Aldermen, Board of

A special meeting of the Board of Aldermen was held Monday, March 2, 2015, at 7:00 p.m. in the Aldermanic Chamber. President David W. Deane presided; Deputy City Clerk Patricia Piecuch recorded. Prayer was offered by Deputy City Clerk Patricia Piecuch; Chief Lavoie led in the Pledge to the Flag. The roll call was taken with 10 members of the Board of Aldermen present; Alderman Chasse, Alderman McGuiness, Alderman Soucy, Alderwoman Brown were recorded absent. COMMUNICATIONS MOTION BY ALDERMAN MCCARTHY THAT ALL COMMUNICATIONS BE READ BY TITLE ONLY MOTION CARRIED From: David W. Deane, President, Board of Aldermen Re: Special Board of Aldermen MOTION BY ALDERMAN MCCARTHY TO ACCEPT AND PLACE ON FILE MOTION CARRIED NASHUA POLICE DEPARTMENT DISCUSSION President Deane The purpose behind this meeting, I thought it was good to bring the police department in. We’ve had meetings with the school department, and the state delegation. I’m setting one up with the fire department. When I originally talked to the Chief about setting up this meeting, it was well prior to finding out about any of the possibilities of financial issues over at the police department. That really had nothing to do with it. I’ve been asked that question. I just thought it was good to bring the police department in to see how things were going. We’ve purchased a lot of new vehicles and there’s been staff changes, staff hiring’s, and there’s a new chief in town. The floor is all yours, Chief. If you have something you’d like to share with us, we’d really appreciate it. Thank you. Chief Andrew J. Lavoie – Chief of Nashua Police Department You touched upon the projected deficit for FY 2015 that we have. In January we found out that we were projected that we could have a deficit as much as $500,000 and that was not good news. It was kind of a perfect storm. The police commission sent a letter to Mayor Lozeau explaining several big reasons why we felt that occurred. Certainly one of them is our overtime budget dwindling every year and we were hit with three major crimes in a 6-day period around Thanksgiving and that was not in the budget. If we could budget for those we would prevent them from happening. That hit us very hard. Because of that, we had just hired eight new officers and while that brought us up to what was then full staff, the problem with that is they are not functioning for us. We’ve talked about that in the past. We have eight officers that are in the police academy, two officers who are in field training, and one officer that was out on maternity leave so even though we are paying full staff officers, there are eleven that we are not able to use so that affects us tremendously and that affects overtime. We had to take a look at ways to cut this because I frankly had no desire to come in front of this Board and ask for a half of million dollars when we hadn’t done anything to try to mediate that situation. My staff and I got together along with our police commission and we came up with multiple ways to trim money. Many of those involve not using the same amount of minimum staffing. You will hear me say minimal staffing many times tonight. Our patrol division has minimum staffing for many reasons. The officer’s safety is one. We are open 24x7/365 days and we staggered days off so some days we have more than the minimum staffing and I hate to use the word extra, we never have extra police officers. I could use 50 more police officers anytime but financially that’s not a reality. Some of the things that we did is we eliminated some sectors from minimum staffing and one of those sectors was the second shift sector called sector 16 which is an inside sector. You may ask why would you have an inside sector that you hire everyday no matter what. Well, people come into the lobby and report crimes, and Bd. of Aldermen – 03/02/15 Page 2 believe it or not, people come into the lobby and need to be arrested; they turn themselves in. In the last 30 days on second shift alone we have had 105 people come in the lobby to report an incident. Not having sector 16 has certainly saved us money but it has cost us officers in those sectors have had to leave their sectors and come in and take those reports. I don’t think that answers the question of why you don’t have the inside one. I’d rather have those officers on the street and not coming in but again, it all comes down to what we can control and what we can control right now is minimum staffing to cut overtime dollars. President Deane So sector 16 is an officer that would be located at the station to take the reports? Chief Lavoie Yes, in records. Not just to take reports, there are many other service training orders and paperwork. President Deane So now to make up the difference someone gets called in out of their regular sector that they patrol in to take these reports? Chief Lavoie Yes. If we have a higher than minimum staffing on a certain day which often times we do, then we are still putting an officer in there on second shift. Other things we did is we have eliminated sector 1 from minimum staffing. Sector 1 existed as a walking route on Main Street; it was