a computer lab and where they do their classroom. We have another site, they do their defensive tactics. And then of course we do our own range work and then they do a physical fitness routine every day as well. So we kind of move them around a lot. And we do all of our defensive driving, our what we call emergency operation driving out at McIntyre. We use one of their, yeah. Next focus area, maybe the most important is our marketing. Earlier this year, we partnered with a marketing firm, Twin Pea Florida, to really develop a strategy for our new hires. What? So we've recently completed a new video. I want to show that to you. We've completed the non-recruiting fairs. Just mentioned we've done over 6,000 direct emails to transitioning out military personnel across the country, done radio advertising, signage and posters. This video and our pay plans down on our website and we're in the process of doing some website updates. But Eric, if you can hit that video, this is on our guard. In a larger city, you may not know the officer that's working next to you. You may not know the sergeant or the corporal who's above you. Here in CPD, if you don't know someone, a lot of times they're coming to introduce themselves to you because they want to know who you are. So yeah, I do feel a lot of support coming in, has a brand new officer. I absolutely love the family feel of a department because who's got your back better than family? I get thanked a lot for being out in the community, walking, being a police officer. It's not like I did anything special or anything like that. You're doing your job, but you do get thanked for the community. They're grateful. Up against a lot of larger cities as far as interaction law enforcement. I think we're on the positive side, we're not on the negative side. And even if people wanted to get into law enforcement in larger cities, I would tell them to come here first. Now South, 10 to five people are a little bit easier to talk to than some of the Northerners. You have opportunities to grow, opportunities to try out different things and advance your career. I was interested in SWAT, K9, and I was able to do all of those things 26 years later. And I'm still here. Columbia has so many different offerings. The bars downtown, the university and the college life, riverfront parks where you can go and you can just enjoy being outdoors. There's an endless amount of overtime opportunities from working the St. Patrick's State Festival, athletic events, their baseball team, the Firefly Stadium. Every day is something different. It's nice to just not have a desk job where it gets mundane and boring doing the same thing. The department has my back and that's what's pushing me to go further. You've got a family of blue. I may be riding in a car by myself, but I'm not alone. Your backup is close. You've got those close community connections. You're going to have people that are willing to age you to better their community. It's just, it's a great place to be. You have to experience this for yourself. Come find your center at the Columbia Police Department. Thank you so much. That's good. That's good. Good job. All right. I'm just kidding. So where do you put that? So it's, we're, we met with one of our TV stations today or yesterday, excuse me. It's on our website. They're working on taking, I think, eight snippets from it to we're really wanting to increase our social media presence with it. Just creating different links to it. I mean, it's so well done. It's from the heart. Text messaging. Literally you can send a link of that on a text message to all these folks who are in the network for a thing and say, you know, hey, here's an opportunity. Major is going to hit on some of that here in just a second. Well, I'll just say Facebook is a... Yes, sir. And then, like, do you tag into someone's searches, law enforcement or whatever, and you can have a specialized Google ad? Yep. And it's pretty cheap. So... Those are a couple of our highlights. He's going to just mention that. So Officer Atwood, what was pretty incredible to me with this and I really, I completely stayed out of it and just let them create this. And they didn't have to, you know, they told these officers, you know, this is what we're really wanting to focus on. And that was from their heart. I mean, it really... Oh, you can tell it wasn't scripted. Yeah, it was impactful. Chief, I will point out, I'm not sure that there's technically bars. They're hospitality outlets. So maybe change that to nightlife instead of bars. Might be a... Well, and I saw you kind of twitching when you saw fireworks over with the fireflies. I know Cotton Town probably appreciated that. No, he was thinking about his call from his favorite neighbor over in the University of Israel saying, we need to have fireworks with no boom. So Major, how about stepping up here and just hitting on what's underway right now with marketing? 33 years, by the way, of being technical. I appreciate that. And actually I say that because it means a lot. You know, Chief's just celebrated his ninth year. I can testify a little bit better about the support from the city of Columbia over the course of 33 years. And it is greatly appreciated. And certainly, without question, over the last nine years. I love this profession. I love the city of Columbia. And I'm still here because of that, because of the support and what the profession itself means to me and what CPD and the city of Columbia mean to me. So with that, city manager said it best, I think. Challenging is an understatement where we are with marketing, but it's still, you know, there was a time before I get into this, there was a time when it wasn't as challenging. It is still a job of nobility. It is still the most dangerous job there is. And there was a time when the danger part of it could be mitigated. Nobility, the idea, the concept of nobility outweighed everything else for a lot of people 