 there will be joining us after his Harvard class dismisses for the afternoon. He's taking some courses at Harvard. This is the Public Safety Committee meeting, and we're going to start off today with Chief Holbrook giving us a Columbia Police Department update. Chief. Thank you, Mr. DeVall. Ms. Herbert, Ms. Wilson. I've got three slides to present to you, and one, I'm going to start out with just an overview of kind of a year and review of our crime numbers. Included in your packet today is a pretty detailed executive summary of what I'm going to talk about crime-wise, and I know my portion is supposed to be brief, so I'm just going to hit some highlights. But last year, we responded to over 176,000 calls for service. We made over 4,200 arrests. Responded to 7,847 vehicle collisions and wrote over 7,500 citations. I say all that. It's a lot of activity with our staffing. They're really hustling. We have some very good crime numbers and some major categories to report. Homicide was down 32%. Rape sexual assault down 27%. Robbery down 15%. Burglary down 3%. And auto-breaking and enterings are down 16%. The flip side of that and what we're not pleased with is our continued issues with gun crime and aggravated assaults, which make up most of our non-fatal gun shootings. There was an increase of 31%, and that really skews our overall numbers. We show an overall 8% increase in crime. We had 98 people shot this past year, and that is the highest number we've ever had. And we talk about that in pretty great detail in the briefing. It's a little skewed because we had two incidents, if you remember, that involved 15 people being shot, one at Green Crossing and one at the Columbia Animal. And one of those was fatal. We're seeing positive results from ShotSpotter is down about 23% in the number of alerts. Again, that's down from the previous year. We had 424 guns reported stolen. A lot of those come from cars. And even though our car B&E's are down, our auto theft in the B&E's, a large majority of those occur with cars that are left unlocked in the keys or in the ignition or the vehicles running. You break that number out in your report. Yes, sir. On some considering the shootings that we have and some of the events we've seen, just again recently in California, we continue to do active shooter training with Director Tinsley and our emergency operations folks. And in 2022, they've done 38 classes, trained over 1,300 people, and 2 in our 12 Columbia employees. I think that's very promising. Chief, just a question. Has Council gone through active shooter training? I don't know the answer to that. What was the question? The highlight of the training is you get to tackle Harry. Yeah, I went through it as a staff person, but not as a council. So again, your crime executive summary, it'll include general crime, gun crime, technology. Let's talk about ShotSpotter, our NABN program, and of course, the significant investment you all made in our camera system. We talked about overdoses in there. That is a widely, I think, kind of area that's not discussed as an emerging threat. We've had a significant increase, and we had 60 overdoses last year. And our fatalities in the overdoses went down, but I attribute that to every officer carries Narcan and are trained in the deployment of Narcan. And that's a partnership we have with DHEC. We actually had 11 officers that were credited with life-saving deployments of Narcan and have been recognized for that. And then the last two areas that are discussed in your report are homeless-related matters and code enforcement accomplishments. Chief, on the cameras, where are we with the deployment? We're about halfway through with deployment, generally speaking, and we are getting ready to bring online our portable tower. So when we have events that we can deploy that, we have another one that we hope to bring online very soon. And our plan is to put one of the portable ones in Family Park until there's some more activity with construction and some security down there with the construction. And Chief, we talked about this. I think I sent you something because in my neighborhood, meetings, folks have seen one or two cameras. And so now they're saying, well, we want another one on this street and another one on this street. And can you just discuss how those decisions are made for where the cameras will be placed and whether or not we purchase hundreds of extra cameras so that people could make requests for them to? Can you clarify that? I can. So we've been very deliberate and data-driven on camera placements. These cameras are very advanced. And they do a lot of different things and allow us to do a lot of different things with them. So very similar to even with our old camera system, we tried to put them in places that are heavily traveled, where you have ingress and egress to neighborhoods. They're not designed to necessarily just at a whim because we had an incident to put it there. Now, we do have the ability to put temporarily cameras up if we have a hot something that flares up. We do deploy those for those situations and have been very successful. We don't have cameras sitting on the shelf that we can just in a whim put out there. But it's fluid, so we are flexible. And we can always look at certain situations and see if it's something that's within our budget or something that we might be able to shift for a period of time. A lot of times, and it's actually in your handout, Apple Valley is a great example. That's a city county donut hole back and forth. And we were having repeated shootings. We deployed one of our cameras out there temporarily. And they were able from the EOC, Real Time Crime Center, they were able to watch people complete a drug deal with weapons and just direct officers right in. And they just pulled right up and made several significant arrests and seized drugs and farms. So I think they're going to be a force and a lot of fire force, as we always talk about. I noticed the new cameras are fairly obvious. They look different, and they've got the big blue light on. I've noticed that some of the old cameras have blue lights on them. Is that a new requirement? No, we just like to lead from the front. And it's called copycats is what it's called. Oh. Yeah, we were very deliberate about the blue light and putting the identification on it. We want people to know that we do have some covert cameras, but primarily our camera systems are visible. We want people to know that we have that capability and that they're on and working. And that's also a way for us to see if the systems are working properly. But yeah, that has, I have seen the same thing. And that's a good thing. Yeah. Eric, if you could hit the next slide, please. Next thing I'd like to share with you is just some year to date. We started out pretty promising with our staffing. We've hired five officers, one of those being sworn. We've only had one resignation, unfortunately. That's really where for us to make ground, we've got to, you know, stem the resignations. And we think we're trending very positively there. We've got seven that are in the academy right now and another 10 that are in our basic school. And we've got a number that are in field training. So we've really got the ball teed up, I think, for a good shot in the arm as far as operations. Our staff workload and redistricting study is fully underway and we hope to have some report outs on that in the next, probably about 90 days. Our facilities, we've talked about a lot. We've got 17 different facilities and a lot going on with doing what we can to make it more accommodating to our employees. Harry is gonna touch briefly on just an update on the fencing. That's something that we've talked about for quite a long time and we had a little bump in the road on that and he can explain that. Floor drive is where we're relocating our recruitment. It'll be our recruitment center. That plan has been finalized and we're working with procurement right now for advancing that, same with our farms range. That's all been budgeted and design's been finalized and we're working expeditiously to get contractors in place. Then hemlock drive is an annex that has code enforcement and some other assets for us and it's also a location where we will hold all of our in-service training and a lot of our external meetings. It has a meeting area. All we're waiting for that project to be done is installation of our AV equipment. It'll be a really nice facility we'll be very proud of. And then lastly, an often discussed topic is our vehicles and you all have been incredibly generous to us with the purchase of these. We've received all of the 29 and they're deployed. We just recently approved for the 24 and they're going through the procurement and that leaves us a balance of 31 that we will discuss with and as part of our 23-24 budget process that gets us to the 55 and the one car one officer. We're doing very well right now with our staffing and assigning cars to officers. So that's working out very well. And then lastly, you all just recently approved our axon body camera transition and we are receiving on that equipment. It was immediate upon that contract being executed. We started receiving equipment. So that's gonna be a tremendous technology advancement for us. And then last is our grants. We are, we recently lost our grant coordinator and that's a critical position for us and that's when we hope to, it's posted and it's when we hope to fill in the very near future. Obviously these are important grants that we have to manage and report out on and total three plus million dollars and each one of them is really affects critical parts of the agency. Is there any questions? I did have a question with respect to the resignations. I'm glad that the numbers, they are trending down. Yes. Have the reasons changed at all or is it still some of the things that we've heard previously? I think it's pretty consistent. A lot of it's workload, quality of life with just the pace of the operational pace. A lot of the people that have left and remained in law enforcement have gone to an agency that has less workload or have gone to an agency that like the academy where you're teaching nine to five. I think we've moved past the people just getting out of the business. I think we did have a kind of a population of folks that made that decision but that doesn't seem to be what we're tracking right now and again, I think the pay plan that we put in place has had a profound impact on retention and certainly thinks it makes us extremely competitive for recruiting. There seems to still be, sometimes to Councilwoman Herbert's point a discussion about those reasons or even for our current staff if there's a need for a survey. I've heard this brought up before and all that. So while you're at the podium and I think you really just spoke to it and being that we have implemented the pay plan that we have I just wanted you to address that because I mean I've heard that as recent as yesterday and I don't know always that the public understand so while you're able to speak to some of the the benefit of doing what we did and what this council did with the pay plan notwithstanding the fact that there's always gonna be other issues with the type of agency we are and the type of community policing effort that you insist upon but it takes a minute to get staffed up. I mean it really does. I mean we, you know, any agency has natural attrition. You have a certain percent that are, well it really depends on previous hiring practices years and years ago on what your staffing is like in terms of people that would naturally be retiring. Then you have that small, really small segment of the population that just get out of law enforcement in general. So I think that's the steady that you always have and the one thing that I think has been the anomaly that has affected law enforcement across the country is really the post George Floyd effect on officers in a mass exodus early retirement and we were no stranger to that. But on top of that, you know, we are unique being a capital city in my opinion and I mean our operational tempo is extremely fast paced. We have a lot of extracurricular events that occur every weekend. So where you typically, you know, you can work hard and then you would have your days off and your breaks. That's where we struggle with that quality of life balance for our officers is they work hard at their regular assignments and then they're required just like this weekend we'll stand up probably 60 to 80 police officers to cover the Trump rally. That'll be on a Saturday on people's days off and we see cycles like that all the time and we have to plan for the worst and hope for the best but those are, that's taxing. That's when people or a lot of people are off and so it affects morale and the quality of life internally and I think we do a good job tracking. I talk to every officer or every officer and civilian employee that leaves and they fill out a questionnaire and it'll be categories of morale, workload, training, supervision, communication, it's