hired every single day and if it was a bike officer we would throw the bike on Main Street. That was every single day whether it cost us overtime or not because it was a minimum staffing route. Due to the weather and due to the reason we had to cut money, we’ve made that now that it’s not a minimum staffing route. With respect to the downtown businesses, we are most certainly filling that if we have higher than minimum staffing on any given day. If we are short-handed for the minimum staffing, rather than hire overtime, we are using traffic unit members to man a sector. Traffic unit members are police officers that are out there but that was in addition because their sole function was to enforce traffic violations. Certainly our police officers in their sectors enforce traffic violations as well but they are answering calls and they are patrolling so they can’t give their full attention to that. We have two of them on day shift and two on second shift. If we continue this which I believe we are going to have to, when it comes time to put motorcycles out, they are not going to be covering sectors on motorcycles so we are going to have to make some decisions there and that’s going to further hurt us. Also we decided to reduce the school resource officer staffing levels to one officer at each school. Currently we have two officers at each high school. We looked long and hard at this; we didn’t just come to this decision overnight. We have researched it extensively and we felt that the schools were certainly safe with one school resource officer in each. We based that on many different factors. One factor was calling around virtually every high school in the State of New Hampshire and no other high schools, even bigger high schools than the two Nashua high schools had two school resource officers. We also looked at the crimes that were generated. The school resource officer’s job isn’t just to answer calls or take reports, we get that; deterrence is a big part of their job and I am certainly not going to tell you that one is as good as two. Two is better but the fact is faced with these budget issues we have, I can’t give you two. I believe the schools are safe otherwise we wouldn’t have done it. Our officers were making two arrest reports a month at south and I don’t need two school resource officers to do that. Every decision we make affects something else because we don’t have extra things. I have to figure out where we pull from and when we have a record number of drug overdoses…we had just talked to you last budget season about making POP whole again and increasing our narcotic units by two detectives. The last thing when people are overdosing at a record rate is for me to reduce the POP unit or from our narcotics unit. All “crappy” choices and we had to make some hard choices. First year police officers are not covered under the collective bargaining unit. When they are in their first year a lot of it is training. There are eight in our academy that we hired in December will not be functioning officers until halfway through June but again, we know that they are there but in that interim we are that many officers down. The two officers that graduated the academy in December end their field training tomorrow and they have been put into a 5 and Bd. of Aldermen – 03/02/15 Page 3 2. First year officers not being covered under the collective bargaining unit we have decided to put them in a 5 and 2 schedule and that will allow us to add days to use to cover minimum staffing. We are unable to do that with the other officers that are under the collective bargaining unit. President Deane How many departments use a 5 and 2 schedule all of the time? Chief Lavoie Virtually none and I wouldn’t be in favor of that because it’s hard to sell to somebody to work for 10 years on third shift when their days off are Tuesday and Wednesday. It’s a quality of life thing. When I say minimum staffing I am talking about patrol. We do have minimum staffing in detectives but we don’t ever get under that. When the eight get out of the academy in mid-June we have eight officers that we are able to put 5 and 2 schedule so that will help us alleviate overtime down the road but we have to make the changes now. Supervisory minimum staffing we are allowing a lieutenant to cover a sergeant slot. That alleviates overtime but it hurts us in the span of control. We often have one supervisor out there for 15 or 18 officers. That’s not a great span of control and it’s not optimum. We have also changed minimum staffing in our communications divisions. We had 4/4/4 – day shift, second shift, and third shift. Because of days off rotations we were incurring quite regular overtime in communication so we took a third shift communications person and moved them down to second shift and put a fifth person on second shift and that’s greatly helped us alleviate minimum staffing overtime. We have not promoted a deputy chief since Deputy Chief Carignan which was in November. Each deputy chief is responsible for about 150 employees and it’s an institutional sacrifice we have been making and it’s not a great one but that’s going to have to continue