##VIDEO ID:iL0EhJfBlRk## okay we're about to get started who that's really loud we're about to get started uh if we can silence our cell phones I see all the doors are closed I appreciate that okay good morning everyone we are on the record today is Friday the 20th day of December in the year 2024 this is a budget hearing for the Department of Public Works with the Jersey City municipal Council we had a scheduled 10: a.m. start the clock on my cell phone is showing 10:12 a.m. I will just call out the members of the council who are present council person bajano council person here and council president wman here okay we have three council members in attendance at 10 12 a.m. in addition at its time of its preparation notice of this meeting was similarly disseminated on Monday December 9th 2024 at 5:31 p.m. to the mayor Municipal Council business administrative Corporation Council and the local newspaper so I can certify as to our total compliance with the Sunshine Law before I turn it over to our chairperson and the council um I I just wanted everyone will go around the room to introduce ourselves um you can just grab the mic turn it on um say where you want who you are and where you're from we all know who you are but people who are watching at home on a live stream may not know who you are so we'll start with the director himself and his guest I don't I'm sorry direct I don't think the mic is on got to turn it on on the top you could take it off the stand if you feel better there you go morning council president bman councilman boano councilman s Greg kce director of Emergency Management Homeland Security and a Department of Public Work morning my name is Andes R and I'm the fiscal officer for DPW Danny be not finance department Kyle Greaves director's office of Finance Carmen Gela director Finance thank you so much and I'm going to turn it over to I'm going to be my best guest I think it's going to still be chairperson SLE well thank you Sean and thank you director kce and Andre for uh coming here today to discuss the Department of Public Works budget you guys are one of the largest budgets in the city and uh we have a 2-hour time block for it and you also cover you have a lot of ground to cover so I'm just going to turn it over to you to get started with the presentation thank you councilman um first of all I'd like to say on the behalf 273 DPW employees uh thank you for allowing affording me this opportunity today to speak about our department you know many times the Department of Public Works is the first uh official government entity that many of our residents encounter uh requesting services and and things of that nature and it's important um to um note that the dedication that the employees have our division directors uh I I take great pride that the operations that they run um you know we responsible the responsibilities are broad throughout the city and we interact with pretty much every other department in the city so I'm what I'm going to do is it's okay with you we're going to start by going through some of our accomplishments for 2024 I believe everybody has copies of this document we'll start for instance with recycling um our contracted vender Sims Metal Municipal recycling collected 72 7 7,280 net tons of Co mingle waste 24 to the present date 7,280 net tons of plastic glass and cans were diverted from entering our ecosystem leading to less pollution and dumping cardboard our contract ractor allamerican recycling collected 6,248 37 PBS net weight of cardboard and paper that colleage from ENT the ecosystem the electronic waste division of recycle is partnered with regional Industries collected over 7500 pieces of electronic waste from January 24 to present all American recycled rebate to the city for Jersey City from August 24 amounted to $166,600 cents the collection of cardboard and paper table various community events Citywide to provide residents with building blocks for Environmental Education faing their Global awareness awareness and inspiring them to get involved with their communities vision of recycling promotes the importance of recycling comp composting food waste and the effects of climate change and the environment with echo-friendly lessons promotional literature and giveway the division of recycling manages all janitor employees supplies and cleanliness of all 26 City facilities division of recycling completed over 500 maintenance work orders throughout the city for buildings in 2024 oops and we also handling the issuance of the recycling containers also install coal mingled and cardboard recycling bins at the following buildings to increase recycling tonnage Public Safety headquarters Annex 2 City Hall Central Avenue Senior Center 394 Central the animal shelter Public Safety Training facility Annex 13 and four municipal judge Municipal Justice complex the courthouse car impound recently open and a re-entry program division of recycling believes that every resident plays a valuable role in the local and global environment we strive to empower residents with the resources needed to reduce their environmental impact through the ease of access to food waste and receptacles diversion and repurposing of food waste is critical to reducing greenhouse gases which are released from bring food and ultimately contribute to the effects of climate change a bold and Innovative response to the food waste emergency acts on the immediate need for climate action in the state of New Jersey bring Science Education at to the Forefront of our daily lives by increasing