pretty consistent what we see, I will be quite honest and say that we have areas we need to improve. I mean, communication is always in Achilles' Hill I think with any organization and we're no different and especially this younger generation of men and women that wear a badge, they ask a lot of questions and they expect answers and they're not as patient in a good way. But we have to adapt to that. I mean, we have to change our leadership and management style and that's something as an agency that I don't think we've hit the sweet spot on that yet. That's an area that we've got to continue to improve upon myself included. Chief, when we have extracurricular activity at the state house, such as the rally coming up this weekend, do we get any reimbursement from the state? No, we don't. Even if it's a state sponsored thing like the inauguration, we do not. And so there's a couple of ways to look at that. So they're handling law enforcement security on the state house grounds but because of where the state capital sits right in the middle of our city and downtown, you all have seen time and time again that people park, walk, they're on the sidewalks, often times across the street. Any large-scale event there affects a general radius around the state house and that's where we tend to have the problems. You can't carry a weapon on state house grounds. You can carry a weapon anywhere you want for the most part of the state house ground. Right, so we've got to, we have to be able to address that. And so it's, and then with, especially during election cycles, presidential details and visits from president, vice president, once people are declared a candidate, they get a detail, Secret Service asked for our assistance and that we don't get reimbursed for that either. Do you know from your friends around the United States then in state capitals, does any police force get reimbursements? Not that I'm aware of. There may be special circumstances where there could be an event where there's some type of funding source for that but no, if they were asking us to augment something on state grounds, that would be a discussion to have but as it stands, we handle the city side of the event and they handle the state property side of the event. It seems to me that we have enough data to put together a proposal for the state government that especially when they got the circumstances there showing the last couple of years that the support that we give them for being the capital city and the capital city police department needs to have some support from the state budget. It would certainly help us, I believe. Well, so that would be a discussion or a position for our political officials of course but I will say that there is not ever a time that we have asked for their assistance that they haven't provided it immediately. So just like we see with all of our law enforcement partners in the Midlands and throughout the state, we have to assist one another for large scale events when we do it all the time. I think there's probably room for discussion for long-term plan, maybe annual events that require that from us in terms of the state house but these pop-up events and stuff that we have, I think our relationships and partnerships we have are probably sufficient for that. I think too, Mr. Chair, that the discussion will come up again in the context of fire and some of the discussions we're about to have with them and so some of it is a legal discussion when you start framing it as a fee but I think there's an additional discussion that may have been proposed about just if the state had a willingness to basically cut a check for services every year like an annual allocation and I'm just not sure that we, I know we haven't formally made that request but what I hear you saying is more along those lines is there data to support the public safety services that go on and we are a capital city, is there data to support that and I mean that's certainly something we can look into if that's what we're directed to do. I think it needs to be thought about to see if I'm sure, especially on the fire department, so there is a legitimate reason to ask us to provide the equipment that's gonna support fire suppression on all the state property we have. So we'll table that and I think it may come back up in the fire report as well. And I did cheat two things. I wanted to go back to your comment about the George Floyd era and I had a friend, a really good friend who explained to me and I don't know if we've ever talked about this, so that's interesting. Someone who works with me said, I was saying we're losing offices and they said that they need to look at the culture, the atmosphere and he explained to me what his very best friend did not appreciate about what we were doing and I won't get into specifics. But I- Are you being Colombian? Yes and I said, oh that sounds like community policing my good friend said, yes. My friend did not wanna do that and it was a point of reflection and inflection for me because I kinda wanted to say that's what we're all about at the city of Columbia and if he left, I'm not saying we wanted anyone to leave but if he felt like community policing was not for him, then I don't think that was a bad decision. Did I say that in a good way? Sure, I don't know what that- I'm trying to say it the best way possible. Right, you hear me say this a lot, I mean we're gonna police constitutionally, professionally, ethically and with empathy and respect. People can count sat however they want, that's the way we're gonna police here and we have to give our officers discretion to make decisions on arrests and how you arrest them. Later this afternoon I'm speaking at the State House on bond reform and one of the interesting perspectives that I plan to share and you don't hear it discussed with bond reform is we have been extremely forward leaning and courageous in my opinion with police reform in our state especially being a Southern state. I think they've taken the lead on it but all the best practices and reform measures it's gonna be negated if they don't get a handle on our prolific offenders and the reason I mean that is so one of the things that we've learned that history has taught us is our approach of casting a wide net to find one bad actor leaves entire neighborhoods disenfranchised and with law enforcement creates a lot of distrust, a lot of harm and we didn't have anything to show for it. So we have learned to be strategic, very deliberate in how we identify our offenders and we are very focused on that leveraging technology to make sure we get the small percent of these prolific offenders that are wreaking havoc in these neighborhoods and committing the large majority 80% of the crime. Those are facts but if we do that and then we let that particular offender right back out I mean we're totally negating a new philosophy and a new way of 21st century policing and it's just gonna set us back and it creates frustration on everybody's side. We can't have a shooting in a public housing complex and have our shooting victim laying on the ground dead with an ankle bracelet on and then 14 other people in the general area wearing ankle monitors. That is a failed system. Well and I think that's true. If anyone says there's a very simple solution, they always say, well you don't understand the problem because there are little pieces of the system all throughout the system that we have to work on. On another note and I did email you about this, please explain what the cameras with the blue lights are for because I had some folks thinking that y'all were getting speeding tickets and they were gonna start getting some. So just for the public's purpose, explain to the extent that you feel comfortable what the cameras are for. Are we about to start giving people tickets for speeding based on the blue light? No, that's against the law in South Carolina. So speed cameras are not allowed in South Carolina. A lot of people misconstrue the cameras you see in intersections that are there and those speed cameras and those actually are reading the traffic for the signals. So there's no speed cameras anywhere in our city. There's no red light cameras, which I think there should be. That's something that I think we should be lobbying hard for, red light cameras. That would completely change the behavior as far as driving in our city. But our cameras are for monitoring public space. It's just that simple. For us to be able to remotely monitor public spaces and go back and review anything that would happen in a coverage area of that public space. I see it on TV all the time because I watch all the crime shows and they just use every camera to, but for a particular person is running out of a house. This is how you figure out where they went. And on another note with the stop sign cameras, is there any state legislation that prevents those? Yes, there's no legislation that allows speed cameras or red light cameras at this point. And none that prohibits. I think preemption is what prohibits it. It's not allowed. If you can have the cameras, you just can't ticket with them. We could put the cameras up and get lots of statistics and I think we would be the red light running capital. And I think there are some statistics on that. And again, it's a whole nother discussion, but those camera systems should be civil, not criminal and it's a way to change behavior and it would also create some revenue. There is a group in Columbia, a civilian group, I'm working with them, that are promoting automatic safety cameras and we had a meeting at the Municipal Association on 10 days ago and we had six or eight groups from around the civilian groups from around the state that are also working on the same thing. And we're gonna try to put together a campaign to begin an effort to allow automatic safety cameras because they do work. I agree. Thank you for your opportunity to share this update. Next we have an emergency management department with our Harry Tinsley director giving us a briefing. Good afternoon, Chairman DeVall, Councilor Herbert, Madam City Manager, thank you for the opportunity to speak this afternoon. Within your packet, you should have a brief slide deck. I'll go over some highlights for emergency management and answer any questions you may have toward the end. So are you gonna do the slides, Erica? Thank you. So just a quick update on a couple of things as the Chief alluded to, we do continue to provide along with the CPD, the police department here active intruder training, we call it AIT for our city employees. I will say that we started this venture, I think it was in 2017 and we have moved through, we had a pause during COVID as everybody knows and we've started spending that back up and we had classes as of last year and we're gonna roll out new classes this year right now every month we'll be doing classes and as we need to continue to do that. Also recently, emergency management working with the police department, support services and IT added security cameras to the rapid shelter Columbia site. Now we can monitor those from the EOC. Also, we provided the capacity to monitor in the security guardhouse on site as well. Also, we have been working on a project to bring in the police department's two way radios which are GPS tracked, we integrated that layer into our emergency management common operating platform which is what we call it Allistar and we have programmed and ingested 400 plus radio units to this point and that increases officer safety and Chief Holbrook and I have been working on that project for a while and Mike Cotherin, emergency management specialist in our EOC has really been the spearhead on that and has worked a ton of hours to get that done and we appreciate those efforts, yes sir. Just for information, that gives you the ability to track an individual officer location. Yes sir. We have the capacity currently right now to track them three ways. We can track their vehicle which is their automatic vehicle location computer. We can track them through their smartphone or when they log in for an event or something happens if a critical incident happens they'll either log into that we can track them that way and we can also track them by their radio and we ping that radio and we get an update every about every 15 minutes or so and then we can do a bread come track too. Let's say if we've got a location we can go back and see where it's pinged at and this is right now the officer, the duty watch commander can do that from his vehicle. We can do it from in the EOC. You can do it from my iPad here. We've made it very user friendly for the initial incident commander that comes on and then as the CPD command staff and if we end up having to support that mission we can do that from inside the EOC. We were very excited about that program. Also we've added two 911 computer aided dispatch consoles we call them CAD consoles into our communications room in the EOC. That is a heavy lift. We are finalizing some testing on that but that will increase our emergency operations communication