City Council

Zanesville City Council Budget Hearings for 2020 BUDGET HEARINGS FOR 2020 March 10, 2020 at 4:45 p.m. The 2020 Budget Hearing meeting was held on March 10, 2020 and began at 4:47 p.m. Council Members present: Sandy Gentry, Jan Bradshaw, Ann Gildow, Joey Osborn; J. Rob Sharrer, Mark Baker, Todd E. Ware and Andrew Roberts arrived around 5:00 p.m. Others in attendance were Mayor Don Mason; Doug Merry, Interim Public Safety Director; Rhonda Heskett, Budget and Finance Director; Susan Culbertson, Clerk of Council; the presenters: Fire Chief Jeff Bell; Craig Stemm, City Maintenance; Tim Smith, Code Enforcement and Chief Building Official; and William Arnett, CD Director. Fund 101-Division 4381, Bldg & Code Enforcement-page 2 Tim Smith was scheduled for 4:45 p.m. Mr. Smith updated the Council with highlights as follows:  His budget includes everything he needs as far as he knows. He had asked for a couple of things like revamping the office, but that doesn’t come out of his budget.  The biggest issue is the demolition budget which is a little over $500,000.  Still in limbo on the Kemp properties.  Four have already been demolished that had either burnt or were in horrible condition. One of them was not on the forfeiture list. There are six of them that need to come down. They are causing problems in the neighborhood. Three more are on the brink if something isn’t done before too much longer. He was not sure where we are on these properties.  Some of the properties were occupied and some at one time there were residents in those and interested in purchasing them. The problem is even though they didn’t have to pay rent, they stopped paying their utility bills. So a number of them we had to condemn because they were living there with no water. It has been a real nightmare.  Once you condemn the structures with them there what happens is we had a real nice one up on 150 Green Street that could have been easily occupied and rehabbed, but they stopped paying the utility bills and we had to condemn it. When they moved out they ransacked the place. They took the cabinets, the plumbing, and they just wrecked it. They spray painted the outside of the house.  The house on Greenwood that just burnt is a total loss, but it was not a Kemp house. It belonged to Frank Hersh. He claims he has insurance. I didn’t think he would. I was going to take it down on an emergency basis, but now I am going to file the paper work if he has insurance to find out. Rob Sharrer said he will talk with Tim about this.  Frank Hersh was one of the owners on the 600 block buildings. It was asked if the City couldn’t have filed a lien on his other properties. Mr. Smith said we didn’t want it. There are not very many of his properties that we would want. Okay.  The other thing we have hanging is the Munson School property. If we do have to tackle that you are looking at a couple hundred thousand dollars. Right now we are trying to find a way to maybe market it or renovate it. Again, that is a situation where the owner is deceased. There is an $80,000 mortgage on it to Ohio University Credit Union. I sent 1 of 12  paperwork to them and they have not responded. So there are a lot of things in limbo out there which is one of the reasons that Rhonda set money aside in the demolition budget for this year.  We are looking to add one individual to our staff. That is going through the process with Council now. It has been budgeted. We look to have our seasonal workers hired sometime in mid-April. We will have our weed crew up and running as soon as we can. We may not have this position filled since it didn’t get through Council last night. Sometime hopefully by the end of April we will have that full time individual on board. I will be glad to answer any questions. Mr. Sharrer said he is going to ask one repeated question of everybody who comes before us today. If you had an extra $100,000 could you spend it? Tim Smith: My 50th Wedding Anniversary is coming up. (Laughter broke out.) You might want to amend that question, Rob. Mr. Sharrer: I am not amending anything. Is there anything that you don’t have that if money were no object, to the tune of $100,000, is there anything that would make your job easier or more efficient or whatever? Mr. Smith: If we had some additional money one of the things that the City fails to do sometimes especially in this job is we don’t do a good job of transitioning. I am going to be 69 years old in May and I had planned on retiring last year and didn’t. This job has a lot of duties and it will take someone a while to learn the whole process and to obtain the certifications needed. This would be one thing to consider. The Mayor is trying to focus on some renovations of some of these houses as opposed to demolition. I am working through a number of different options right now looking at ways that we may be able to make that happen. That would be the only other thing that I could see that we might have a need down the road for additional funding. Mr. Sharrer: I saw down here under Item 6, still struggling a little bit with the software? Has it gotten any better? Are we still scrolling to the bottom to hit enter? Mr. Smith: It is what it