accessibility comp to composting we are making significant strides in a community sustainability by encouraging participation of f of all walks of life going on Pro providing over 78 cubic yards of mature compost and molts to all the adop the Lots Community Gardens throughout the city city parks neighborhood associations and residents our cleanups throughout the city lady assaro community cleanup Ferris triangle triangle Park cleanup I love Greenville Jersey City Association cleanup Jersey City antii antiviolence Coalition movement cleanup Heights dog lover Association Hudson County Community College Student cleanup Hamilton Park cleanup Public Schools cleanup sustainable JC community cleanup PS5 cleanup Weston slope cleanup a uton park cleanup Dickinson High School cleanup Summit Avenue cleanup vision of recycling plays a vital role in ensuring the community cleanup events held in J bit supplies and communication with City departments neighborhood associations or special Improvement districts to operate safely and effectively process provides a coordinated approach to planning reviewing and on-site managing management of the community event moving on to our buildings and streets with the approved purchase of thermop plastic machines our painter painting crew were able to complete all crosswalks that needed retouching in three woods from April of 24 to October of 24 this machine and products allow for long-term painting of crosswalks this consisted of over 700 crosswalks and about 300 fire hydrant in addition to curbs and bus stops in addition to the no parking requests that were filled basically we purchased our own machine we're looking to expand uh this capability by bringing in a second crew so we can cover even more areas our Carpenters um have taken the initiative to repur repurpose original wood floors and instead of bringing in a vendor to put down new slots the cost for one location was estimated at $35,000 and our Carpenters instead stripped and re restored the stained stained the floors this project is taken once purch course to purchase the equipment with a 5 to 10e life expect expectancy allowed us to do the job in house for less than 10 ,000 four some of the before and after fold work they've done and they've supplied one of uh taking look at the you see the old North District up there how that was done that really job lower the stairs are Firehouse at fail state inspections get the repair we re quoted a $10,000 F our Carpenters with materials from the shops repurposed the wood and install new stairs painters come in used the required paint all work was done in house during working out tasks like this are complex and required skill workers but if we continue to provide them with the tools and support this will be the outcome of their work our plumbers are regularly call for small objects such such as clog drains toilets overflowing the basic function of a plumber however you'll see in this instance uh pictures you'll you can see a slop sync that was completely rotted to require replacement to course was about $1,500 plumbers were able to purchase cleaning equipment chemicals to restore the sink project took three days but it was handled while we're on shift the outcome made it look brand new and this was the idea that save city funding other major goals we're looking to initiate with the bid process and approval of the council we were able to obtain a new HVAC vendor to properly conduct uh prevented maintenance services these efficient Services allowed us to save costs on major HVAC what we had seen with the previous vendor a lot of these systems were properly maintained as a result of that we did a pretty thorough study of all of the facilities throughout the city uh which moved us in the direction of bringing in a new company and thanks to you you approved the contract and we're seeing significant savings already and operational purposes are are greatly improved during the summer months of June 2024 September we September we maximized resources our boiler operators had to service all of our boiler Citywide to ensure that we'd be up and running for the winter months this is important helped us for be be far prepared if there were any boilers requiring replacement or requiring major repairs buil this chains inhouse on all HVAC units instead of paying the vendor so we utilized a supervisor who obtained the skills to replace all filters during the summer months vendor cost approximately $150 an hour not including the material we bought the material and had our staff handle a nor very normal working hours created an actual database of all services produce some the division which Justified each employee the need for additional employees and the turnaround time of completed assignments created and implemented the chain each trade now we are properly monitoring all inventory which has curved unnecessary previous cost in this division was dealing with and had kept to some compliance with purchasing basically the director director fona has done a phenomenal job in totally reorganizing that operation uh anyone anybody has been down in there you can see it's it's 110% efficient and the productivity has increased tremendously moving on to our forestry we begin a block a pruning cycle using a contract with Rich's Tree Service UMass recommended a five-year pruning cycle for all trees is an achievable and reasonable goal for municipalities in the Northeast pruning on a cycle is a best management practice and Superior to working based on solely public requests working what public requests