capacity. It is basically an extension from the PSAP that the fire department headquarters inside the EOC. So anything that happens in the hierarchy of that incident or disaster or emergency we can see what's going on right there inside when we request tactical dispatchers from the 911 center. Also we as chief said we continue to integrate the emergency operations center with the police department's real time crime center and we're monitoring the rollout of the camera systems that the chief spoke of. It's about halfway capacity as the chief said we are. Next week we'll be finalizing some network configurations inside our EOC so we can make sure that we can provide the streaming live streaming bandwidth capacity inside EOC. So we're starting to spend that system up. Once that is I would say go live would probably be somewhere around late spring summer of 2023. So we'll be testing that system pretty heavily here pretty soon. We already used 51 of them. Yes sir we have 51 that are operational. There's more out there but the system, the backhaul of the system is being built and there's two parts of that. There is a LTE backhaul which is wireless and then there's a point to point cambium system that our vendors building out for us now so they're doing some testing. Sir? Mesh network. Yeah exactly yep. So we're excited about that. That has given us some real time eyes on seeing what happens and you know these things are gives us a great common operating picture when we're trying to spin up for any kind of emergency weather related issue or you name it it gives us the opportunity to have eyes inside the EOC which is important. The other in September Chief and I and some others gave a tour to leadership South Carolina's 2022 class and I think they were pretty impressed with what we've been able to provide leveraging the leadership of y'all policy makers and leadership of our city manager and police chief. We have been using some pretty good technology. I mean y'all know what all of them are ShotSpotter, Alistar, you know we've got a lot going on a lot of moving parts so that building across the way is pretty impressive if I have to say so myself. So in 2023 as the chief alluded to we, January is always a busy month for us for some reason but anyway we were able to use our city EOC as the incident command post where state and local partners collaborated in that building with the governor's inauguration and then the 2023 King Day event at the dome. And one thing I will say about that location over there we are collaborating and coordinating with state, local any federal partners this weekend as the chief talked about this Saturday. It's crucial during any kind of a planned event or an emergency that folks that are the key decision makers are in one central location that can make decisions collaboratively in their sphere and then also coordinating. So like the chief says, if something happens on the state house and it goes into the streets of the city and they've got a traffic management and things of that nature we're all making the same decisions right there collectively and that's crucial. We didn't have that during the flood of 2015 so. Who makes the decision that King Day we're gonna at the dome we're gonna activate the EOC. We'll typically get a request and this request came from SLID could be co-located in that location. We all, we work the Alistar solution system they enter into their information. You know, there are people that ever signed to it PDNs are in this there's firing of theirs and we put it up on the video wall in there and we monitor that. So they asked me for that and we are fully leaning forward on any kind of collaboration. SLID's using the same analyst star system yes sir we're pushing that heavily in our state and as a point in here on the next slide I'll get to it but because that is a key collaborative issue it's one thing for everybody to be in a silo that you know, BPS is responding their people SLID is responding their people police is responding their people fire and you when you start having to make critical decisions in a timely manner and things start to scale up you wanna have that those people in the right room and we've not only given the capacity to be in the right room but also do it remotely so we're running that hybrid thing so anytime there's something happens we can scale up pretty quickly and collaborate together. Going back to my original question so who makes that decision is it up to it would be me Chief Holbrook or you? It would be me once those requests is made if it's a request that we're already building out a process and we have a mechanism for we'll do that if it's something that's outside of that and I think you know, I think the city manager needs to make that call then we'll upwards report that to her and the police chief and we'll have a discussion from that point but a lot of this is just lower level folks who are running the day to day operations it's not the command folks she's not in there she's just not in there but their people are and that's what's crucial workers. Yes we are we want things coming through the emergency operation center if something happens you wanna know what's going on you should work through the emergency operation center that's the central clear now. Yeah that's true. So we're gonna continue with some of our training programs and spinning up the real time crime center as we work through that process. As I said just a little bit ago we're gonna establish a working group with our state and local partners with using our Alistar solution and continue to work that through as planned events, emergencies and things of that nature. Those are some things we have going on and we'll continue to as we build out or police department builds out their camera system we'll be making sure that we can ingest that into their real time crime center into the EOC and we'll continue to do that moving forward. In closing I will say the chief talked about the fencing project. We do have two security fencing projects one at 1800 main here at our emergency operation center and then one at one Justice Square at Columbia police department which also encompasses the courthouse area. We went out to bids for that we've received the bids back we're working through that process. We've got some budgetary issues that we've got to work with I'm working with the contracts and procurement now to work through that process. Hopefully we'll be able to work through and be able to adjust what we're gonna be doing and maybe do some addendums to the current solicitation that's out there if not we will have to rebid. And that last slide is just a couple pictures from some events we've had as we work through this is from the governor's inauguration here at the bottom. The action through your training some other things we've had. But any any questions that's my report I wanted to try to be as brief or give you some highlights. It really is an impressive center. Thank you. Thank you all for your support too. Ms. Wilson thank you. Harry I just wanna say thank you to both chiefs and you the effort that you put into this every day and leaning into our folks in the field and folks who are on the floor and they're on a daily basis is very meaningful for our city. I don't know that our public really understands what an asset it is and I think this is another one of those opportunities I was just telling Kevin to tell our story that I'm hearing the council always mentioned obviously there are certain things we can't tell and there's covert things that have to continue to go on but it means a lot to me because if you think back to 2015 we didn't have this we didn't have Harry's role and it became very apparent to me after the flood that we needed to go in this direction. So to see the evolution since then and how he has totally embraced it he's not excited at all about this if you can't tell is it means a lot and I think that we just wanna keep encouraging everything all of y'all are doing so I appreciate it. One of the things I think city assistant city manager Benjamin had reminded me of recently I forgot what made us think about it but it was not just thank you for the trainings you're always doing with our team yes we will absolutely need to include city council with trainings like the active intruder trainings but also infrastructure that we have with the defibrillators I think we've seen how people knowing how to do that on a moment's notice saves lives and I think we have invested in those I'm just not sure if we've done the training is that what you're concerned with them? Yes ma'am we were working that's a very good question we were working I spoke to director Rump earlier this week we were talking about the training we've got an option here that with some of the vendor that provided our ADs that we purchased our parts and records purchased our fires purchased some we purchased some we have them in the buildings we're trying to get that training provided with within that company and we think we're gonna be pretty close to that so we're working through those details and as soon as we get that buttoned up we'll communicate that and we'll be able to provide that too I know one of your objectives was to get CPR provided so we'll be working on that I would like to point out one thing too and I know Chief Holbrook is okay for me saying this I appreciate Chief Jenkins, Chief Holbrook's support couldn't do anything what we do without them but there's some folks in that building over there that work hard Merchant Management Specialist Mike Cotherin back boned my administrative specialist Tracy Beamer and Inspector Sellers, Johnny Sellers I'll tell you that they are always working around the clock and we just couldn't do what we do without them Very true Thank you all Thank you for your time Mayor's probably got about 10 more minutes if you want to take a moment you need to stop at this No, we're ready Keep on truckin' Yes, sir, unless you want to that's up to you, Mr. Chair No, I'm ready to go on Okay We've got fire department coming up Assistant Chief Folsom Oh, is the Chief gonna lead off? Okay Chief Jenkins, we're delighted to have you with us today Chief Jenkins, I know that you're Superman and you're trying to push through and they've been a little under the weather so that's why we were to burn to your able-bodied assistance but we're glad to see you We can if that's what y'all want What's that? I can go ahead and let them do it No, it's up to you on how you're feeling and what you're feeling up to We're glad you're here but, you know, I keep it real I'm all about how we're feeling and what we're up to doing so, in that you're here we assume you're up to the challenge If I get to the point where I feel like I'm gonna fall out of All right You got a lot of folks right there who I think got your back So, thank you, Mr. Ball, Ms. Herbert, Madam City Manager and I appreciate this opportunity and basically I just want to give you a brief update I know it said five minutes but as I'm looking at my watch I know that everybody ran over five minutes so if I run over five minutes don't hold it against me So basically I just want to talk just about the staff research and purchase the new software programs The new software will allow the department to create a daily fire operations management system the system we designed to streamline software applications to go to reduce the number of current software applications But what I would like to do is I'm gonna get Chief Brochie to kind of give a briefing on this software While Chief Brochie is coming up I would be remiss if we didn't Mr. Chair recognize Councilman Reverend Ed McDowell the birthday boy today I'm not sure if everybody knew that I didn't see him sneak in so these little blunt cupcakes are up here because we knew he might be sneaking in on us so happy birthday, sir We'll share the cupcakes before you leave And I just have, I'm sorry Just a quick question are we talking about replacing an old system or are we talking about implementing give me a totally new system The answer is yes So currently we're using a system for our Regress Management database so basically every incident that occurs inside the city where we respond we collect data and then we report it up to the National Center This new system is gonna allow us to collect a lot more data so we can give that over to the Fire Chief and Chief Jenkins can continue to make database decisions So not only do we wanna collect data on our incidents where we're going, how long does it take us to get there where the hotspots are occurring so we can provide some intervention strategies but also maintenance on our vehicles Currently we're using a separate software to do some of that tracking whether it's our folks spending time on physical fitness requesting training, going to training we use multiple applications to track all of that This new system will allow us to keep everything in one location, one password, one bill and basically dial everything down into one operation system The great thing about it is there's an opportunity for us