through at least this fiscal year. It has a cascading effect. You are not just not making a deputy chief, but by not making a deputy chief you are not making a potential captain, lieutenant, or sergeant and that effects morale down the road. Another big change is that we were set to hire a record technician as we are already down a record tech that we haven’t been budgeting for. We were going to make this record tech a 6:00 p.m. – 2:00 a.m. shift and that was going to help alleviate having to cover third shift. We’ve already cut down on not being open full-time on third shift in records. People can come into the lobby and they can pick up the telephone and call into communications. Before, that was staffed 24x7. By not hiring this record tech and continuing to not put that in our budget we are going to have to reduce our services in records. I understand that we are one of the few people that have more than business hours but I guess that’s why we are the Nashua Police Department, we always like to go over and above. These are just a few of the changes we made. There are several other internal changes. I’d like to talk a minute about overtime. We use the words “overtime” and “alleviate overtime” a lot. Overtime on a department of our size, counting civilians, 250 + employees, open 24x7, 365 days a year is an absolute necessity, it’s not a luxury. I talk about training, this is a police department, training is constant and on-going and is comprehensive. You have a department that has virtually every specialty unit that you can have. Everything that we have on our belt from a gun, pepper spray, or Taser requires certification. Every certification requires a re-certification. Most of these are at least 8 hour re-certifications. Every sworn police officer in New Hampshire every year has to go through use of force and handgun qualifications. We pull from every shift to get all of the training done and if there is other training going on simultaneously then you fall below minimum staffing and that’s where you need the overtime. It’s not extra. Every specialty unit trains monthly and the bomb squad trains twice per month. This year we have CPR and first aid re-certification and that’s every civilian and sworn officer in the police department. We owe it to the police officers and the citizens of Nashua to provide all of the training. That’s in addition to what detectives get; interviews & interrogations, sex crime schools; the Nashua Police Department is at the high end of training because we are at the high end of service. I think that’s what the taxpayers have come to expect. When we talk about overtime please understand that we have to fill the slots because the main function of the police department is boots on the ground, officers on street protecting the citizens. We have a few statistics from 2014. We used force on 3.5% 4,500 arrests and that’s a full percentage decline from the year before. We answered 106,000 calls for service and that includes about 25,000 motor vehicle stops. Last year we had 13 citizen complaints out of 106,000 calls for service. The year before we had 20. I think that decline is attributed to training. Overtime is a tool that allows us to function and without that we absolutely could not function. Right now we have been pushing off training. A lot of this training is Bd. of Aldermen – 03/02/15 Page 4 mandatory and one of the cost savings that we have come up with is the desk sergeant can check and pull someone out of training that morning and say I need you for the street. The reason we are able to do that with use of force training and first aid training is that we are running those every day because we have to train 254+ people in CPR and 179+ officers in use of force. When we talk about patrol riffle training, we are only able to do that certain times of the year because we need an outdoor range. It’s tough to bump someone out of that training if it’s going to cost overtime. Again, that’s where we incur overtime. Alderman Schoneman It sounds like the training is typical or systemic cause of overtime. Are there other things that are typical and systemic or would it just be when someone is out sick that contributes to overtime? Chief Lavoie It’s all-inclusive. Often time’s four people can be out on vacation, there could be officers who were in court all day and worked the night before and haven’t been to bed yet. They are going to have to be given time coming rather than overtime for that but you still have to backfill their slot because you can’t have them working with no sleep. The training schedule is set well in advance but two or three people could call out sick on the same night and that blows everything up. Anything can be involved because we have such a finite number with regard to the pool of officers we are using. When we talk about the cost cutting things that we are doing now that’s “knock on wood,” we don’t get another major crime between now and the end of June. When we get a major crime we investigate our own major crimes and if it takes more than a couple of days to solve, it gets worked 24x7 as it should be. Unfortunately, that pulls people from