means that only people who make the request have trees worked on meeting a lot of trees are neglected and it's also reactive as reactive than rather than proactive proactive cycle make cycle maintain programs and are safe and less expensive over time in concept with block tuning cycle implementation we've worked using the 2023 tree inventory the city has completed by daav Resources Group to work based on an orous assess tree assessment this allows us to prioritize the most risk hazardous tree first trees first as of 2024 all of our high-risk work and a lot of the moderate risk work has already been completed we've already seen you far few Emer fewer emergency tree incidents arise out of the air likely as a result with the work beginning in 2023 we found identified and tested and confirmed the presence of serious disease called bacterial Leaf Scorch in Jersey City this will have a serious cting ramification moving forward while this sounds bad catching it and knowing is developing a problem will allow us to best manage it we brought in um some time ago we brought in a new Forester who's been nothing short of spectacular there again he was working for the City of New York he was a Jersey City resident when we advertised the position he come over and uh he's done a great job but there again we could use additional folks down there to assist with this so you need additional folks for the fory Department yeah does anyone have questions you uh people are calling about trees like I have a tree that's five stories high in front of my house I've been asking for three years for them to cut it back they came along and they cut a couple of branches off it's like well unfortunately what we find is that many trees that are healthy legally they can't be cut down not cut down but they should be God if the tree ever came down it'll kill somebody say is that um this Forester is is very well uh very knowledgeable in in what can and can't be done and uh if a tree is damaged or sick you know it falls within the guidelines of laws they certainly take it down what they try to do is save most of the trees I think a lot of the problems we've experienced is that years back many trees that were planted were really not applicable to the urban environment and you know there there again we're now dealing with you know trees somewhere are 50 70 100 years old that are healthy and I think the the the feeling is is that they would rather try and trim the back as much as possible or stay within the legal guidelines as opposed to what we're talking about basically is cutting the top down from five stories up and taken them down because if you send me send me the information Rich to the city that and lifting sidewalks you know they everybody's complaining their sidewalks are being lifted by these trees and nothing's being done well that's that's a whole issue you know obviously by ordinance the sidewalks are the responsibility of the homeowner no I had an ordinance uh thing pass if the city puts the trees there the sidewalks B to the city we have no control over it it's the city's responsibility well with that being said I know Council Gilmore had brought this up at one of the meetings and the issue with that is is that first of all the costs associated with replacing sidewalks we would literally have to hire a contract to do that Citywide I don't know whether that's something that that expense we want to take on at this talking about a tremendous amount you said the uh were on a block pruning cycle with uh Rich tree services and what block or how does that go can you explain is it like by Ward is it by like certain area in each Ward and you they did a complete uh analysis of the tree canopy Citywide and obviously we only have I believe it's 12 employees presently assigned to forestry which would be a task that would take years just to complete prob so what we do is we hire an outside contractor and their responsibility is maintaining the trees according to standards and it's done usually by by Ward do they give you a list of like the uh we can I can get that for you Council if you like yeah also yeah you could bring the mic closer just because it's okay you know uh yeah softly and carry a big stick director You' like to see that I'll speak to Mike and you know we'll come up with a list where they presently are and we're moving forward but they're responsible for any Citywide U problems that know that the so you spoke about the HVAC systems how do you know how many HVAC systems we have across the city well we have 24 roughly 24 properties um 53 you know if you count lots and things like that but what we've we've encountered as of late is that the a lot of these are old facilities you know and therefore they're coming the life cycle of the equipment is is either here or is rapidly approaching unfortunately many of these uh were not maintained to the specifications they should have been when we bought this new company in part of the thing was to do an analysis of uh the properties and that's resulted in um you know maintenance that had never been performed in a timely fashion now being performed we have uh two locations that we are presently awaiting funding for that require full replacement of the HVAC systems one is the um Senior Center on the old Senior Center on Patterson Street uh and the other one is the uh the animal impound facility so uh close to10 some OD thousand dolls just on to those two locations alone I mean they've been able to keep them running but like anything else they have a life expectancy you know