to partner not only with city police but the county sheriff's office, emergency management as well So when an incident occurs we all have live data all at the same time all sharing the same exact information We saw how important that was during the Blythe Woods School shooting hoax where we all responded multiple agencies and didn't have the exact same information This will allow us to do that And then we talk about our cardiac events in the city The system also has an ability to where when someone dials 911 if they're on a mobile phone the caller can talk to dispatch as she asks a question and she goes you want a mobile device? Yes, I'm gonna send you over a text Click the text, it's gonna turn your camera phone on Down the dispatcher has live information and live data right there So for whether CPR, whether it's active shooter whether it's a fire we get that information live on the spot So we're very excited We really appreciate our PMO staff for helping guide us through that process If it wasn't for them we probably would be six months behind but they really did guide us down the right path So we're very excited about this And I like technology so I'm trying to hide most of my excitement but we're really excited about it And do we know our other agencies are already using it or is it something that are we the first or are several folks already using it and we're trying to pitch it? So along with my love of technology I also have a passion for being competitive and being first So we'll be the first in the Midlands We demoed three softwares This one came out to be the best choice for what we do Other agencies locally decided to go with other software that best fits their need That's their choice This one, the biggest thing that changed for us was it has an ability called Community Connect And so for example, say I live at home and I have an elderly parent at home and that individual's a wheelchair bound They can go into the system, create a profile and put that in the system At time of dispatch our firefighters will know that there's an elderly individual living at that home that's wheelchair bound That's crucial information for us to have as we're responding We had some of the examples they gave local police, I believe it was down in Florida responded to a home The person had created a profile explaining that there's an individual there who was about six foot five and 300 pounds but he was autistic Without that information typically that call could have gone a different way, thinking that person was perhaps being aggressive for no reason Well, police had that information Fire had that information They were able to de-escalate the situation and had a positive outcome So those types of stories that we heard is basically the leading cause for us to make that decision or the recommendation for Chief Jengus to make the decision And I guess don't be a roll out for that purpose with the community side of it So community facing to encourage people to create profiles and that sort of thing Absolutely, so are we going to our next implementation meeting on February 2nd? Again, guided by PMO and we look for more answers out of that We hope to roll out by this summer and that's going to include a lot of Impressed releases and getting our community on board It also has an application there for local community business leaders as well to create profiles for their business to let us know crucial things too So Chief and Chief I would ask that we do take a break The mayor wanted to hear the rest of you about presentation He said he needs about five minutes So we can put, is that okay, Mr. Chair? We're trying to give you while I go Well, I didn't know and these breaks sometimes become longer than necessary I didn't know that they've still got a lot to cover Well, there he is, so that works out We're about to break for you but thank you, mayor, for joining us I just left some folks online Okay, thank you, mayor Well, no need to break, Chief Okay, this system will also help us prepare for up-and-coming ISO inspection in progress And just in We also did 820 hiring services from July 22 to December 22 So that's not a year I will say that a lot of stuff that I'm giving you all that will come as we do our yearly reports which hopefully we have it published by at least all our numbers in by next month to be able to give you a yearly update on what we're doing Okay, next slide Also Okay We're preparing I would say I'm thinking probably what we say probably around about summertime Yeah, it keeps getting pushed back because you only got one person basically doing it for the whole state so we kind of keep getting pushed back which is okay I would, as Chief Paulson come up here and talk about our fleet stuff to give an administrative update Afternoon everyone Thank you for having us here So our fire fleet, we just got in a new our new engine one New Pierce Enforcer engine We'll be sending out or contacting you all for pushing push-in coming in soon We should have that truck in service by the end of this week being as they get everything ready Also Station one headquarters 1800 Law Street and we have some other ones on order as well 2 F-150s for battalions 1 and 2 has came in We're working through getting the systems installed 6 forward ranges that goes to 3 different entities within our department 2 to prevention, 2 to logistics and 2 to training This is good news for our birthday guy We have our city and county for the second set of bunker gear We're working through procurement now to make sure we're using the opera funds in the correct manner He's been a great advocate It's the turtle now So on the facilities we've been working with Missy Gentry Right now we do have a letter of intent for some property So we're working through those and hopefully that process and I know Chief Jenkins has been working on this for 6, 8, 10 years to get this station built So the great news is we're on track and hopefully we'll be breaking ground soon Mayor, thank you for that question And I'll give We've been doing a great job of trying to replace our front line units We know it costs money but today's time the prices are going up I think it's 12% in the last 2 or 3 years or honestly the last 2 years But our front line right now we only have on the city side we have one truck down that's on the front line and the reason being is the back order part Now our reserve systems we are working on providing a better reserve system for both city and county You can't have a great or good front line fleet without a good decent reserve fleet and things happen Our staff, we have 2 mechanics at fleet and we're doing a great job working with them both city and county of getting them and keeping them on the road The city, the fleet manager just started a program Hopefully within the next 2 weeks we'll go through all of our front line fleets and just do PM's and then we'll come back and address the small things not a windshield wiper but to say a mirror not functioning properly but our major concern right now to keep them on the road and responding safely is to look at the tires the brakes and the oil and stuff like that to keep it going Although it seems based on the industry and you can go any other fire service based as the city and the county we're doing a good job but now the truck that we have on orders we ordered ladder 7 and engine 12 well that's 20 months out and the prices continue to go up so Chief Jenkins tasks us to work on a proposed to justify bringing forward 3 trucks because the mileage are high it's over 120,000 miles and the age is getting close to 4 replacement now we do have we put in a 5 year plan but what has happened it has changed if you go to Charleston you ask some of our surrounding municipalities the reason it has changed is because of lead time and price increases and I will tell you speaking to several mayors across the country what is the fire's role and becoming the first responders for everything is creating more wear and tear on equipment and vehicles which then refers to more costs and so this brings up this age old question as we are moving forward keep that foot note because Chief Jenkins is going to talk on that because we did develop a plan and try to find some data and I think it renews the conversation about should EMS and fire be a single unit to serve our community better and stronger especially if you look at times of service and everything else but it's also overall costing and resources so I think this is probably a good time as we move forward hopefully with this new study that we can really dive into that but it is a conversation that's happening nationwide and a lot of it is because safety became the major discussion about that and the safety by wearing our materials out on a car wreck versus a fire which it was intended to use for so it's kind of interesting debate what do we do here it's a good question based on the number of costs that we run thank you go to the next slide just want to kind of give you an update on our training division the total training hours that our training division has provided is a hundred and twenty two thousand five hundred forty eight hours and these these training hours are very important because we have to catalog all our training hours because of the ASO it's part of the study so we are a relevant tractor and I would say that's why I can say that that's why our folks are so marketable because of the training that they do get and also we've got such a great training that we have our direct hire recruit school program to onboard qualified firefighters this is a program where we don't have to put them through the full eighteen weeks of training we can bring them in because they are already spare we can put them through six weeks now six weeks and we can have them ready but we can also give them an additional training to move them up to the senior firefighters so they can become drivers so we don't have to put them through we don't have to onboard them and then put them through a driver training course we can do that all at one time and I talk about as we move on where we are with that also qualifying practical value to accessibility of direct hiring recruit program applicants so and the self-managed driver which I already talked about the promotional tractor this is to track people for promotions so we know exactly what they are in the system so they can't when they become eligible for promotion we know exactly what they have but also our instructor tractor instructors have and what they qualify to teach so it makes it a whole lot easier so as you know, some of you may know I don't have a professional service of chief anymore because chief has actually just retired so but we still have to so but currently we just brought in seventeen recruits so they'll be going through the poor crew class 46 current openings right now is what we have now some things that we did and I got to give chief brochures and Mike and Summa they've been really hitting this initiative called the virtual ride alone and based on what it is they go out to interview some of our folks in this initiative and we actually put it on social media and people see exactly what we do how we do it and we also get firefighters to talk about the job, what it means to them and all that stuff and we've had some pretty good hits on it and we've received a lot of feedback from it so that's working real well and like I said we identified a diverse group of firefighters that highlighted the department and how are you reaching those folks I think what we've discovered over the last six months that for us we've got to quit trying to recruit locally because we're just pickpocketing from each other across the state the virtual ride along or looking at innovating by going to other communities you know I mean today in Milwaukee it's about 50 to 50 degrees and today here it's 57 degrees you know sending a video and sending the things of hey we're in a different world today come here people are looking they're moving to the south let's open up the opportunity to get a longer reach because we're really hurting each other in the different cities a big discussion last week too about recruitment but also how it's a great way for them to see what you do and how you do it and all on the staffing in September I believe y'all were in here there were several classes so where are we exactly what's our percentage you said 46 openings we had a number so what is that really in the scheme of things out of how many so if you look at getting two numbers together the 17 and the 46 that's where we are but we have but we now we have 17 of those what it was 63 openings we have 17 of those still but we are doing it now so we lose more since the fall so because I know we had what two recruit classes so how many of those we made it through and then how many folks have left since then so when I give you my yearly report once you put all those numbers together we tell you exactly how many people that left in 2022 and we tell you exactly what our net gain is as far as what we've hired that's why we're putting in so