20, 30 years ago. And maybe not so long ago, not so much now. So our challenges are many. You know, what we're willing to pay people, you know, isn't everything, it's not everything. It's more, it's more deep rooted. So how do we get our message out there? Well, so let me just start with saying this. We, you know, we have a void that we're trying to fill with our marketing manager. I mean, we are very close to doing that. We are interviewing this week and we have some very good candidates for that position. So what I've learned, my personal takeaway from this is over the course of 33 years where I felt like I've done it all, know it all, ins and outs and marketing, I tell you, is a dynamic that I've never really had to consider the way I am now, or we, I should say. There are, yeah, yourself includes, sir. There's just so many different approaches, you know, to, you know, to marketing and, you know, getting your message out. And I think you all know that, but I can't overemphasize that. So as the chief said, we, you know, we've met with NP a few months ago with my first conversation with them. And then we've developed a narrative over the course of time and developed a strategy and, you know, from the very beginning, our approach has been, you know, we, because of those challenges, we want to make sure that we, you know, we promote the profession, certainly, because the profession, as you all know and have said, the profession itself has really taken a hit over the last five years. So we're trying to promote the profession itself, but more than that, promote the city of Columbia and the city of Columbia Police Department. How do we all, how do we do that in concert? So we developed a strategy that we thought was best with their help and collaboration throughout the department and outside of the department. And what you see in front of you is, for lack of better way to put it, it's kind of our phase two. You know, the, when we met with NP, the, you know, the strategy development part was part of phase one. And of course, the flyer, the lead behind, if you will, the video was part of the phase one deliveries or deliverables that we wanted to see. And this is where we are now. So someone had mentioned, you know, Facebook and some other things. So one of the terms that I've learned since getting into the, you know, the marketing sphere is bits and, you know, in that marketing world of language is behavioral intended targets. And that's kind of what they utilize, you know, to get our message out and to get it out in such a way that, you know, we want to make sure we spend our money wisely on things that are going to have a return, whether it's a billboard, whether it's a social media platform, whether it's a, you know, a commercial ad or, you know, a handout or anything, whatever it, whatever the case may be, we want to make sure that we are doing our due diligence and spending the money that you all have graciously given us to do this. So what you see in front of you is, you know, you are going to target Facebook, LinkedIn, again, behavioral intended targets, you know, those things will be used in banner and video ads bought online. There'll be contextual ads that appear in articles that are discussing police issues. That can be, you know, law enforcement articles, such as police1 or police.com, you know, to literally to National Geographic, wherever it is you may see or have or find to read an article concerning police, you know, we want to target that based on the readers. Who are the readers reading, you know, those articles or those books or, you know, those handouts. So in addition to those social media sites and, you know, in, you know, geo-fencing those areas, some of the things that we are doing is we just recently met with Watch Fox and developed some conversation about getting some airtime. Someone asked about the video, where would we play that video? That's certainly one of those places. Now we'll say this, we are also in the progress of developing a second video, a more dynamic video, if you will. One of the things that we want to do is kind of like how I started out by saying that we wanted to focus on the profession in concert with the city of Columbia and the police department. We want to develop a second video that hits on all three of those things but has less talk and more visual. And that's what we're gonna focus on, which, you know, I think can be utilized in probably a few more different types of platforms and certainly outside of, you know, the region. We're also in partnership with Gamecock Network as well as Grace Outdoor and creating some static and digital billboards. Those things are in progress. And the chief had mentioned our updating and modernization of our website that is also in progress. So I think I probably overstepped my time limit, but any- Just out of curiosity, Major, a lot of this y'all been doing from your, it's all about getting applications. It's my understanding. You need more applications so that you get more hits and so forth. How are these targeting with the applications? Are they from localized area, state area? Are you seeing it outside at this point? Because one of the things that I wanna make sure is that we don't limit ourselves into where we're just playing, we're robbing Peter to pay Paul. We're playing ping pong with Lexington and Ritzland. That doesn't solve a problem. So as you're continuing to create these relationships with Fox or watch, you got a bunch of affiliates. Who can we connect with in these target areas? Utilize there, make them do the work for you is what I'm trying to say. So that you can make sure you're getting a stronger reach and when you're ready to do the pop-ups and stuff that those guys are calling their affiliates to create a buzz about it. Utilizing that atmosphere because I think the one thing that we're gonna have to do is expand and I think that's what you're doing here is expanding but