some of these things in 2025 30 years old by replacement so spending more trying to fix them as opposed to replacing you get something more it's a lot more energy efficient and it's going to do the job a lot cheaper you know once we get the identified funding for that we'll be replacing those systems for the firehouse on Palisade in Congress did they end up finishing the air conditioning system on the firehouse yes they've done that uh actually we had a meeting yesterday with the chief Hart of uh Chief Johnson's office that was on our to-do list there's an issue up there with a separate entity uh with the controls of the system so director fonc and myself met with them yesterday and they'll be addressing that but the system in question was replaced yeah any other questions you can proceed director okay administrative Services basically uh one of the big goals that we accomplished was the upgrade of the security system here in City City Hall um you know unfortunately over the years we've seen Trends where houses of city government are vulnerable uh there are security issues one of the things that we instituted i i in one of my other roles is the certified protection professional and certified domestic preparedness planner so we did a complete analysis of the president pre the previous security and found it to be not adequate enough to protect uh you know all of the entities involved in Hall um so we basically come up with a new visitor management system which is enhanced security comprehensive visitor identification and monitoring uh prevents unauthorized access um streamline check-in process and real-time visitor tracking to ensure seamless management uh forced safety and confidence a safer environment promotes trust and confidence for all working and visiting City wall um and president wman I I got an email from Phil Oran Ides yesterday regarding the active SHO thing you're looking at yeah uh I spoke to deputy chief d uh on the PD side he handles the training uh so that'll be forth I believe director Moody's going to reach out for you to come up with a convenient time but um after we did had the um Unfortunate Events back in uh 2019 with the active shooter I did the U it was pretty pretty intense uh a two-day course where we got everybody in the annex trained it was over 300 employees you know just to bring them up and it's a pretty self um awareness type program it's it's called run hiide fight it's recognized by the federal government it's authored by onema and um you know just people so they have an awareness of what they should or shouldn't do in these type of events but they did put that on uh Chief dal's radar and then he was going to speak with director Moody and then she was going to reach outk thank you thank you and you know what too though what what would be a good thing too though like if we have a fire drill i i as long as I've been here I've never had one yeah unfortunately that's something that's Channel Through Fire Prevention we did I I remember being here at a meeting and we did actually have a fire alarm uh fortunately it it was kind of like a a uh good opportunity to to determine what the capability was and fortunately everybody left the building you know I mean we we can't plan emergencies and I think what they should we have doing something similar down in the annex where you know um you try and get people aware to what they should or shouldn't do many times these alarms go off and people just like uh I'm right oh but you know you have an obligation you know to for self-preservation and legally you know you have to vacate the building when they come out and but these are all things I think that you know moving forward that will you know will work with fire prevention and and get that back on track and based on our system here like there's no one PA system that can go through the whole building like if there is a fire and somebody get on and say this is real this is um not a um a tester right I forgot the word they use you know what I mean but this is a real drill is there's no system that can go through the whole uh City Hall but can we create a system to go to each department like a PA type system right yeah what what the nor the perfect scenario would be to have building captains on each floor uhuh and a central desk which would be you know our main desk downstairs there I know there was some conversation uh adding the capability on that we presently have in the phone system yeah for an intercom type thing um and I believe that was the ba was taking that under you know consideration I think it's a there again it's more of a software type thing yeah see if they could do that but that was raised when we did uh the the implementation of some it was on the the list that we had during the implementation of some of the security thank you uh the updated security infrastructure provides a safer environment foring confidence among Court we also the other thing we did was similar operation in the courthouse what we found that uh we were challenged where the systems that were in place were from the original date of the opening of the building um and over time um you know threats have um increased for uh government facilities right um unfortunately the U the bad people come up with ways to get around security systems so there again we had to do a complete update of security up in the courthouse um it was quite expensive but there again you know you can't match expense against human life so right um we did it in two phases um we did the upgrade of a similar type system that