their sectors if they are on specialty units such as the crime scene processing unit. That’s going to incur overtime. If they are working over 8 hours; homicide guys work 24 – 36 straight hours without going home. If we keep up the cost savings things that we implemented, fingers crossed, through the end of June we believe we can get that $500,000 deficit down to under $200,000 and we believe with operational savings and if the Mayor will allow us to use savings in fuel cost, we believe we can get that down to zero or as close to zero as we can get it. We have been able to cut our monthly overtime in half with these cost saving plans. Again, we are losing services and it’s not the way we want to do it but it’s my job to stay within my budget and I plan on doing that as best as I can. Alderman Schoneman Based on your description of all of the training, it sounded to me like training might account for something like 80% of the overtime but then your description of all of the random events; does the training fall to 50% or 40% or 75% for training. Ms. Karen Smith, Business Manager, Nashua Police Department Training is probably one of the smaller parts of our budget. The expenditure report has our overtime not just in one line but in numerous lines. Coverage and investigative are the highest. Chief Lavoie Often time’s coverage can be because of training. We have a training overtime budget. If a person has three days of training and one of those days is his/her day off then he/she would get paid out of the training overtime budget but it all comes out of the same pool. President Deane If you did a matrix on your overtime and the serious events that we have had this year along with the amount of new hires that are at the academy, how does that compare with prior year with the budgeted amount of overtime that we had? What’s driving all of this? Bd. of Aldermen – 03/02/15 Page 5 Chief Lavoie It’s several things together. We finally hired the officers up to full staff. Those three events alone were over $100,000 and we are still paying the eight officers in the academy about $400,000 and we can’t use them yet. Ms. Smith The hiring of the officers is a benefit but you are not going to have the history of having a reserve because there is not a reserve in the payroll account this year and that’s a big part of it. Chief Lavoie Classically we have been covering our budget with basically underfunding overtime because we had to take it from somewhere and overtime doesn’t have a face to it. When we underfund the overtime and combine it with not having the operational savings that we have had in the past and not having the payroll savings we have had in the past from attrition because now we are up to full staff. Do we find a happy medium where it’s better to have a couple of openings and hope you don’t have to pay extra in overtime to cover those where you save it in operational and attrition. That’s the dance we have had to do and it has added up all at once. President Deane The new hires that you brought on, were they due to retirements? Chief Lavoie Through openings however they occurred. Alderman Donchess What is the status now of the downtown patrols where the officers are on foot or bikes talking with the businesses and people downtown? Is that still going on and if so how regularly are you able to put that into place? Chief Lavoie We have eliminated that position from minimum staffing. That is only going on if and when we have people other than above minimum staffing. Alderman Donchess If you had to put an estimate on it what percentage of the time do you think you have that position in effect? Unidentified Speaker In the past month and a half we have saved 49 overtime shifts by making the cuts that we did and to do that we would remove sector 1 from the street. Chief Lavoie Our sample size is barely two months. We are talking with our staff and adjusting things as we think they should be. Bd. of Aldermen – 03/02/15 Page 6 Alderman Donchess Is that a one shift, a two shift, or three shift situation at full compliments so to speak? If you were to fill sector 1, is that for a one, two, or three shifts per day? Unidentified Speaker Sector 1 was a mandatory staffing on second shift only and we would have a sector patrolling downtown during the day but those were not a mandatory minimum. For example, if we have access to the extra bodies we would have them on bike patrol and they would patrol primarily downtown and go a couple of blocks in from the downtown Main Street area. Chief Lavoie We are still giving it special attention; we are just not having the sector assigned exactly for that. Like with the school resource officer’s, we have actually added officers going back into every single school like we did after Newtown. I believe they have three private security guards in each high school as well. We understand that what we are doing is taking away but we don’t want to completely ignore it, we are doing what we can with the manpower that we have. Alderman Siegel The overtime is typically under budgeted and it’s always back-filled with attrition numbers and I was hoping that going forward in the budget