is. I mean it is not as user friendly as the old software. It is not any more economical that I can see. We are paying $5,000 a year out in annual maintenance fees. Anything that you need to get fixed on it whether it is their fault or not, they want to charge you for it. It is a lot slower. I can’t do reports and pull up information without spending money to customize reports. One of the things that would help is if we just had access to the data and some of the components on that software if they would just unlock it so we could get into make changes on it. They have us locked out of it and I am not sure how to get access to make changes not even on misspelled words. I am still working to try to streamline it the best I can. Mr. Roberts: Is there anything else from Tim? I am just trying to keep us on schedule. Thank you, Tim. Page 2 of 12 5:00 p.m. City Maint. *Craig Stemm Fund 101-Division 7782-City Maintenance-page 4 Craig Stemm provided the update for his department with key points as follows:  We spent most of last year at the Police Annex remodeling it. It is pretty much done now. It tied up a lot of our time last year. The Police Department is in there so we are about done other than tidying up.  Budgetary wise this year we will be fine. We are going to take part of the money to buy Jamie Brannon a new service van for about $35,000 to replace the truck we got rid of a couple of years ago.  We are going to work on Traffic Signals. We will put some GPS time clocks on Maple Avenue for about $8,000. The rest of it we are going to work on as we go.  A lot of it is prior to the I-70 project. I met with ODOT and they are going to work with us and possibly install some radar detection and help us manage the corridor from Blue and Adair through Ninth and Main. That whole corridor to help move traffic when they start shutting ramps down and things like that. They offered to do it. I am not sure what they are going to do yet. They are going to meet with us before long and we are going to look at everything and see what will happen. They are going to pay for that part of it. We may have to upgrade some stuff. We are going to put some LED bulbs in and try to make some things ready to go before this I-70 project happens.  Money wise I am not sure we can spend all that is there, but we will see what happens. We could do some more upgrades on Maple and some cabinets if we have time to do it all. The cabinet at Lowe’s needs upgraded. Maybe the one on Military Road. It depends if I have enough people to get it all done or not.  There was a grant a couple of years ago that bought all the equipment to replace everything over at Ridge and Brighton. We got the pole set last summer, but that is all the further we got. We have to try to do it next. It is a new cabinet, lights, and pedestrian lights from the grant money that came through.  I think they are going to do the sidewalks now so that is what we need to do next.  The building maintenance side of it whatever comes along is what they are going to work on like remodeling the Mayor’s office now and we have some work to do upstairs. Plus all the general maintenance we do every day. Mr. Roberts: It came up last night in Public Service about looking at some of these buildings and the windows and everything like that. Do you have guys on staff that are able to do that kind of work or is that something we would have to sub out? Craig responded some of it. It depends how many and how big a job it is. If it is like City Hall to do all the windows, I doubt we could do all of that. Mr. Roberts: It would probably be more cost beneficial to just let somebody else handle that. Craig said it is not that they couldn’t because they have four guys there, but that is a lot of work to do and still maintain all the heating and cooling systems in all of these buildings and all the plumbing and everything those guys do plus the small remodeling projects and things like that. Page 3 of 12 Mr. Sharrer: If you had an extra $100,000 in your budget. Craig said no, we couldn’t spend it. We don’t have enough people to do that amount of work as far as that goes. Mr. Sharrer said so a new employee. Craig said we tried to hire an electrician last year, but we only had three people apply. One was qualified and he didn’t take the job so that is where we are short. We did hire a general service worker and he is a little older gentleman, but he worked thirty some years as a plumber and a HVAC guy so he is pretty talented. He is working with Jamie right now. We hired a young guy for the Traffic Signal side and we are training him. Whether you are going to find any highly skilled tradesmen that can do some of this stuff is pretty doubtful right now I would say. But, we could always look at some intersections that need to be updated and hire in a contractor to update them. You could spend $100,000 pretty quick to fix some of the worst. There was also a traffic study or safety study on Pine Street. That would have been last year. It is still under progress and the plans on it are to update the traffic signals at Pine and Pershing, which is in pretty bad shape, and at Pine and Eppley. ODOT redid Pine and Maysville and Maysville and