you see here in City Hall additional cameras and things like that and I know on the PD side there was some crease personas person output up there so you know we try and monitor situations that's uh you know trending throughout the country um and then you know get out in front of it you know but there again all of this cost money budget constraints not only here but throughout the whole country you know we do the best we can with what we have but moving forward I know that um it's a main concern of the mayor you know the ba that we take these into consideration we've done a tremendous amount of um with our camera system you know we over 900 cameras Citywide and I continue to get the federal funding to supplement uh a lot of these cameras um we're actually looking at I got a list now councilman it's pretty um robust in your ward yes so I mean we try and you know get them Citywide at the using a comstat and and tell people to you know we're having issues here so we try and get cameras there it's expensive um a new location is approximately $130,000 we get somewhere between 500 600,000 a year so we try to maximize where we can where we get the most bank for book so to speak but I just got the list from John Sabo yesterday so we'll be going over that for uh Future No Persian field is an issue and we just opened up mosquito Park and we have I added some up there um way back when councilman Yun had asked me to help with getting some cameras up in certain areas up there so we were able to get that funded all the funding obviously we have to come up with locations uh that requires what we they call an investment justification it's got to be approved by the state and then sent down to the Fed so um it's their money they want to have a say as to how it's spent where it's utilized but fortunately they've been pretty good Mex Finance I know we have like Capital Improvement uh dollars and so often we just you know do a lot for just you like we say parks to to remodel them or bring them up isn't there a way that we can also include Security in that can we include Security in that Capital to fun because it's it's like I'm hearing what the director's saying um I know he's been going out for Grants to do the best he can to cut course but because security is like a issue throughout the whole country now shouldn't that be one of our priorities is it's good for us to remodel a park but what good is it if the park ain't secure yeah um a permissible usage would be like installing security cameras uh the machinery and everything like as long as it has a useful life of five years which most of the stuff does um we have used Capital Money in the past for CCTV installations and and things of that nature so it's it's definitely doable um like I mentioned yesterday we're working on repurposing some dollars M projects um and the goal is to have it for General miscellaneous improvements to all buildings and we can kind of you know move our our our funding as as we as things come up rather than just tying ourselves to one project at a time so it's definitely something that we could work on okay thank you but just mentioning that too and and I think what we've been doing um is is basing a lot of our camera placement uh we're using an intelligence-based policing police side which helps us tremendously because it's you put put the assets where it's needed the most and it is playing a significant role in the detection of crime identifying offenders and also success successful prosecution so the camera system has paid off tremendously and you know the goal right now I'm I'm determining availability of funding to to purchase the portable cameras mobile cameras which we can deploy pretty much immediately if there's an issue that's occurring uh at any location in the city we try and get them out as quickly as possible um the problem was that the previous vendor um there was an issue um with some of the cameras they were using so they would were eliminated from the federal system for using federal dollars but we've worked in a an agreement out with or a Cooperative agreement with our current camera vendor where they're actually branching out and they are co uh entering into a co-op with another vendor to build a trailer so uh and the best thing about these is that they'll be directly networked into our Network so any availability of viewing wouldn't require a or anything like that once we deploy the camera it's immediately viewing us they're looking forward to try and get I think four or five of them out of this funding cycle and then with the upcoming uh FIFA games in 2026 uh Jersey City going to play a huge portion of that as many of the teams will be staying in our hotels uh Park is's a major major 30day event down there so we'll be working with the state and feds to uh you know maximize security capabilities both on our end and with them and uh there again I'm going to dedicate money for that type of equipment for next funing cycle uh We've coordinated the execution relocation employees and assets from the old Senior Citizen Center to the new Senior Citizen Center effort included organizing logistics for safe and efficient transfer of all office equipment furniture and essential materials ensuring minimal disruption of daily operations collaborated with staff and external vendors to achieve a seamless transition allowing the new Senior Center become fully operational and successfully coordin execution executed relocation employees from 555 State Route 440 to 75 Bishop Street uh we manage shed Services agreement between