many different programs we're doing a direct hire right now I'm going to do it we don't want to hire for tanker drivers so when we look at those folks all they do is drive that is a position so all they do is drive the tanker that's it they don't have to fight the fire they don't promote up or down or whatever but that's what they do it's mostly people who just don't want to fight fire we just want to at least get the water to the source so that's what we're doing so yeah we've lost some people I mean you know I lost an assistant chief so we are losing people how much is just natural attrition because of retirement verse well we're likely to be at 3% but I can't I can't give you that number right now until we look at what we've done just so I'm clear current staffing numbers we're looking at we currently have 63 vacancies and this is the breakdown of the status of oh 63 we got 63 openings on shift however 17 of those are not in recruit class so it takes I guess this is the 18 week class this is the 18 week class so it's going to take 18 weeks to get them out from this past Monday 18 weeks so yeah we just did a test and I think we're going to do the interview for those 5 that we're going to go and get started when we're going to do those interviews okay so we're going to do those interviews next week so we're going to possibly have 5 more come on next week but however we may have to put them in the class at any class with this recruit class now we just have to see so you know and I'll tell you right now and anybody will tell you I have never seen a 100% graduation from a recruit class except when I first came here standards must have been low well it was only 4 of us and the training was you see that truck when that truck moved you'd be on it that's your training so that's what I did I did have 100% like it was only 4 of us so any more questions on that Mr. Rickman okay alright so if you look at our fire prevention we've done over 5,700 inspections public education we've done over 1,500 demonstrations completed we've installed almost 450 smoke along plants views almost 500 589 and we do special events too where we have to help out even when sometimes we have to help out the police department so we did about 268 of those but I will say even when you look at although we complete these many inspections I mean as you know the city is constantly annexing so that does put a tax on our fire prevention and even for education as people move in and people with more fire education and people needing smoke alarms you know that really taxes us and the plants view you know how much development we're doing right now so that taxes us as well so the yearly report especially when it comes around the service calls can y'all really break those down into the different nature we do I know you've got 60% but I'm curious about how many false alarms how many discussion how many fires et cetera how we had to do it when you look at the 237 times you use a defibrillator CPR 346 times I mean these are all part of the information we need to have for future discussions to make sure that we're providing the best service for our community we break all that down in our report all this broken down do y'all have as part of your gear do y'all have some separate gear to protect yourselves against fentanyl when you're in a situation where you have overdoses do y'all have special gloves I noticed that this was a discussion we had in Washington obviously fentanyl is a bigger problem than we all I know that we have Narcan but other protective gear because our guys are going from one event to the other and there may not time to go get a second gear and change it have y'all looked into investing in some gears that trained personnel can have in addressing it because the exposure of fentanyl to individuals and what we're seeing has increased in a lot of more populated areas but if it's there it's coming to us and as y'all know we've already dealt with several deaths here I'm concerned about the safety of our personnel, fire, emergency and police in that situation so as y'all look forward do some research on that see what we can do to protect our folks Chief on the that 59%, let's say 60% of all emergency responses that's your 34,000 number whatever that number was and so 40% were fire calls and 60% were medical calls that should have been handled by EMS well yes and no good political answer Chief I know it's a loaded answer see what I want you to really look at don't look at that 59% I mean I know you have to what I want you to focus on is what's under there all units perform CPR 300 and 346 times but our response is the patient and using the AED which is what we're talking about putting here in the city hall so they're saving lives well I agree with you we got to know what the difference is from when it's saving a life at a fire or an incent versus a car wreck because I think we got to create that balance right and there's a reason why there's an EMS system and other things and I think that's where we're headed is we really got to dive in deeper to it because what you do on a fire site is what you're trained to do what you're supposed to do but the cost and what we're doing there's a better way to handle it there's a reason why other cities do it the way they do it because I know how important it is and having our trained guys because on a fire scene you never know what you're going to walk up on we absolutely have no idea but the other factor though becomes what is the capacity of the county to respond in a timely manner I mean just being frank and honest with what I think the reason the chief goes to that 346 times a performance CPR is but for them having gotten their first or breaking down that data so it's a collective discussion that has to be had must be had with county emergency management director who I believe is where the EMS falls under that leadership I think that's our general point there's a lot here that we need to look at from times cost because the county is part of this they're part of this Columbia Richland fire services so they're part of this and these elevated costs but when you start looking at what it's driven for us for overtime and other things those affect every other part of our budget so we got to dive down into it and have a comprehensive conversation is hey we're in this collectively how do we work together and how do they and the city come up with a better plan that saves lives and provides the service that we've all committed to provide our citizens I think that's where we're headed there it's not about oh we're going to push that somewhere else no let's figure out what's the most effective and efficient way to provide that service but when we look at things sometimes we look at that but we don't think about all the others the time we go to an event that's just a car wreck and we don't provide any service we put our guys at risk we put the trucks we put added mileage out of the way and tearing all of that well that affects everything else so I just want to make sure when we look at it we're looking at it all and say alright this is how we can do it because the one thing we want to do is make sure that as a county and I say that because I believe we're one area that we're providing that service so I just want to make sure that you're not trying to pick on or push on hey we got to dig into these so we know what we're pushing forward and I do have a question I guess it's a newer person is this a trend are these numbers with respect to how many times our response to our medical in nature has it always been this way or have we seen numbers trending up or I think and Harry might notice better when we first started this I think we were more we probably ran a lot more calls well I think we might have ran more calls but we called that number down because we don't run every medical call that comes in it has to meet a certain category so I do want to say when you're talking about response to we have entrapments we have to respond to entrapments I mean we had to equipment to cut people out of cars there's no doubt there's a role there but we also got to look at the bigger picture and plan ahead because what we're talking about is not just today it's five years from now we got to be thinking that way when it comes to especially when we're we're sitting down with the county because I know they have an interest in making sure their citizens are as safe as getting the attention that they need and I know there's there's a lot of questions around all that so I also did want to point to think that you know we had to administer Narcans roughly two hundred times you know for people who had overdosed you know that brings up you know question about if we had money with all the money coming can we redirect some of that money into um our fire service and they are our first responders you know we did with the guarantee funding allocation the police and fire were our part of our response on how we would use those funds I think we're getting another allotment so we time I combining the service you know I was I was on the on the panel you know those years ago in Georgia near Phoenix when they first did combine so it was a growing pain so it's a lot to think about so often get Chief Kip to talk about this stuff that we already talked about you know with me to get him up here so as far as calls for service now what you're looking at is for the year 2021 um we're looking at our air response time and the average personality that we sent on this call were at least five and you look at our total fire laws which is a little over three million but if you look at our total property saved and these are just fires now we're talking about just a shot of nine million dollars on property saved so it does work now the one thing I would say about these numbers if you look at the next slide and it says total calls 25 25,000 but that's just through September we got to vet all these numbers um because they get validated from the National Fire Incident database and so we vet these numbers but if you think about incidents and we're probably talking probably closer more to 38,000 for this year but if you start looking at number 48,000 that number kind of depicts that you know when we send after at certain fires that may be one incident which you may have five, six trucks responding if it's a house fire it's not as so and that number so that's kind of when you look at that 48,000 and you talk about wear and tear on trucks that's how we're going to count on really we feel that we can really capture that data give you a true number of how the trucks are responding and why we got so much wear and tear on it it's not like it used to be the city it used to be ten blocks long in any direction I know it's been but these trucks didn't run as much but now these trucks they really run a lot one time I can remember back in the day you know we had a five year truck and they probably had five to ten thousand miles on it trucks don't last that long because of the wear and tear what is good intent what does that mean on the getting the cat out of the tree good intent has several and I don't have the meanings with me right now one of y'all want to talk about a good intent call upset the clerk now she's the blue around here so so councilmember DeVall joked about the cat in the tree but sometimes that's considered a good intent call or you know the fire services really turn into everyone's automatic call right so I got a pipe busted in the house we saw that during the the winter storms they down 9-1-1 a fire truck goes will turn off their water I've got something going on with my washer and dryer you wouldn't believe some of the calls we get and it's a tough call you know you tell people no or you go out there and you do a service form so we're here to serve we call we go so what we were just talking about in the back row is really dialing in to the mayor's point about how do we prevent some of those 9-1-1 calls whether we use our data, education chief's got us working on some fire false fire alarm initiatives how to prevent those things those things are really well wear down our trucks quicker than anything else because they're necessarily not an emergency call it's tough to say that someone's loved one is falling on the floor that's an emergency for somebody but how do we take away the non-emergency calls how do we prevent those from happening I think it's going to be the discussion that chief's going to task us with coming up in the next year or so and you know that makes you think well what if I send a Tahoe with two guys who are EMS trained first sending an entire truck or two trucks empty in a station I mean that's why I'm saying trying to understand that so that we can plan for the future I think it's so key because I do I think it's every time you throw on all that gear and you load up all that truck and this and that I mean it's wear and tear on our folks as well the mission is to prevent the 9-1-1 call from ever happening and the way to do that is using that database that we spoke about earlier collecting that information