SR 719 last year which was paid through the Ohio Rail Commission for safety reasons. Mr. Roberts asked if it is on loop or is it on timers down there at the corner of Pine and Maysville. Craig said it is just on time. Mrs. Osborn wanted to know about the Maple traffic signals that are GPS time clocks. I know we have talked about some cross walks. Would that play into that or would that work with those if that comes to fruition? Mr. Roberts said that is one of the things we discussed when we were talking about crosswalks. It would mess up everything on the timing. Craig said time clocks will just reset all the controllers every day to the same time to keep the coordination running. What happens is one may drift a few seconds this way and another the other way and then before long you are stopping at every light. All that is going to do is keep it in time which will help. It won’t solve all the problems on Maple. There are some problems with loops and we are going to work on this summer. Some places we may be able to throw in some cameras. That is what the Mayor has asked us to do this year to put a lot of effort in to Maple Avenue and downtown is going to be another issue when I-70 shuts down in the spring of 2021. Other than that, that is basically what we do. Mr. Roberts: That sounds good. Thanks, Craig. Is there anything else for Craig? Okay, we are ahead of schedule and Chief Bell is early. 5:15 p.m. Fire Chief *Jeff Bell Fund 270, Fire Operating-page 13 Fund #275-pg 13 Page 4 of 12 Chief Bell said to highlight the 2019 year and what we did as follows: New Garage Doors at Central Station 1. Key Code Locks at all Stations-our firefighters replaced a lot of the indoor locks in the doors 2. New Station Pickup for Eppley Station 3. New flooring and toilets at Eppley installed by firefighters, interior doors and handles, bathroom vanities at Leonard station installed by firefighters, Kitchen cabinets at Central refurbished by firefighters. 4. Strategic plan put in place for turnout gear to be NFPA compliant. Our gear has to be ten years or newer. When we bought it in the past we purchased it all at one time, but everyone then comes due at the same time so we staggered the purchase so Phoenix Fire gave us loaner gear to get us through and we are buying between 10 and 13 sets per year. We will be on a five year rotation. We will be NFPA compliant with our front line gear and our back up gear. 5. SRT Medic program established. Hosted a Mass Casualty class for 11 members who are SRT Medics to include active shooter training. Increased interoperability with ZPD. 6. In House Fire investigator class first step in establishing an investigation bureau and has decreased OT call-ins because now we have investigators on each of the shifts that can do the initial investigation, get the pictures, get things started and then hand them off the next day. 7. MARCS Radios were a large expenditure. 2020 Budget Items: 1. Training Tower - $15,000 Materials – Firefighters provide labor. We are the largest Fire Dept. in East Central Ohio and need to take the lead in training. Adult learners retain long term only 10% of what they see, 30%-40% of what they see and hear, but 90% of what they see, hear, and do. Building hands on repetitions is vital in developing and retaining necessary skills. Everything we do is putting templates together. When we go out the door we don’t know what we are going to run into, but we have to train for those things. Hands on training is the best way to know what our limitations are and what our capabilities are so we are able to push ourselves in a safe training environment and see what we can do and what we need to work on or what we need additionally to do. When we do the hands on it is invaluable to us. It will be built in the lot beside the impound lot for the Police Department (PD) along Central Avenue and the PD said they weren’t interested in it. We will build it where it is centralized so all the stations can come for training. We do classes and cutting up cars down there. We set up the burn station there when it comes to town for training. 2. Garage Door openers on emergency doors Wi-Fi capable. We are getting bids for that right now. 3. MARCS Radio Repeaters $26,100 when we got the MARCS System they told us there would be no dead zones. There is a dead zone that runs right down past the Safety Center through town and they said we could either spend half a million dollars and build a tower or we can get these repeaters. We are working on putting repeaters in the vehicles. Assistant Chief Vandenbark is working with them at the state level on everything to see which ones we need depending on which channel they give. That would make each vehicle a hot spot for the hand held radios. We have gotten into things where when we Page 5 of 12  are on a fire scene, when we are on our operations channel the IC’s outside and the guys are just inside the door and he has no communication with them. So, we have to go to the fire ground, but then when we go to fire ground they can talk to each other, but dispatch doesn’t know anything that is going on or anybody outside of that area doesn’t. So, this would solve that and it would also solve if we are out doing safety talks, or out doing hydrants and one of those dead areas it would act as our own personal repeater. So there shouldn’t be anywhere where you are not able to reach dispatch or be able to be reached by dispatch. When the original testing was done they were not using the handheld radios so no recourse as they were driving around in their cars and checking the signals which indicated no issues. We have been working with them and they are trying to make it right, but there are many levels we have to go through to get it rectified. 