the Jersey City Boe Board of Education Jersey City Redevelopment Jersey City housing various service fueling of vehicles provided container dumpster refills filling potholes and other surface improve improvements tree maintenance invoicing and contacting for reimo reimbursement manage relationships with government agencies and a government and Senior representatives for New Jersey Transit Conrail verison Comcast Port Authority NJ do New Jersey t Turnpike regarding City issues oversee and manage vendors contracts including Canon Gateway group Nelson Westerberg moving company Avid exchange Millennium Communications Miron Technologies psng quadrant racial Michelle gas and diesel fuel Universal vending WB Mason creating Outdoors synas UPS Johnson business products digital Dynamic digital ones screen temperature scanners and value payment credit card system coordinate the management of unarmed and armed security guards provided by the gateway to various City build buildings organizer ran point at to keep American beautiful great Jersey City cleanup resulting in 14 tons of garbage being collected Citywide reorganize the administrative service staff to structure it to better align with operational demands for the city initiatives include coordinating with the ba Human Resources M mayor's Chief of Staff DPW director mail room Messengers front desk and dispatch officers to ensuring adequate coverage of work do ities by reallocating or or assets and streamlining workflows toward responsive to the city needs couple of other points i' just like to make you know one of the things that I mentioned this year to year is that out of our budget we we pay approximately $13 billion and that that's a based on a legislation that was passed back in 2020 as to the solid waste management and recently we've notified to that $13 million there'll be a 2% increase which is a tremendous amount of money unfortunately it's the only mechanism in place back when this legislation was passed this was um as a result of management of the solid waste throughout the the state and for our purposes the Hudson County Improvement Authority was a designated agency so um I just think that's something you should be aware of out of our total budget $49 million I believe was the request 13 million plus the 2% is part of that it's a big choke is that for regional Industries you're talking about or no that's separate that's the the Garbage Contract is a separate entity this is basically our Solid Waste is uh how it's disposed of yeah you know that is for the city where it has to go and the mechanism in place to ensure that we're in compliance all state regulations and things like that so there's a lot of different you know hidden fees and things like that that you I want to make sure you're aware of that that contribute to a large portion of of the budget and like everything else you know our other our budget is also impacted by contractual raises obviously I believe one one Union has not settled yet which eventually I guess will you know result in additional funding um and you know every service that we we provide most part requires some type of equipment and like everybody else you know we've seen tremendous increases uh had a conversation with Jim Lao our DPW Automotive director for instance a water pump you know preo maybe cost is70 or $80 that same water pump now in some instances is costing as $200 everything has gone up tremendously we have uh some Union contracts coming up next year we have the regional contract coming up next year um what there there's so many things I want to say on that on this topic I know you going to ask that question I had this conversation a while agic horrible it's really like what they do and you know they the people you work with that are supervisory in nature they they help and you know they try to mitigate things but on the ground it's like a war zone a trash war zone and it's like they're throwing the trash like they're in the Olympics you know and it has it has gotten slightly better but it's not good enough for us to justify a renewal like we have to like plan for something else I don't know it's not if we do a ward based or every two Wards a RFP for that like maybe Regional can't do the whole city especially the recycling night recycling night is just like it's a war zone it's especially on a windy day and I know part of that is the responsibility of like the homeowners and the the residents but it's uh it's it's really difficult for them to do what they're doing and for us to continue to you know do what we're doing like the definition of insanity is like keep doing the same thing and you know I tried to give them a chance but I just want to voice my frustrations and see if there's a there's a contingency plan for trash pickup recycling you know something to help with the the mitigation of the streets we actually looked at um nor H where it was kind of like a u Cooperative some was done internally and they use a vendor um even if we did a um so-called hybrid type operation I think the startup cost would be probably 14 or 15 million just to purchase the equipment this is related to recycling in um and you know we've had numerous meetings with the company uh I now have Rich Venia who is the full-time guy that handles the complaints and believe me I get calls from all all the members of the council you know 90% of the calls I get is related to to that trash compact as contract um the contract is coming up for Renewal I believe it's next year um but I I think the problem is going to be um the