continuing to get that because I do fear we just, like every other agency, we're just pulling from each other. If you look at the departures, how many of those are all localized? Something with billboards, taking advantage of up and down 95, some of the areas where you see interstate travel but also, you know, Fayetteville is on the way and so you have that military connection. I think we could get some folks that way and we're not just focused on city proper. My city of Miami put billboards in Portland and all the cities wherever they were having problems. Hey, come here, it's sunny, it's warm and we got good pay. I'm sure. Well, I was gonna make a comment too. I think what I would do too is I would develop a similar page to this called Messaging. So we got marketing and messaging. So if the chief was on Dairy IS once a week, Wednesday morning, talking about the city of Columbia and talking about the great things that we're doing, that's good messaging that ties into good marketing. I just think there's a ways too and that video was amazing. And I think that's a good step and what you do is you keep working on how to take that marketing and turn it into messaging that really ends up connecting with people. And you have somebody that says, you know, that's what I wanna do when I get out of high school. That's what I wanna do when I get out of college versus, you know, having a more of a, I like that, but it doesn't do anything. So it's just taking it one, two, three, four, five steps different and tightening up that message where everybody's on the same page and you can have somebody on the city live. I mean, there's a whole bunch of opportunities. One of us, if we tighten, you know, you can give us a few bullets and that's a great one. And our spears of influence. Really make a difference. Thank you for that. I appreciate that. Yeah, absolutely. Chief, let me ask you something. Sure. So, you know, grassroots homegrown talent, whether it's growing small businesses or retaining the talent that's here in the Midlands for all we do, how is the relationship with Midlands Tech and that pre-justice academy certificate program? Is there any more we could push to really collaborate with say a criminal justice major to lead into a wonderful pipeline that feeds from that two-year degree right into a job with not only CPD, but this could be big for all law enforcement in the Midlands. So I think those are certainly opportunities for us to, you know, trade at Midlands Tech. The, you know, one of the, not a challenge, but, you know, in fact, you've got to be 21. And, you know, it's so beneficial if we can grab them early. You know, our cadet program now is we're up to three and we're working with Missy C to look at ways we can expand that and we'll have to work with HR on that. But, you know, we have a lot of interest in that and that is, I think that is a great proving ground for us. But the other thing that I think is going to be important and this has a budgetary impact as well as, you know, we've really got to increase internship, paid internship opportunities with our HBCUs and the university to, if you can pay a wage and keep them engaged, we've got a lot of recent hires that have cycled through us in the summertime. And they do some of the work that we talked about earlier? Absolutely. I mean, I think there are some opportunities there without question that, you know, I think that's something we've got to think a little bit out of the box on, but there's some really good innovative programs that Perf is sponsoring with ScholarshipWise with HBCUs. I think we can replicate that here. Well, I just want to reiterate, don't be afraid to try it. Don't be afraid to ask for it. You know, look, this is our future. We got to build it up and we got to be creative and different than everybody else. So, you know, y'all don't be shy. Don't be afraid to ask. Don't be afraid to try it. I mean, as a support from us. Absolutely. And just to, somebody in the training program gets paid, correct? They're getting paid in that program. So a hybrid of a criminal justice free tuition from Midlands Tech with a actual paid gig to an ultimate career is, I think, would be very attractive to individuals. So there's anything we can do to help those conversations. They can get qualified for the lottery money to pay all the tuition. Yeah. We had this young fellow named Robert Stewart that was less than 21 when he wanted to go to work for the town of Chirol. And we put him to work. He was in charge of the meter enforcement until he reached 21, went on to become the police chief public safety director and sled director. So you need to incentivize these young people and like the mayor said, they could do a lot of the stuff before they're 21 as some sort of officer. Chief Stewart's still very engaged with law enforcement communities, big advocate for us at the state house. He's a great fellow. Absolutely. The last area that I'm gonna maybe just tee up for, was there any more questions on the last thing I wanna hit on and I'll tee it up for Missy is to talk about special events. As I mentioned at the very beginning, that's something that's pretty unique to us, just the number of events that we host every single week. Festivals, races, sporting events, it's massive. Just CPD alone, we participated last year in 321 events and over 15,000 man hours. So that challenges us. And one of the things that I don't think is thought about very often too is we also vetted 389 one-time special alcohol permits. So with Inspector Crowley that you all have met over time, he really vets that every time. It's not to say that we weren't vetting it before, but it's more of a robust process where we're just not taking any chances on that. And so I tee that up for Missy because this certainly touches us. These are 321 direct contact events that we're at, whether it's one officer, an event, or 50 officers at an event, it's taxing. Sometimes we're competing against ourselves on that. But there's other city departments that are equally taxed, whether it's public works who do a lot at these events. I mean, on the front end and on the back end, they do a remarkable job. I mean, what they do after St. Patrick's Day is incredible. It is incredible. I mean, what they did after the protest, I was getting ready to say that. I mean, it was unbelievable what our staff does. I mean, it's holidays. I mean, I'll be at the pumps or something you'll see them rolling in. I mean, they do an incredible job and just don't get recognized for it. But so it touches a lot of other city departments and I know Missy's gonna talk about that. But the one thing I'll leave you with because we've talked about it before is, you know, I think they're expensive, but I think it's something to consider again, is ballards, permanent ballards for downtown. 