4. Thermal Imaging Camera replaced for Ladder 1-$8,000 5. Windows at Safety Center - $18,000 estimate but they may come in over budget so we will see how many we will do this year. 6. Turn Seats in Engine 2 and putting some new cabinets in -$6,550 7. Replace Half of Station Chairs - $4,500-we want half this year and schedule it out for replacement. 8. Replace Medic -1 Ambulance - $235,000 Thank you to Council and the administration as we needed a new squad. We have staff going up Friday to deliver the opticon and wiring and meet with them to go over the final specs. Items for further study: 1. Paperless Check Sheets-We do big check sheets that get handed in once a month for every vehicle, but those sheets don’t follow the vehicle so we will computerize them so they are available by phone for easy access for Vehicle Maintenance or other staff. It will be easier to track and not slow us down with the paperwork. 2. 40 hr. Inspection position-We currently have myself and one other 40 hour employee for inspections that we do. The arson investigation that we do is being done with the bureau. Any time Assistant Chief Hobson is on vacation or anytime something comes up and we have another duty we have to pull him off of what he is dealing with and we don’t backfill that position. It slows down our inspection process. We would look at that in the future and it is a large item because you are adding a position that you are going to be paying. 3. Grant possibilities for E-1 and Tower 5-We are always looking for these. Tower 5 is a 1981 model and Engine one has a lot of maintenance issues. The plan right now is MARCS Radios 2022, Engine 2 in 2022, and the squad should be 2022 also. That should be the last payment years for that. We will probably be looking to spec out in 2022 so as soon as 2023 comes along we can hand that spec sheet in and hopefully get a replacement. I tried to be quick. Do we have any questions? Mr. Sharrer: I take it if you had an extra $100,000 in your budget you would go after these future things, correct? Chief Bell: That would be something I would like to find how to budget, but I also hate to do payments. Right now I have Engine 2 as a payment, Engine 3 is a payment, MARCS Radios are a payment, and we just picked up a payment for an ambulance. I don’t know what is going to come down as the ambulance was a surprise. We were able to do that. If we can get by, and we Page 6 of 12 can do it safely, I would love to if the money came down like in a grant or something, but I would hate in the next two years for something unknown to come up and we are committed to that other payment and there is no way if hard times fall in, right now I think we can get by, but that is why I am a little worried about additional payments. Mr. Sharrer: So you would put it as contingency? Chief Bell said yes. We have always come in at the end of the year and see where we are with our insurance and see where there is money and stuff like that. Some of these things we can move forward to and I would still like to do the paperless check sheets, I just don’t have the final cost on it. When they came in first they were talking $500 a month. Assistant Chief Vandenbark has them talked down to the $330 range right now and still working on it. When I talked to IT they said for a program that is not very expensive for what you are getting out of it. It is something we can put our hydrants on, we can put all of our PPE on so it will also track those things. So that would be an investment I would like to do this year. The other ones because of the immense cost of it until something opens up I don’t feel comfortable doing that. Are there any other questions? Mr. Roberts: The thorough sheet was appreciated by Council, thank you. Other thanks were also expressed. 5:30 p.m. Police *Tony Coury Fund 201-Police Fund, page 6 Fund 250-Jail Operating Fund, page 11 Fund 820-Mandatory Drug Fines-page 31 Fund 821, State Forfeiture-page 31 Fund 822-Federal Forfeiture-page 32 Fund 823-LLEBG Fund-page 32 Tony Coury was told he could start. He asked, “What do you want to know?” It was asked if he has enough money and it was said he did not need to answer as they already knew the answer was no. Chief Coury said he could always use another quarter of a million or he will take half a million if Rhonda will give it to him. I had a quick meeting with Rhonda this morning and discussed some of the things I had laid out earlier in the year. Right now we plan to purchase a few police cars and that is budgeted correctly. We are going to change over our handguns to 9 millimeter. After about a year’s study of looking into that