availability of another company to bid on it you know they kind of it's kind of like they self-regulate you know I don't go to your territory and you don't go to mine so chances are and there again you know I could be off off base on it that we may have the only respondent to the contract being Regional because the the capabilities I think a lot of it has to do with the overnight component you know and there's no way in heck that we could ever do daytime collections you know the the traffic would not permit it yeah it just would be totally prohibitive but um the other problem I think they have is that um maintaining uh employees you know there's a huge huge turnover you know and from what Regional tells us they they've raised their starting salaries but I think the fact that uh they're pretty much at will employees there's really no Union protection or anything like that um that's a problem I mean i' I've checked them at night myself where I've seen you have a driver and a helper where at normal pickup times they should have at least two two additional people on the truck to a uh but that's not the case so that obviously takes longer to get the um the pickup done we also have a problem with a lot of residents using the sidewalk waste receptacles for personal garbage you know where our people go out we'll empty them sometimes we're doing this two and three times a day so uh it's a headache it's a major major headache but moving forward I mean these are all things I think when the RFP goes out um you know all your concern turns has to be in there and then it's kind of like a wait and see what type of respondents we get back at this point taking it on as a city operation it would require a tremendous amount of money um there again you know we're dealing with the same pool of people that you know uh would be interested in doing that type of work yeah I think the salaries obviously is an issue so you know we gotta wean ourselves off from from Regional I just don't feel like they're they're cutting the mustard here you know and they should uh either upgrade their equipment so that the trash the the trash truck the garbage truck picks up the garbage and puts it on their own yeah I know what you're saying right you've seen it in other like civilized countries and we should they should upgrade their equipment or they should upgrade their training they should do something that is different than what the status quo is what what I say I I think when we start the RFP process then you know it might be good to hear your individual concerns so that can be included you know like that I've seen that the mechanical trucks where they they actually pick it up there's really no human component you know the it's done from the driver's seat and you know I guess it works in some smaller areas the other problem we have is is that we have many times the trucks are not able to access the areas because of parking issues people um Park illegally you know and and they the truck can't effectively get down to pick the garbage up which creates more of a Time problem you know so they're they're supposed to be in and out of here in a certain period of time but many times we find them on the street during the height of the rush hour you know with school buses and everything else so it only creates more problems getting back to when we start the RFP process I think you know it would be a good idea to get your concerns and get that included you know if it's something that you know they can do and it would work at certain we should certainly look at the sanitation inspectors I know that you had made the recommendation a few years back like have we made any progress on no I I I think what what I'd like to do is that I you know we've mentioned this in the past there's two things to look at uh having our own inhouse sanitation inspectors is good for two reasons it when for instance if you call up and you want a property or it up or you want a lot clean what we have to do is make that notification to Joe Barrow and his folks and most of the time they're pretty responsive they'll get on it right away but there's a gap you know so when we had our own in-house inspectors we would if they run out of recycling actually there and sanitation where we could send them immediately there they would issu the violation and we could immediately take action so you know we tried Joe and his crew works pretty good with us but I think there's also in my opinion based on the amount of complaints we get related to sanitation you know there's a revenue War there where if people who are habitual offenders are not receiving those summonses there's a loss of Revenue and I think the best way to get people to um compliance is to site them really I mean it's it's it's unfortunate but um you know on what I've seen is that people years ago they would be take pride and clean up their area clean up you don't see that anymore you know they'll be walking down the street with a rapper and just throw it in the street and you know another thing we look to do is um director Dublin had identified some funding sources that we could potentially bring back either seasonal or part-time more oress like um litter patrols you know throughout the city I know that's a big thing especially in the commercial areas so um that's something we'd like to you know introduce you know I've had discussions with VA on it he seemed pretty uh you know enthusiastic about it so moving forward I think we'll we're looking to do that you know this next cycle right you can tell when this garbage