100% perfect. Five points, whether it's flooding or some of our floodpreneurs, those again, those are things that require us to respond or us to man. You know, if you look at downtown, we're posting vehicles and we're posting people at Barricades. If you could pop up ballards. It works in other places. The automatic ballard's about 10 grand is worth every dime to do that. Especially, I mean, you looked at this past Saturday. I mean, we had football events. You had, I mean, so the city was five blocks long. Yeah. I mean, it's great to see. I mean, it's what people talk about. But things that we could do to lessen the impact of our load on city services, I think are things to consider. Agreed. We're just sort of teeing it up today and not to go too deeply into the discussion of the structure as well. You know, it's pretty much housed with CPD. So that's why the chief is touching on it. But I asked Ashley and Missy to do a little research. We've done this before. We've done the rainbow. Over the years, we've had stops and starts at looking at special events holistically, an office of special events, realigning some things. I want to put all that back on the table, but before I go all in on it, I just want to have, you know, y'all's feedback and make sure that incorporating a fee structure for some of these tasks is something that, you know, you all are comfortable with. I just wrote down start charging money. Yes, sir. I mean, we talked about it yesterday. I mean, we got it real quick. Nobody in the world works for free anymore. Yes, sir. Absolutely. Nobody does. Absolutely. And I think because the city has always done it and does it really well, I don't even know that citizens think about that. Some may think we, you know, somehow we're paying for this and it's all about the narrative and it's just explaining it to people. So thank you, Chief. Thank you. Again, thank you all for patience with us on this and supporting us and Miss Wilson. Thank you for pushing, keeping our rear-ends in gear, pushing us hard on this. I know it's urgent. One more. Thank you. Thank you. One more question. Yes, sir. So actually two more questions. Number one, if you had a magic wand or magic wands to hire 99 people, what would it be? What would they hire those positions? What would those magic wands be? And the second question is, are we ever really going to be able to hire those 99 people? Well, that's a tough question. So I think what our study is going to show is that we probably need additional positions which is really a mute discussion because we can't fill the positions we are. I think it's critical that we look at some alternative response models. And I think we've got to create equity with our regions and your fellow council that they know this. Now they've heard me talk about that our regions right now are divided along council lines. I think once upon a time that had some utility, but it really, it doesn't serve its purpose anymore. We really want to create boundaries and then we got to have another discussion about facilities and how that impacts our recruiting and retention. But I kind of gave a political answer. I don't know about it. I guess, I guess, you know, I mean. Facilities. Yeah, but this is, you know, it's a big thing when someone says, hey, we're 99 position short. That sounds like a lot. It is a lot. It is a lot. Then, then, you know, I mean, you know, at some point if there's no magic bullet to fill those positions, then that obviously facilitates what you're saying, which is when we're unlikely to be able to fill those positions, therefore we have to do things differently. Yeah. There's a sweet spot that we got to hit though. But just because of capacity, we cannot continue to sustain this operational tempo with the staffing we got. I mean, we're just hitting critical mass on that. So that's why there's so much urgency with this hiring. I think as we start chipping away at that, we're gonna, I think we're gonna get to a point where we're starting this, you know, we're seeing that balance and we can make some, you know, maybe some decisions on strategically how we move forward in terms of our service delivery. Thank you, Chief. Thank you all. We're just gonna fly through these next few slides. Again, I really wanted to just put the information, initial information out to you all and then get a feel for if you want us to, you know, go a little bit deeper to actually develop a new schedule. Chief talked about already the myriad of events, the volume of the events, many with alcohol beverage permits. Next slide, when we get into just the, again an overview, next slide. And Missy, I'll let you take it from here regarding, you know, the purpose and the next slide that talks about the type of events. Yes ma'am, thank you, Miss Wilson. As Chief has mentioned and Miss Wilson as well, of course the city of Columbia, gratefully has a lot of events and activities that are going on in our communities. We're very happy to host and be a site for many events and communities. Part of what we also want to