and the cost savings we can have with the 9 millimeter instead of a 45. The ballistics has changed so much in the last few years that we think we will be just fine with that move. For this year I do not have a whole lot of stuff going on. I have new vehicles and new guns. The detective bureau needed some updated equipment. We are going to more than likely purchase that as it wasn’t anything too major. Something that we pay for every year on a contract so basically our cell phone extraction software and training for that. Page 7 of 12 The status of the jail right now we are in pretty good shape. We know we had a couple of things we got gigged on in the annual inspection which is normal. It is not anything that would ever close our jail. We narrowed it down to two things and we got that taken care of as far as one of them was the TB testing that is required now. I am sure there will be some stuff come out soon with the corona-virus. Right now the only thing we are lacking is we got gigged on the condition of the male dorms. We do have that budgeted for this year. We are probably going to talk to Craig and his people to figure out if we can get somebody in there, maybe an architect to tell us what we need. I reached out to Genesis HealthCare. Dan Vincent got me a connection with the mental health side at Genesis. They have redone what is now the Sunnyview. We will take a visit up there to take a look to see what they have done to safe guard their patients. We will safe guard our inmates trying to do the same thing. Ms. Gildow: So it is safety issues, not that they need fancier quarters. Chief Coury: They always say they need better conditions. Out ceilings are kind of torn up and we are going to take a look at redoing them and how we do the lighting. The inmates like to take the lights and bust them out and they jam pencils in them. They do about anything and everything they can to destroy stuff. So there are better safeguarded lighting fixtures up there. We are looking now at taking the TV’s completely out of the dorms. It is kind of mounting them on the outside of the window so they can see them through the window, but they can’t physically touch them. Then somehow pipe in the sound to them. As far as the bathrooms they need updated. They are twenty–five plus years old now. We need to update some bathrooms and get a better system there, but that seems to be where the state is gigging us right now. Other than that we are passing the inspections. The jail van was requested and there seems to be enough money to do the renovations and purchase the jail van. Our jail van is I think 16 years old. It is looking bad. It is kind of nickel and diming us a little bit, but it is not in too bad of shape. It is in the shape right now that we need to replace it. Hopefully we can get that through this year. Staffing levels, as far as police officers, are at maximum and we will probably go down one here soon with the officer that was in trouble. We will need to replace him and we are going to continue, as I talked about, a traffic enforcement officer. We are going to continue that as we are just kind of looking at it. I know some of the numbers you have asked for and we have numbers from when we ran a trial before. We are actually starting this Friday with a full-time traffic officer that we pulled from the patrol ranks, but that is the only way we can do it. We are going to run that through the end of the school year. We will give him the weekends off based on because we want being the five days in the school zone. We will see what kind of numbers we get from that. He has been educated on exactly what we want and he understands. He is Patrolman Stillwell so if you receive complaints there will be a lot of zero tolerance for traffic enforcement. We will hand out some warnings and stuff like that, but there will be a lot of tickets issued. We will probably own Taylor Street for a little while. We will stop that complaint that I have heard for six to ten years. We will hear it again. Maple Avenue is another area that we want to get on and hit it hard. We have some other issues. Maple is just one of our complaints. We have traffic problems everywhere. We will hit Maysville and Pine Street. We will hit school zones and East Page 8 of 12 Main Street. We will also hit Blue Avenue and all three school zones. I don’t know how much we will do down at the community school as they are older kids and not as many bus drop offs as the others. Mr. Sharrer: How are things coming along with the county seized funds? Chief Coury: They are turning over the forfeiture stuff pretty quickly. We didn’t have a whole lot of forfeiture turnover in 2019, but we had an okay amount. Mr. Sharrer: I just know we were way behind and we had to slap them around a little bit trying to get some extra money from them. How is that going now? Chief Coury: My relationship with the Sheriff is good right now. We haven’t had any issues. We communicate regularly. We have two guys out there assigned so we are pretty even. We are even. They have two and we have two. There is no real supervisor in that group. They are self- motivated. We have some really good things coming down the pike for 