finding out what similarities there are amongst those that are calling 9-1-1 and then putting in intervention strategies to prevent or reduce the amount of calls that are coming in that are non-emergencies community paramedicine and so on and so forth yeah when we took the 9-1-1 and did a hotspot ACM Simon set us up with a hotspot from it was amazing how many multiple services we're sending for incidents and it seemed to be the same areas we're sending everybody police fire EMS and so you start seeing the drain on the resources and what that cost us in the long run so how do we provide that service without draining two other resources when one could handle it and I think that's our overall mission I wanted to ask a question along those lines unfortunately my home was one of those false alarm I'm homes where one day I looked up and you burned the greens again no because I just rather not you I can't remember what it was but someone was doing something with the house alarm and I just didn't know and next thing I know there's a truck in the car I guess my question is do you have a lot of them that are directly related to home security systems or because I mean I think I'm wondering because that's just such a large percentage of the calls trying to narrow those down now we get false we get false alarms and that way we consider the false alarm how do we what can we do to decrease I mean because I don't even think I did it I'm not sure who did it in my home I can't remember all of the facts from that day I just know it's not me I swear I don't remember but I do remember being really apologetic that everyone came out no for my household I was apologetic for the whole household but is there something that you see more often than not that could be that we think that you think we can do something about you know some of the things we just can't begin to even figure it out but because I'm trying to figure out why does the alarm system folks automatically send fire if we haven't given them an indication of fire well because so let me put it this way let's say if you do have an alarm that goes off call your alarm company up or your alarm company may call you say you got alarm going off okay then you say well there's nothing to it it's a false alarm so once we get the call we still have to come out to verify we're only going to send one truck but we have to come out to verify because for us it's a liability because the alarm they come in and so if they call you all before verifying with us then you still have to we're sending you to verify now if it's a multiple if it's something that comes in several times we can make the decision not to come out but if it comes in the next day now we're going to come out and your alarm system believe it or not they can be very sensitive they can activate all the dust that's why we tell people make sure you keep them cleaned up vacuum out or whatever so that dust won't collect on them they're pretty sensitive I went throwing that at you it's dust who's going to cover the classification city manager these are really the same slides that you all had in your recent work session and so what we were asked to do was bring this back again or a deeper dive with the committee so that's the attempt today we also have a slide or we can talk through the fact that our consultant did the compensation classification market study citywide which I'm not really ready to get into the citywide piece of that because I think it's more appropriate as we are in the budget process but because we were asked to bring fire ahead of that just due to some of the challenges they're experiencing with staffing and then in the region what we've seen is Richland County of course moving forward with some of the increases as well for their public safety functions and then of course we recently did the police pay plan and approved that and implemented it we wanted to go ahead and bring you the numbers that would at least get fire to the hourly rate that's more in line with similarly situated agencies across the state that have a very similar call volume actually our call volume is a bit more than most of those that we've done the comparisons to so with that I'll let Miss Benjamin add anything additionally or Chief Jenkins so alright you know what gives me great pleasure to say that Evergreen basically is saying the same thing that we said when we looked at it and we came up with the numbers and sometimes and I'll be honest with all of you I'm not trying to basically we need to compare ourselves to other folks but what I want to do is just do what's right about don't get what I'm saying wrong what's right about all folks and get them a fair amenable salary so they can make a living and I think what we did that's what we looked at even though we can pair other folks with the study and Evergreen apparently did the same thing so what I'm asking is that we really consider this you know one thing and God bless him I'll tell you all something I'll just tell you all a secret Mr. Taylor a very unique relationship really did and I miss him to the day I really do because I've known him before he even got on council you know doing some projects but one thing he said that I always preach that City of Columbia sits in the center of the state but it is the hub of government and the one thing that I would even say also is that I do agree because I think this kind of came as was kind of talked about it we ought to be there ought to be some funding coming from our state I just really believe that I've had some conversations I'm not going to say who but from the state house and we talked about this I had conversations before a certain person left the state house and we talked about this and they were all in agreement that you know what do you all need but it takes somebody to say hey this is what we need you know the chief ain't looking for a thing I'm going to tell you right now but chief looking for something for his folks that's what he's looking for and I would hope that this pay plan and we need to implement it and we feel like we could even implement it for half a year going forward we feel like we can it's going to be a struggle couple things that we need to understand I'd like to see that but they just did a market study in comparable you know what did they compare one of the things that we still got to work out and discussion we've had over and over and I've had it with fire folks and all about getting our base up I mean right now nobody's made base pay in any category in five years but for us to recruit and be competitive and retain we've got to make that strategy so we know that base pay is really about how we're getting folks into the system and keeping them and that's why you want to have the compression how are we dealing with the overtime the sick leave and all the things that are pretty increased and the numbers are I mean the numbers are the numbers so we can't argue that's not true you know the antiquated system of the way a fire department operates we really need to look at how do we modernize the fire department you know is 24 on and 48 off the way to go I don't know and the reason why I bring that up is because I think all of that plays into what we're looking at but when we look at this and the idea that vacation time is you know planned a year in advance it's proven it doesn't work because it puts us at risk we've got too many people calling out this and that so as we look at this and we go in to figure out a way to start increasing making sure not only that we're bringing you know the base bound of the 15 which you know I mean that's a base salary of 4380 and I'm assuming that does not count the FLSA overtime in that number correct it does include it it does it's for 2920 which is 2,920 hours so it is included and that means we're really we're paying even less than then because the base pay a base pay is not overtime it is paid at a different rate correct right but that 164 hours is a guaranteed overtime that they receive so my point is is the base pay if that's what they guaranteed then we have to build that number from there so are we building the right number is my first question then the second part of that is how does that affect the compression because we we make a move like this right now we can't make the move next year again for another 12% it's just not possible so I think to answer one of your questions of course Evergreen did not do any comparisons of any type of sick leave or any type of overtime hours they were looking strictly at base they did their comparisons with everyone making 2,920 with the group that they surveyed so they tried to equalize that out because of course we all know that different firefighters have different scheduling and so to kind of equalize that so that the numbers make sense to compare to each other they based it on 2,920 so based on that we were from our 22 people that they compared us to and I can give you all that listing it was regional people everybody in South Carolina we were 13.8% below at the beginning like you said may are the starting salaries so that's where the foundation is built on those starting firefighters salaries and then goes from there and so that's really the base concentration but you're exactly right for saying we have to look at compression once you look at that base level then you have to look at because it's a domino effect of everybody above that level and so they have given us some preliminary information about what that looks like if we were to start at that $15 as a base and move upwards where did the, do you know where their salary range stopped where they wouldn't when you're looking at this did they look at the guys making $80,000 and below is that the study? They looked at the total population so they looked at everybody they didn't just look at you know they took an overall census of what everybody was making and they used that data of course it's data that like they were talking about you lose people, people start so of course it's a moment in time but they did use the current census in order to to determine that methodology as far as implementation that's that has not been discussed you know whether we target people 80 and under we haven't discussed any type of implementation methodology but they used all the they used all the data points for all employees they looked from A to Z right but I'm assuming base salary would have I guess base salary is not always newcomers that could be laterals coming in we use laterals going from one county to another whatever y'all call that so typically when I say base salaries I mean the starting salaries for all for all the classifications now somebody could come in with potentially I mean they do that every now and then they'll bring a firefighter or somebody from another group that may come in at a higher rate because they were recruited at a higher rate but this is just talking about if we're at the starting salary for all of our classifications what's the minimum starting salary that we're talking about I think the chief mentioned that he thinks that they can implement this thing for coming out from January to the July for this half a year what was that because we did this in December this was a December I think they were looking at half years calculations as far as because of course the major cost is the implementation you know you gotta start it and any consultant or any good HR professionals gonna say you gotta start bring people to the new minimums so anybody that's lagging behind you know if we have a firefighter that makes $35,000 or a firefighter that makes $40,000 we would elevate all of those individuals to the $43,000 to get them their new starting salaries I think we probably want to be looking at the cost of implementing an increase right now that would be fully realized in July get an increase right now that would step us in the right direction for this half of the last half of the fiscal year and then fully budget next year and let the city manager look at her resources to see where she may be able to fund that whether it's bringing it everybody up at the bottom level to $15 an hour or going back to January 1 and starting the increase then maybe come up with some options for us the January 1 to June 30 timeframe would have to be based upon what whatever cushion I'll just use that word is in the fire department's budget right now and I think they have looked at that to help supplement whatever additional funds we would have to put our heads together to come up with whatever that delta would be for the amount that equates to bringing everyone to the minimum which is and then I think they were adding the 260 an hour would be the additional amount to address any compression so the question I guess that you're asking Mr. Deval is if we have options that show that January 1 to June 30 timeframe would just bring everyone to the minimum and then the option of what that looked like for the same timeframe bring everyone to the minimum plus the compression starting in July I wasn't even getting to what starts in July because in July and