acknowledge is that the city, various city departments assist with these different events and different activities, usually at no charge or no cost to the community, to the hosting event. What is that? So there's a variety, some events there are, obviously, and we'll go through what some of these things are, some of it's culture, some of it's, I mean, there's a myriad of reasons. And Missy, I think Ashley has given you a list of the events that she's put together from different departments and housing services that are provided. Of course, you know, we're here to serve the public, but then again, that is meant the broader public. So when you're providing service to a specific population, usually in a lot of other places, there's user fees associated with those specific fee functions. So of course our goal and discussion for here is to be able to assist the organizations. So planning events for safe and fun events and negative impact on both the community and those public resources. As Chief mentioned, we have a variety of departments to provide the services and we'll go through what some of those are. Some of the event types events, and we've asterisked those because some of these events do charge for fees or do charge services. It just depends on what the function, what the function is or where it's being held. But block parties, concerts, it depends on which services being provided, college and university events, festivals, walks and runs. As you know, there's a walk and run just about every weekend in Columbia. Neighborhood associations, different nonprofit events, parades that they can go on, public and private gatherings, those can be private parties to also protest and picketing religious events and of course, other different types of road closures. That's right. The types of services that are provided at these events include that, well, first we also want to distinguish what types of events we are collecting fees for, user fees for. Of course, rental of a city facility is associated with the cost. Police services, as Chief mentioned, usually those are the special duty, those are done as an additional. That's grocery stores, churches, stuff like that. It can be every, right, whatever in the host organization pays those costs to the office, I mean, through the city to the officers. Which is, we're vastly undercharging for that, by the way. Yes, that is part of the Chief's analysis. I think we're at $5 and we ought to be at 50. Right, and we have some information on those in prior. Is that a price per hour or just a set price? That's a thing. We're the cheapest in the entire state on that. A lot of cities have moved to $50 and $5 of that goes to the city just to help with, because we supply the cars and the gas and everything else just to help offset. But I think there's a couple of things we'll talk about during the budget session outside of this too, that we provide a service for, that we really ought to be charging something to cover our staff time. Just to throw, to be thinking about things, we're gonna have to look at some of these services that are provided. And that was Ms. Wilson's intent with the discussion from the Chief and the sense of the special events and the activities, the demand on the police department, as the Chief mentioned, a lot of those same demands impact other departments and without an equipment charge or those other costs, those other services are often not included in that fee or structure. Well, look, we, borrowers, we ought to invest the money either through, you know, if they can be used from accommodations or hospitality, it's where invested blood prevention with some of it. I mean, if you think about the hours you spend during that, I mean, the last major rain that we had this summer in July 4th, I mean, we had not only officers, fire marshals, we had fire trucks, we had public works, we had stuff stationed all over town, blocking people from driving through the damn flooded areas. Right. Our parade permits that are handled through the police department, that's a single point of entry at that point, but they're $5, I think, and that was been here, probably when major drafts was first hired was the fee for the parade permits. This list needs to be much longer. Oh, yes. Like this is, I, yeah. This is just a sample of types of things. So of course, fire prevention and fire marshals similar to the police in some of the services they provide. Yes, sir. Yes, sir. Let me ask you this, Mr. catastrophic events that would sort of bring in a cadre of folk into a certain area. Is that, is that a fee? Is a fee, will a fee be charged? No. Okay. That's different. And I think that's a delineating line we need to talk through and talk about. Not only what the fee amount is, but what about? I mean, nobody having a parade over a hurricane, I promise you. Well, you're right. But you have got places where that may not be a hurricane, there will be another catastrophic event. Sure. I think you raised a good point that since there, I mean, the types of events range from very social fun activities to, you know, to, you know, picketing and protest. And then the variations of the services provided, you know, vary from event to event and then the types of fees that you would charge, of course. All right. And of course, Reverend Medallan, we have gone into, you know, disaster mode and, you know, later mitigation. That's different. Yeah, that's Harry's shop and we're documenting and we seek reimbursement for things from the state or federal government that we're eligible for. So that's different. Okay. But of course, our user fees, you know, all right. So moving on to types of services that are performed, delivery of barricades. That is often, that is probably one of the top types of activities and services that are provided. While it's maybe a low cost activity, it's still an activity, it's still a staff time, it's staff resources to go deliver those barricades, deliver