2020 with them. Things that will grab a lot of people’s attention. They are very excited. We have spent a lot of money in the last six weeks buying drugs so we have some good forfeiture stuff coming down the pike. Rob Sharrer: So a big party coming. Chief Coury: People who push numbers like Rhonda will love it. She likes money. Ann Gildow: We will all love that. Chief Coury: Right, we all love money. Probably the biggest exciting thing right now that is going on with us is we took over as one of my goals for 2019 was to start our own impound yard. We did that lease with the Harris Road property. That started out in January. I think we shocked Rhonda a little bit with the numbers that we have already turned in. I think it was over $12,000 in the first month. Comments from the group were that is positive and great. Chief Coury: We have some more work to do there. We are working with the owners out there. They are putting in a shipping trailer for us. Basically, what we have done in case you have forgotten is we no longer send our cars to the tow yards during accidents or impounds. We take everything. The only thing that goes to the tow companies is non-injury accident vehicles that they need to be towed from the scene. Everything else comes to us. From that the non-shipping trailer and what we are going to do is if it is an aftermarket product on that car we strip it off and put it in storage bin. Then when it is time for auction, we will sell that separate from what the car is. It is about making money. To me it wasn’t as much about making money as it was to stop what I felt was the wronging of the citizens of Zanesville by these companies that charge outrageous prices to tow a car. Three and four hundred dollars to tow you out of a ditch is one issue. The issue of cash transactions only bothered me. The issue of saying that you tow your car on a Saturday and you can’t pick it up until Monday and then they charge you two days of storage fees. It is just wrong. We went around and round with our two companies. We had Page 9 of 12 meetings with them. We set guidelines. We had them sign contracts. Some of them said they were going to walk, but none of them did. We are doing well. There should be something in front of Council in the next few meetings so we can have an ordinance passed to have a live auction. We have worked with David Wolfe and Andrew Body on that and they are in favor of that. It is cheaper than the selling that we are currently doing with Gov.deals. Gov.deals is 5% and the auction is going to be 3%. I already have three bids for the auctioneers so we are ready to go. We just have to get the Ordinance done. So, none of us have done that, but Sue has sent me some examples. That should be coming soon. Mrs. Osborn: Are you doing the citizens academy again this year? Chief Coury: The citizens’ academy was slated to happen this spring and due to the changeover of everything that was going on in the City and we weren’t sure where we were going or where we were headed so we moved it to the fall. That is one of the things I have listed for 2020. We want to continue that part of our community policing. It was very positive and I think everybody that participated enjoyed it and learned quite a bit from it. The most exciting thing we have going on right now is called Project Blueprint. The inspiration for that came from two of my police officers and basically what they asked me was they wanted to work with children in the community that they dealt with on a daily basis or they dealt with frequently. They wanted the bad of the bad. They wanted the kids that no longer had hope. Kids that were being locked up. I took that idea to Big Brothers/Big Sisters and asked them if they would be interested in partnering with us. Jenny Masterson and her staff were ecstatic that we would even ask and we said we wanted to design it. We didn’t want the Big Brothers/Big Sisters plan, but we wanted our own. They ran with our idea. That helps us in a couple ways. One we have paper work that is signed in agreeance of the parents and the child and then secondly we have an umbrella of insurance from Big Brothers/Big Sisters. That way we are kind of covered if something happens. Here is what we are doing. We are meeting with these children with a couple of my officers. Four of them to be exact right now. They sit down and they talk with these young men and they teach them about being a man. They teach them about doing things right and then they are sort of a mentoring program. Then they work out with them on the CrossFit in the gym. None have touched a barbell yet. They have been in it about three or four weeks now. It starts for us around 4:30 because Dutro Fords from the citizens’ academy now lets us drive the van and go around the City to pick up the kids and bring them in. Then we have donations that were made to us to buy them food if they were hungry. We could put clothes on them if they didn’t have something to work out in. So this Thursday, is a day that I think some of the media might show up and talk to us and talk to these guys. Some of the people who have shown up told me they wanted it and they think they needed it. To be out in the public