the annualized cost is double what I just described I think there's two options there of what we could do right now we could just not deal with the compression piece right now and then just bring everyone to the minimum is what I'm hearing or stage it or that at the end of the day I think the reality is the general fund can't support doing doing this in addition to what we've already done for police in addition to what I'm hearing it's why we're coming to you all starting next month with a discussion about priorities and a lot of the other new projects including this proposal that you're going to put on the table these are services here that we're talking about that are directly tied to our citizens that we serve and the thought process of if there's any flexibility of the state I mean I don't know because I haven't been directed to ask those type things directly to them so that we can plan accordingly to know we would have that but outside of that you know obviously there's tax increase, millage increase that you all have not entertains in my tenure as a practitioner do I advise of slow but steady very small incremental yes you probably heard me say that multiple times during my tenure and during the budget process have you all opted to do that no and I get it but every year we don't do it and every year particularly now in a marketplace where we are truly competing with the private sector and others and seeing changes in what people expect and flexibilities they're requesting and demanding in the workplace at the end of the day our role in my opinion outside of all the other creative things that we need to do as a capital city is to maintain service delivery of the basic services first the internal needs of the city and those things do directly tied to police fire, public works, public all the public safety and the market study does show that we're also behind with back office functions and the other jobs in the cities I didn't even start talking about that and that's why I said I'd rather not get into that piece today but we were asked to bring fire forward no I don't have how you would pay for this with an already burdened general fund I have some ideas and I can come up with some for the rest of this I think we need those ideas and I think we also need to go back to our discussion about a subsidy from the state since we're providing fire protection then may recommend I think we got to do several things one we've got to modernize our service and how we operate because there are some things that we could shift internally into this thing I think two things I'm not for a tax increase until we actually the people who should be paying property tax are and I think the next step for us is to have a conversation with the county which I'd like to get on the agenda with Leonardo Brown the administrator along with the assessor because there's too many pieces of property that are not tax exempt we started to do a short study here already where those things until we've done all that we can't go ask our folks to pay more until everybody else who should be paying should be paying and I think that plays a big role in it and we have gone up on fees we've gone up on fire hydrant fees we've gone up on a sprinkler fee all those fees we've raised fees we've taxed people indirectly so you know I don't want us to say that we're not trying different things but I do think we need to have some conversations with our partners you know I hate to use the word fee and loo but we are providing some service for some good amount of folks in town that we need to have a conversation that's directly tied to to property tax just a quick survey of a major entity here property that have been off the tax rolls for years have not been used for public purpose those are subject to tax so I think we're going to have to have a deeper discussion and I think we're going to find we're going to find some revenue that's going to really help us address the shortfall needs now how we get through the next six months with trying to do something I think we just we got to have a deeper discussion what can we afford to do now to take a step forward and there but also understand I haven't seen exactly what the county is committed to on the fire it was such a broad discussion that I never could find any detail I think it would be great for us to find that out as well we have what the county's done I didn't do anything for fire I mean this is we have to initiate what what happened with fire and ask them to participate for the fire side of it what they did was involve their other functions like EMS the deputy the sheriff's deputies I don't even think they didn't deal with 911 although that could be another possibility because they're going to be 911 by 2024 as opposed to shift to the county so again I can bring you back whatever I can outside of this deeper discussion that I don't think is happening right now in if the intent is to do something now then I only made the statements I made because if we do it then we have to annualize it come July 1 and the deeper discussion will absolutely have to occur village increased notwithstanding so I'm I'm just being blunt I mean their services y'all want to provide them we are we have to provide them you want to do an increased pay plan a guy pay for it general fund can't support it the way it is right now where we are I think those discussions have to go parallel I think that I'm going to be looking for the city manager to look at the fire department and the proposals here and see what can be done and if do you have any pockets of money back away that we could could do this at a step at a time part of it now part of it in July and I understand that if you do something now it's got to be annualized in July but I also think that may I recommend if you would like to work with the county and others about things that are not on the tax roll that should be on tax roll we can look at that too we're going to have six months of preparation of the budget coming up I'm sure Ms. Kaufman is going to keep us busy for the next six months looking at facts and figures trying to come up with the budget for next year and it may be that public safety being the important thing that it is that the citizens of Columbia would rather pay another mill or two to get a top-notch public safety department than it would be for something else we'd want to do so I'm not opposed to a tax increase for the right purposes I think a tax increase has to be justified and until you've done everything else you can't just keep going to the same people allowing the other folks who are benefiting from the service not participating so we've got to have a parallel path I just I think if you look today at what people are paying and what it's doing to the small businesses to the individual property owners the mom and pops who have one or two rental properties what it's doing to them in a cost structure we're talking about shifting all the burden to them corporations ain't paying that they all got discounts until we've done everything else we can't go to the individual taxpayers because I'm not going to vote for a tax increase until I know that we have collected what's duly owed to the city and the county to provide these services period that's a good thing we can do parallel but I'd like to see the city manager present us with a plan on how we can do some of this and then do the rest in next year's budget and I was just making sure that I hadn't missed anything are we concluding in order to do to implement the program as proposed are we already concluding that we would have to do a tax increase or was that just straight with some folks I'm just simply first asking if you support the recommendation to go to the minimum to take the salaries to the recommended new minimum the $15 and do you part B recommend that we address compression as proposed as well do you want me to bring back what that cause to do both which we can do that if we're going through that exercise is the recommendation I guess from the committee that we bring funding sources to do that from January to June 30th annualize as a whole another animal and we'll have to you know this idea of bigger discussion and taxes and all that comes during the budget process I would assume but right now it sounds like if the committee recommendation is to yes address the right now then we would need to sharpen our pencils and figure out how we would pay for that and once you do that your recommendation to your colleagues is also that I mean once we take them to the minimum right now then we've done that so your recommendation then is that we're going to have to figure out the annualized cost and how to pay for it during the next budget cycle I think that we got a 2.3% annual growth that we've had for a decade that's what we should be building off how does that affect that what other capital needs that's why I think we have to be can't just say we're committed to this until we know how the annualized is going to work because it may be something we have to step in to match up with all the pieces moving together I don't think you can just go say automatic 12% across the road is what it's saying you know without understanding how we're going to fund it in the next cycle so is it a smaller percentage now with anticipated so we can build that into our growth pattern I think we should look at that I think we need to do this very specifically so that we don't put ourselves in jeopardy we've got to go ahead Ms. Herbert and I was just going to say I think we should take the approach that we did with the police and Ms. Benjamin bought in various different scenarios once we made a base decision then you brought in several different scenarios to us so that we could see how to implement it I do believe that we have to make the increase, the base increase now one of my thoughts though is is that the timing of it and particularly being a for staff you know I'm always thinking about can we get it done as we're trying to go into budget season is that more helpful administratively or we want to plan for it as a part of the budget starting July 1 that is just kind of what I'm going through in my head right now my feeling is the council probably wants to take that first step of bringing it up to the minimum now and I think the mayor is right we need to know what the annualized cost will be if we take that next step which is taking the 260 per hour to minimize compression carrying forward into the next fiscal year and your one of your slides shows the cost as we have looked at them so for half a year if you are doing the right now option at that slide that has the header compensation classification study it shows the city counting rate the same as the the first six seven doing both of those things bringing it up to the $15 minimum plus the compression yes sir that was what that was doing if we did just bringing it up to the minimum it would be less than that that's what I was saying we can bring that showing that right down those two options Or if y'all feel like there's a recommendation now for the three of you to just focus on just going to the minimum right now, I'm seeking clarity on which way you want us to look at it. I just think that I need to know some scenarios, you know, what is that actual dollar? What does that look like? What if we did a step before I would make a recommendation? I feel like I don't have enough information to say, yes, do I want to see us begin a plan to get to the minimum of just 100 percent? How are we going to get there? I do also want to understand, you know, we've compared base salaries, but we also pay a lot more of health care costs than any other group. Does that include in our comparison how we compare to other communities as well? And I'm just trying to understand where we are because I want people to start looking at our compensation and its total package. What are we actually providing when you sign up to the work at the city? And I think that's very important for us in Cruton and we've got to answer those questions. How do we compare to Charleston? Do they pay 10 percent like our employees or are they paying 50 percent? You know, that's a big play. And so it'd be great for us to know that for multiple reasons, how we stack up completely but also how we recruit. And yet is the bare minimum what, you know, at that cost? If we do the bare, if we put the, get to the 15, what is that cost on the annualized basis? Because that's got, you got to include benefits and that's an 18 percent increase in health care on top of this. So we need to not forget as we're planning ahead, it's not just that dollar figure. There's 40 percent benefits on top of that. And I do agree, Mayor, but I also, and again, going through how this process, the way we went through it with CPD, we at some point have to give direction in more specific information so that staff can bring us very specific recommendations. And I had one question separate from that. When we do the 800,000 or so, that's the city portion. Does the county need and have to participate at the same time or