season; I know we can be a little gun shy about having the actual numbers based on historical trends but I’d like to see that just called out. The problem with the phrase overtime is that it’s loaded and people have a lot of connotations of what overtime is but I think in the case of the police department so much of what your overtime is beyond your control. I know that as a member of the Budget Committee that would be very helpful to me because I think it’s important to accurately reflect where the costs are. I was told that some of the training has had a very noticeable positive effect. The first aid training turned the stabbing in Greeley Park from a brutal assault – kept it an assault instead of a homicide. I’m sensitive to ever cut back on training. Chief Lavoie We have handed out multiple life-saving awards in the past 3-6 months. All of our officers carry tourniquets and that’s all part of our first aid training. Ms. Smith That’s correct. With the changes we may be able to bring it down more to a 1.2. Chief Lavoie We spend about 1.5 but we’re budgeted at about 1. We’ve been making it up other ways. This year we were unable to do that. Alderman Siegel I also want to commend Ms. Smith for doing an excellent job of juggling the money back and forth to backfill some of this stuff. It is pretty amazing. It’s a very difficult job. As someone who has been staring at the numbers fairly critically, I was like “wow.” It’s very interesting. Bd. of Aldermen – 03/02/15 Page 7 Alderman Wilshire I appreciate all the effort that’s gone into this. Clearly there’s been a lot of effort put into this. I say like you, Chief, hopefully there are no more major crimes between now and the fiscal year end because you’ll be back here saying we had to investigate and this is what happens. It’s kind of like snow, right? Crime and snow, they are kind of the same thing. You can’t predict how much snow you are going to get, and you can’t predict how much crime you are going to get. Hopefully that stays at a minimum. I do appreciate all the hard work I can tell that went into this and the hard decisions that you had to make. Thank you for doing that. Alderman Caron I, too, want to thank you for coming in and explaining these issues with us. I think it’s nice to have people know. On another note, I was reading an article that because of the severe weather we’ve been having; crime is down a little bit. Is it down in the city as far as burglaries and different things like that? Has that helped? Chief Lavoie We actually haven’t received our year end completed statistics yet because they have to be vetted. I couldn’t say off the top of my head. What I consider major crime, felony assault to a homicide, has been down. We’ll take whatever reason it could be. Weather, fairy dust, anything is fine with us. That helps the citizens and it helps us investigative-wise and financially. Again, the ones investigating the major crime are our detective bureau. These are other people we decided not to take and put back into patrol because they have 30-40 felony cases apiece. Taking them and putting them back into patrol, we’re going backwards. President Deane I probably speak for our colleagues, I’m glad to see that you decided to look at what other options you would have to help deal with some of your deficit. As Alderman Wilshire alluded to, you can’t control how much snow falls. When it falls, you’ve got to move it off the street. When crime happens, you’ve got to deal with that and take that off the street as well. The heroin problem. How are we doing in that arena? Chief Lavoie We’re making arrest upon arrest. Our narcotic unit, combined with our POPP unit, in the targeted area in December increased drug arrests by 69 percent in that area. Overall, I believe for the year they were up either 13 or 18 percent. I don’t have the statistics in front of me. People keep overdosing though. It’s completely out of control. It’s out of control across the country, not just New Hampshire or Nashua. We’ve had 21 already this year. That’s even I believe a little bit ahead of last year. Last year it was 124 when the prior year it was 48. It’s mindboggling statistics. A lot of it is the fentanyl that it is being cut with, sometimes it is straight fentanyl. A lot of it is the price. Our answer is arresting people. We’re the enforcement leg of how this works. We do spend forfeiture money on trying to get Chris Herring. He’s a retired NBA player. He’s had a huge drug problem. We pay a pretty penny to have him go every year into the schools to talk at the high school level, at the 8th grade level. He’s fabulous. If we’ve never seen him, he’s unbelievable. We do what we can prevention-wise, but we can’t arrest ourselves out of this problem. Our job is to make arrests. It does make a dent. We took off a group of drug dealers in November or December. AMR Ambulance made a point to talk to us and tell us that the narcian dispensaries that they had to do after those people were off the street dramatically decreased. It does have a direct affect. Again, narcotic investigations certainly take time. They take manpower. That’s why I chose not to touch our