the barricades and pick the barricades back up. So it is definitely an impact. Use of mobile soundstage and systems often, not always the case, but there are some in schools where mobile soundstage, mobile stages in the sound systems are not charged. Facility grounds and setup. Again, that is one of the areas where there is, there are some, obviously some fees charged, but not in all cases. Traffic control and management, public safety at special events to include and please fire marshal type services. And of course, as mentioned, these services incorporate the use of both staff time and staff resources, whether it's a vehicle or electricity or other types of equipment. This is just a description or just a little graphic in the sense of the types of events in terms of the frequency. So some of these are ad hoc or as needed. They may be a one time event that won't happen again. There's a variety of events that happen monthly, a variety of events that happen quarterly, which would, of course, yearly. And then you can see the different departments that are involved in providing those services. Things that are happening like weekly, even though it shows on here as low, that's because there's a few number of events that happen weekly, but you can think about Soda City. Soda City is a weekly event. It brings out a lot of people. So of course, it also requires a lot of involvement from a lot of different city resources. In terms of what we're seeing from other cities around the state and around in other states, rental fees for traffic control, use of barricade signs, of course, they make some variation that if the organization picks up those activities themselves and there's no charge, but if the city is delivering them and picking them back up, there's a cost associated with that. Role cart rental and delivery, we're delivering the role carts, then we're bringing back the filled role cars and doing the disposal of that. So there's a cost on to the city to be able to perform that. Event venue and setup, equipment usage. We're seeing even events for filming, commercial filming, photographs. I mean, there's some cities that if you want to take photos at specific parks, you have to get a permanent and pay a fee. If you're there doing a photo shoot. That's pretty common. So that's just an example of some of the different types of events and charges that we see in other communities that are types of costs or charges that are being done. As far as the city, our next steps would be, depending upon the directions from city council. And this Wilson is, you know, work with departments in terms of gathering what the fee is. So that's just an example of some of the different types of events and charges that we see in other communities and work with departments in terms of gathering what the fee structure would be, incorporating what you gather in the cost. We have to install that, correct? Yes, sir. I think y'all need to move forward and come back with the options on all that's out there from that. I think we need, I know Robert, my request at some point looked at the ballers. I think we need to bring that back up and talk about that and where that makes the most sense to relieve, especially in places like Main Street where we have multiple events all year round, other places. I think process is important here. Where's, who's the point of contact to engage all these potential, I guess some boxes that you got to chat. And I think we've talked about that before. This Wilson, let me ask. Yes, sir. Once we go through that process of discerning what that fee structure might look like, what happens after that? Is it automatically incorporated into or do we look at whether it's $35 or $50, whether it's $50 or $100. Will that be some input? Yes, sir. We would bring it back to you all first and then we would, the mayor would say we'd have to have a hearing. Yes, sir. Part of the budget approval for this upcoming budget here. So the projective income of fees. It's really about breaking even. I don't think it's about income. It's about covering our costs. I mean, fuel, man hours, this and that. I think at the end of the day, that's what we're trying to do. You're not trying to make money. We're not in the rental business, but we're not in the losing business either. I mean, we need to. That's my point. We're not in the losing business. But we also want to be in a position where we, uh, incredibly make sure our fees are in sync with whatever somebody else is doing. That's right. Absolutely. I also think that working for free is never appreciated. And that's part of this is, you know, have skin on the game. Yeah, right. You know, I mean, this is real, this is real stuff. And working for free is, is not the way to look forward to your recommendations. Yeah. That's fine. I have one other question. Um, cause we got a request about waving, I'm not going to say what organization, waving the police fees for an event that's coming up. That's not anything that we never do that. And I want to make sure that's, that money actually goes directly to them. It goes directly to them. If you get those, you just send those my way or the chief's way. We'll handle it. I want to do it. Okay. Go for it. No. No, I want to do it. I want to send it your way. Yeah. No, yes. I just want to make sure I was on target. Yeah. Okay. You got it. We really appreciate you all speaking. Yeah. Thanks for that. I appreciate you. I'll speak back. It's helpful and it helps us to keep losing forward. June 30. Have all this lined up. You can look at the structure that other cities use for handling the weeks. We are, we, yes. We're going to refresh our look because we've looked, and I think we kind of know, but we want to take another look and want to look at signal 30 and how it's handled as well as far as maybe outside entity helping him you know manage that equitably as well so lots of good things. Thank y'all so much. Appreciate you see.