to show what the officers are doing. They don’t get paid for this, just like they didn’t get paid for the citizens’ academy, they do it on their own free will. That is pretty much where we are at. It is a very positive thing that they are doing and it is pretty inspirational actually. Mrs. Osborn: Who are the four officers? Chief Coury: Bryan Wolfe is the person that is driving it. Ryan Harris, Cody Dent, and Marcus Pisch. They have all been cleared through Big Brothers/Big Sisters. One of the kids is sponsored Page 10 of 12 as a little for me though I am not active in that group with them he can fall in under me because I already have a little. I do that on Monday’s at Zane Grey. Ms. Gildow and others commented that is very cool. Chief Coury agreed it is very cool. Things we planned in 2019 that we have accomplished.  We had our second annual department meeting in February on a Wednesday, the 22 or something at Secrest. It was the second time we have been able to have an all department meeting. So, we have about 102 employees and I think 88 showed up because I still needed people to work the streets, guard the jail, and run the dispatch and a couple other things. So we had 14 not make it.  Our Lexipol Program for risk management is what we were big on last year.  We were redoing our policies and procedures. We are about 66% accomplished on that and we started in December and we think we should be done sometime in May. It is going to roll out to the officers relatively soon with a daily bulletin and they have to answer a couple of questions and that is 365 days a year on a daily bulletin.  We did start our tow yard that we planned.  We hired two Jail Administrators last year as planned.  We moved the detective bureau into the Times Recorder building. We finally got them moved in February. That is looking pretty good. Feel free to stop down and take a look.  We put a new K-9 car out. A new patrol car out which we had purchased I think with 2018 money, but it took a while to get the build and get the cars.  We did our first citizens’ academy. Those were pretty much the things we wanted to accomplish in 2019. Mr. Roberts: Does anybody have any questions? It sounds good. Chief Coury: I don’t know what is going to happen in 2020, but we are still striving to meet those goals. I have been nominated to be the Chief for District 6. So we will see what happens after tomorrow. Ann Gildow: Do they give you whole lot of money for that? Chief Coury: No, they don’t give me any money. They might give me lunch once in a while. We will see. I was nominated last week and I have to go to a meeting tomorrow so we will see. It is the Southeast Ohio Chiefs and be a representative for that. Mr. Sharrer and others: Congratulations. Chief Coury: Be careful what you wish for I guess. Mr. Roberts: Thank you, Chief. Mr. Merry, do you have any final comments for us on the Safety Division? 5:45 p.m. Public Safety *Doug Merry Comments or review Page 11 of 12 Doug Merry, Public Safety Director: A few ideas:  We talked about moving the Dispatch Center upstairs. We are looking into some funds through 9-1-1. It would make it much more secure. Before I retired two years ago that was my baby. I worked with the dispatch centers and securities. I belonged to the National Emergency Number Association quite a few years and they are really preaching that the next target is Dispatch Centers. So security for everything. We need to move it out of the front of the building to the center of the building I think is a good idea. When I took over a couple of weeks ago that was brought to me so we are going to talk to EMA and we are waiting to hear back from 9-1-1 to see if we can get some funds to help with that. Maybe we can get some matching funds or something.  There is a space next to where my office is in the TR Building. We are talking about maybe moving the evidence techs up there to make it a little nicer for when attorneys come in to view videos they are not down in the basement. It would be a little more receptive to the public coming in if they need to get stuff. Those are a couple of ideas. I am just kind of learning to find out what I don’t know yet. It is a different ball game from where I was before. I tell the guys it is kind of like herding cats and putting out fires. I am learning, and hopefully I will be here a while. It just depends what the Mayor thinks after six months. Mr. Roberts: Does anybody have any questions for Doug? Chief Coury: Ohio State and OU just went to virtual school until May 1. Rhonda Heskett: So did Muskingum College. Chief Coury: Everybody is on the band wagon right now. Mr. Sharrer: I make a motion that we take the same precautions in Council. Chief Coury said he would second that. (Laughter broke out) More conversation about the Coronavirus took place prior to adjourning. Mrs. Osborn moved to adjourn. It was seconded by Mr. Sharrer. A voice vote was taken with all in favor. None were opposed. Motion carried. Mr. Roberts thanked everyone for coming. The meeting adjourned about 6:10 p.m. ________________________________ ________________________________ Susan Culbertson, Clerk Andrew Roberts, President Pro-Tempore of Council Page 12 of 12