narcotic unit or our POPP unit. Bd. of Aldermen – 03/02/15 Page 8 Alderman Donchess Given the steps you’ve taken, when do you expect to be able to have a firm fix on where you will be at year end in terms of budget and overtime, etc.? Chief Lavoie If things stay like they are, which is very hard to project out after barely two months, right now we believe we can get it down to about 180 something thousand, $185,000 which we believe we can make up with the cost savings on operations that we have. If the mayor will allow us to use our fuel savings that we do have, we believe we can make it up to zero. Coming from $500,000 I wouldn’t have thought that was possible. Again when major crime, one who done it, that takes up ten days, two weeks to investigate is going to blow all that up. We just can’t control that. All we can control is what we can control. Based on what we’re doing now, we’ve been able to over eight weeks cut our monthly overtime virtually in half. But the weather has been crappy; there’s been a ton of vacations. So many factors go into it. I’d hate to give you a hard and fast prediction with this little bit of data. Right now it looks like our changes have dramatically made an effect, but they’ve certainly caused us to cut back on a lot of things we’d like to do. Alderman McCarthy How are we doing on not using uniforms in civilian positions? Chief Lavoie In the last budget season we talked about adding a civilian third shift booking officer to cover third shift. That’s off the table because that’s adding to our budget. We can’t do that. We need to come in at 1.5 percent. That’s not possible if we a civilian slot. We’re full staff in CT. That’s helped tremendously. If we have people other than minimal staffing, we’ve been able to use an officer in there. I’d rather have the officer on the street, but if he’s straight time and it would incur overtime, we need to put him in there, he or she. Again, we’ve moved a third shift communications technician to second shift. That’s negated a lot of the overtime. Alderman McCarthy Even on straight time, it still costs us more. Second, a straight time officer presumably had somewhere else to be. If they are in communications or dispatch, they are not on the street. We’re actually running at lower strength than we would expect yet it drives the budget number up. If you don’t drive the budget number up, it means we’re not covering something we thought we had covered in the base budget. Chief Lavoie I would agree with you. Unfortunately, I have a number that I have to meet. We’re only putting people in there if they are in addition to minimum staffing. I’d love to have him on the street. When I’m pulling people from everywhere and cutting money, it’s hard for me to pay an overtime civilian if I have an officer that can be in there. We’re not incurring it anywhere near like we were. We were four communications people down. Now we’re full staff and we’ve even added to the second shift by rearranging things. Alderman McCarthy When we use a straight time officer in communications or dispatch, does that somewhere down the line later in the week lead to us paying an overtime shift we wouldn’t have otherwise paid? Chief Lavoie It would be on his regular work day, regular shift. That wouldn’t affect that at all. We’re already paying him no matter where he works. He or she. Bd. of Aldermen – 03/02/15 Page 9 Alderman Dowd I know you haven’t worked up the total budget yet for next year, with the increase that you’ve been asked to look at, can you explain the tightness of your budget for 2016. Are you going to have to keep up these same efforts just to stay within bounds? Chief Lavoie We’re going to have to keep these up and cut further. We were mandated to 1.5. We certainly understand that’s what we are asked to do. Faced with what other departments in the city are asked to do and the school laying people off, we’re certainly not going to go see the Mayor with a 4.0 or anything like that. If we submitted a budget that’s 1.6, as close to a 1.5 that I can in good conscious make it, that’s going to include not only what we’re doing now but it’s going to include a lot further cuts. Not funding that record tech at all rather than just holding off hiring a record tech. That includes not adding close to $100,000 in contractual increases in the overtime account. We’re playing roulette there. The difference in the raises that went into effect in addition to the several other things we had to cut. The school resource officers being down. I’ve been in contact with Superintendent Conrad. We do have a meeting. I don’t want to speak out of school on that, but we haven’t seen any data to change our opinion at this point. Deputy Carignan has been on their safety committee meeting. We’ve been offering them any help they need. We’ve been talking to them constantly about how we can help them. I feel very confident that certainly the schools are safe. None of that is going to change and we’re going to have to dig deeper to even come close to that. Alderman Moriarty I was wondering if you could go through the command structure and add up how many captains and lieutenants so I can