does that mean, and so have we had any of those discussions? I haven't had those discussions because I needed to know what directions you all were taking first, if this is something we're actually. So now, knowing that it just seems to me that we, that is the starting point, because if the county is not going to pay their portion, I'm assuming we would not move forward with just our staff. We could, I don't think we could do that. So I think that would be, is that not a starting discussion before we go down the road or would you want to have numbers to give the county when you present it? Budget season in July 1, where you know the numbers, it gives us time to get with the county and get it, you know, but people know what's coming. I think that's the big debate because if we just sit here and say we're going to give a half a year, but we don't have the county's buy-in or whatever, we've created us false hope or we've smarter to target July 1 and say this is our directive, is July 1, let's move with the minimum and the compression, how is that analyzed so that we can budget for that as we move forward? In my experience in working with the county on anything, not just this, and I'm not saying this like loosely or anything, but we're the provider of the service with one of the reasons that, you know, the contractual relationship that we're in maybe sometimes gets a little off-kilter is because I don't know that that works if we're not demonstrating that we're taking the lead. So to go to the county to say if you're gonna participate in this, then my counsel's gonna do whatever. Really the way that works. I don't think that's what I was saying. Well I'm saying that I have to go to the county administrator and say that with clarity this is what I'm being directed that we're going to do and you all's participation would equate to this. Period. I mean there's no need for me to go to the county and say hey do you think this is- For me it'd be July 1 start because you're not gonna get, the county is not gonna change its funding between now and June 30th. So let's just be realistic and say we ought to be focused on a July 1 start date. Well I think that's premature for us to make a decision on what the county would do. Yeah and I think the reason it came up was because of what the county is saying they're gonna do with the other public safety functions right now but no they're doing it now but I don't know that they would incorporate until we would say this is what we're doing this is what it caused. I mean I don't know if they would or wouldn't participate right now. I think we need to ask them that question. My position would be that we go to the $15 an hour minimum now now maybe backing it to January 1 and let the city manager have that conversation with the county would y'all fund it if the if our council votes for this will you do your portion and then come up with the figures for doing the decompression or to minimize compression starting July 1 and ask the county that question it would be our intent if we can work if we can basically do it to do the 260 per hour decompression starting July 1 and it would be XYZ if you want for you to join us with that and and give them the option to agree with us that we immediately do the the $15 an hour and that we look at what it would cost the county in the city to do the decompression on July 1. And the only thing that I would add from Ms. Benjamin because I think she recalls that we just did y'all presented so many once we gave you the go ahead you gave us if you start tomorrow at base and you did that this is what it looks like and then you gave us if you start tomorrow but you don't do the compression those are numbers that that can be pulled together I'm not gonna say fairly easily but that's not a hard lift. I think we can do that and present you know we have our scenarios they'll have their scenario so the information will be there I mean I think the numbers can be achieved and then we just I don't know if we need to come back and confirm which scenario we want sent but I want to ask the city manager what how would this work on a timetable if we've got a February 7 meeting that could you give us could you give the full council those numbers on February 7th and and talk to Leonardo at the same time you have a February 7 council meeting you're asking for a word session discussion mr. Deval you want to I don't know that it will work in the council meeting you have a work session on the 14th you want to bring it to the work session and let the full council talk about it is that time your recommendation I would make it happen we have several other items on that work session but we'll you know we'll have to adjust the schedule accordingly we bring us the numbers and let's see if our council would support the immediate increase to $15 an hour and then you check with the county council to see if they will join us and that will give our council the first step which will be the up the minimum and then also tell us what it will take to do the full implementation in July and ask Leonardo if he thinks that the county council will pay their share so our council will have that information and that would also be bringing you all from our side of it is funding recommendations so I'm gonna have to check that cushion in the fire department's budget of the top of my head I can think of another funding source that you all would have to approve utilizing about the opioid money funding though that goes beyond today because this is what we're implementing is not gonna get cheaper next year it's gonna increase I don't want to pick pockets to make this happen we need to have a dedicated source we know where it's coming from and how we're gonna do and that may involve us shifting some stuff internally I think we're crazy if we just go into this and say oh we're just gonna figure it out later no way and miss wilson you can bring recommendations for annualized funding sources no ma'am not not by February the 14th now I can't do that it is I mean not to use the marriage terminology about picking pockets but if this is something you want to do for the right now the six months it is that I mean the general fund I can't just it's not sitting there in the general fund to just do for half a year without delving into their budget which I think or I wouldn't have brought this to you so we have kind of looked at their budget but they but it won't do it all so there's still a delta and I do think there will have to be a discussion about another funding source I won't get into right now in and it's been raised that it could possibly be utilized but again it is not the source that would be for annual to annualize it no it's not that's why I was saying if you do this though it's like you're committing that we're gonna have those hard discussions about how you annualize it during the budget cycle we'll put it on the 14th work session and and get us as much information you can about funding sources and the will of the will test the will of the council sure to see whether they want to go forward with something that will have to be annualized for the next budget that number that includes friends let's get the real numbers on the table that we need to know what the full amount is that we're gonna that's where we're headed because that doesn't include friends mayor these departments that you see here on this chart I believe they're all the same type departments that we are and I probably having the same friends you are gonna a few minutes ago about we might be different as far as our health care and all I believe all these are probably have the same type situations that we but we we charge our employees less to participate than any other community it's proven fact so you know but you still have to plan this if we're gonna make an increase there's a fringe benefit cost to that increase we need to make sure that we're when we're committing if it's 1.7 million and the true cost is really 2 million we need to know that because damn if I want to be 3 $300,000 short all those all those are public departments and I bet you they fund their friends the same as we do but you got a budget for it it's got to be paid I think that Ms. Wilson can have actual numbers if we are implementing right now by the 14 include the fringe we oh yes ma'am I definitely bringing that I feel confident that the staff will come through hey well we appreciate your confidence in us Mr. Chair okay did you have any additional comments yeah I just want to say that I'm just asking about Charleston actually Charleston and Greenville since our last time we met they have increased their numbers they have increased I'm not just how to argue and also passed on all the health care costs to their things so the increase really went the other way so I mean I still think guys as we move forward we got to modernize the way the fire department functions you know we can't have a July June July and August that we had where we had one crew on one crew sick and one crew and overtime just can't do that we've got a look at this overall and I think today there's a lot of discussions there's a lot of discussions in Washington about how to to modernize the fire department to go with today's times and how we do that that creates more efficiencies more effective work people coming in and out obviously we're working on the pay I need y'all to help us on the inside and I know there's some great ideas out there on how to create shifts and all that I don't know the answer you know because it is set up differently so everything that we talk about is totally different from everybody else but we got to figure out a way easier for people to get vacation time and the time they need but also how we balance and keep recruits you know I think this will help but it's only one one piece of it and I did have a question about the earlier presentation about the new software system are we going to be able to have any resulting efficiencies that may impact the budget with the use of that I'm just wondering not sure just yet to be perfectly the goal is yes the goal is to be able to to what the mayor is saying about modernizing the fire service I think that's what chief jing is exactly is tasking us to do with this system again is to find those common data sets and to know that if you fit this data realm chances are you're gonna have an emergency or if you're the person that's called 911 on average 10 times a day then we set some intervention strategies and then hopefully we can see a decreasing amount of calls with fuel maintenance on vehicles wear and tear on our gear and so mayor Rick I mean you may want to hear about though because you were with your Harvard folks but they don't my time helping y'all but the software that they are implementing is gonna lead to some of the efficiencies I think that you're talking about so when y'all have time if y'all can discuss that I think some of mine is around you know is 2448 off the way to go is this you know what what's what are people thinking I've heard Charleston and several of the low country fire departments are looking at how to how do we do something different that's that's better quality of life all the way around but also keeps us safe as groups that we don't run short we don't because we're not the only ones who have seen that I mean everybody's seeing that that's it's a nationwide problem and I think it's just you know it's we're in the times where we got to look at things differently I agree again I think that's some of the stuff that Chief Jenkins has us working on no chief Kipp and I's tasked us with with looking at vacation and holiday picking do we need to pick once a year do we need to modify that that we don't we don't know yet again it's a ever-moving target I think every fire department in the country especially in our state our local area is dealing with the same issue some are modifying their schedule going to a 4896 what will you look at that but then you look at the divorce rate amongst those that work that schedule you look at those that have smaller kids ought to keep more marriages together I don't know mr. mayor so so we're looking at 48 hours off 96 out and sounds like the heart grows fonder yeah so I will tell you this to what Chief is saying recently I was at the National Fire Academy and I ask who who's not having a staffing issue and and one person raised her hand and I said please tell us part minute to yeah please please tell us the the answer and he said we're the where the second highest paid department in Ohio and we work 2472 meaning they have an entirely different crew now chances of that happening for us probably not happening but the point is to your point and what Chief is tasked us with is finding creative solutions to to work with it I can look at I can look it up yeah if it wasn't a bunch of the mayors from Ohio supplemented by the federal government that you that you can't compare them federal government ain't subsidizing us the state government might if we ask them all right without objection you ready to adjourn mayor all right we will adjourn