keep track of who is who. Chief Lavoie We have an organizational chart. I don’t have it with me. We have one chief, two deputy chiefs, seven captains which all command bureaus. They are bureau commanders. We have 9 lieutenants who are divisional supervisors. I believe we have 23 sergeants. They are the direct first line supervisors. They are broken up by shift, by bureaus. That’s our command structure. Alderman Moriarty There are seven bureaus that are like three shifts per bureau. That means there are 21 leaders of sorts? Chief Lavoie Patrol has three bureau commanders. There’s a commander for professional standards. A commander for detectives. A commander for services bureau. A commander for legal bureau. Then the patrol is split up. Each shift is their own bureau. They are the same bureau but they have a captain because again there’s almost 90 something officers just in patrol. The deputy chiefs, one is Deputy Chief of operations which is everything other than patrol. One is the Deputy Chief of Uniform Operations which is patrol and specialty units and things like that. If you look at their organizational chart, it appears the Deputy Chief of Operations has so much more but number of people, it is virtually the same. It is evenly split pretty much. Alderman Moriarty How many shifts are there? Chief Lavoie Three shifts, and overlapping shifts. Detectives have two shifts. Communications has three shifts. It’s all around the clock. Bd. of Aldermen – 03/02/15 Page 10 Alderman Moriarty So you don’t have three Deputy Chiefs, one for each shift. Chief Lavoie No. Alderman Moriarty Would you normally have? Chief Lavoie No. Alderman Moriarty Do the Deputy Chiefs take the second and third shifts so you have a chief on for every shift? Chief Lavoie No. They are staff members. Alderman Moriarty They are all daytime or first shift? Chief Lavoie Yes. Alderman Moriarty Captains rotate shifts so you always have a captain on the shift? Chief Lavoie Patrol captains, there’s a third shift patrol captain, a second shift patrol captain and a day shift patrol captain. Alderman Moriarty At some point in the night shift the highest ranking officer is a captain? Chief Lavoie Yes, Monday through Friday. Alderman Moriarty How many people would be on staff at that night shift that that captain is running things? Bd. of Aldermen – 03/02/15 Page 11 Chief Lavoie 12, 13 or 14 people out on the streets, depending. It’s shocking how few people we actually have out there. Then you have the communication technicians depending on the shift. We have two dispatchers at all times. Are you talking third shift? Alderman Moriarty I’m just curious. Chief Lavoie It could be three sergeants. It could be a lieutenant and three sergeants. They are the ones that are actually out on the street. They are the ones that are the first line supervisors. Lieutenants are divisional. They have the divisional duties, all the scheduling. They all have their own assignments. The Bureau Commander is in charge of the entire bureau. Alderman Moriarty Is this online or written down somewhere? I’d like to read it on my own. Chief Lavoie It’s on line. I believe our organizational chart you can pop it right up. Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja Just a follow up to Alderman Moriarty’s question, you mentioned who was on Monday through Friday. What does it look like on the weekend? Who would be the highest ranking officer? Is there a deputy chief on, a captain? Chief Lavoie No, there would be a lieutenant on depending on the day during the weekend. Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja Nothing higher than a lieutenant? Chief Lavoie No. Alderwoman Melizzi-Golja Would other people above a lieutenant, captains, be available if need be? How does that work? Chief Lavoie We get called all the time. All the time. We would come in. It goes in ascending fashion. The sergeant, or whoever, the tech, would call the Sargent, lieutenant, depending on how severe it was. It would be up through my deputy giving me a call or giving me a text. I would let my commissioners know if it was serious enough and then I would let the mayor know as well. Bd. of Aldermen – 03/02/15 Page 12 Alderman Moriarty There is a point in time when the highest ranking officer is a lieutenant? Chief Lavoie Yes. Alderman Moriarty Oh. Good for him. I assume that person is going to be promoted soon after demonstrating that they can manage the whole show by themselves. Chief Lavoie Again, you have the street sergeant. You have the desk sergeant. Everybody there is a very experienced, well trained person. They don’t have to be hands on manager. That’s what you have the sergeants for. They all have their own function, a division supervisor doing scheduling. Things like that. President Deane Any further questions? Thank you very much for coming in. We appreciate it. We’ll see you at the budget season. It will start sooner than later. PUBLIC COMMENT- None ADJOURNMENT MOTION BY ALDERMAN WILSHIRE THAT THE MARCH 2, 2015, MEETING OF THE BOARD OF ALDERMEN BE ADJOURNED MOTION CARRIED The meeting was declared adjourned at 7:55 p.m. Attest: Patricia Piecuch, Deputy City Clerk