night on my block all you gota do is follow the garbage laid in the street uh they drop all over the street they don't bother picking up go down to North Carolina where my sons are they drop a piece of paper they have a machine that comes out picks up the garbage cans people aren't doing it a piece of paper falls on the floor the driver gets out and picks it up here they just leave the garbage in the street it's a shame yeah that's what councilman S I mean if that's something that's feasibly possible you know I mean if that's that should be included in the RFP that as opposed to uh having uh it's got to save them money also if they had that type of equipment uh where I would imagine it would require a change of U containers yeah for City residents that the areas that I seen that minut it's mostly smaller areas where uh it's a specialized container and it's a side pickup on the truck I mean that these are all things that we should be able to you know tune before the RFP is put out and then uh go from there so can we um could you could you document this um can we at least try to start with two sanitation workers I mean inspectors for DPW um um I know that's been a conversation before you know last year was a conversation but it seemed like um the uh this the uh sanitation department is um with region Regency is just it's not it's not improving so maybe we need to just try the inspectors to go um behind Regency in some way um to see if that will improve because based on what I'm hearing too they have like a some type of respect for companies you're saying so if we do put out an RFP the only person that may apply is Regency because the other companies are not going to apply because they feel like Regency is the one that dominates this area yeah based on what I heard you say so then it it's like then what can we do to improve you know our our our our trash pick up because they going to apply again if if what you're saying is true and you know the industry they're going to be the only ones that apply again so what can we do to pretty much help our residents if it if if getting us another uh two inspectors in your department again we need to go back to it because it's not helping we we we're missing money you know um people who are abusive is is increased is not decreased they are abusers you know and they need to um they need to be um kind of uh disciplined to stop doing it and just the mere fact that you're saying that when the uh trucks go down certain um blocks there's double parking then we need police you know to be able to do some type of um following tour or the inspectors because I'm telling you throughout this whole city this city is growing so rapidly the behavior is crazy that's what I'm I'm seeing and until we start putting enforcement in to change people behavior is not going to improve the city it's not our garbage uh you know our trash uh pickup is getting worse it's not getting better because people Behavior people are double parking because they can't find no no parking I get that there's issues there but people got five cards to a family that's that's something we got to own up to too it's not like one one house got one car that's over you know everybody's driving even though we trying to put more bikes on the street everybody still driving we got cars that you just plug in with a battery so it's saving on pollution you thought we was going to do something different but I see uh it's still increasing so I'm saying let's try what we keep hearing the director keep saying every time he comes to um these budget hearings let's try giving them the inspectors that's all I just want that down so when we have a conversation let up later we remember it that that's all what's stopping us from getting sanitation inspectors I I mean sorry say that again what's stopping us or preventing us from getting sanitation inspectors just cuz The Dumping situation at the tra the city receptacles is out of control like you know the issues that we've seen with trash you know Sands enforcement without the enforcement it's you know it it's not getting better and we need to have people and I know we have some enforcement mechanism already but I'm saying in this situation there should be some redundancy in the uh you know com the compliance and the enforcement just you have your team code enforcement has their team and like you guys cover what the other can't right I I think and in somewh research that we've done on it there again I know director Dublin does a great job in a lot of the grants um putting this through her operation slash sanitation many of the salaries I think would be eligible on the grant you know as as long as we can show the problem that we're having is is to the council president's point the city is growing Leaps and Bounds you know and unfortunately we find a many many many of um new businesses we aren't you know being cooperative when it comes to you know sanitation so having the inspectors that are out there specifically for sanitation violations I think we number one send the message you know and I mean we're not out there to hurt people but I think you also have to get them to a point where they're going to be in compliance you know because a lot of it comes down to where people are using the public uh trash can which obviously is for litter and things like that as personal garbage disposal so you know and that's come up by Dickinson at lunchtime you have a garbage can out in the street of Chestnut and uh nework Avenue you have 10 kids here eating sandwiches is from the stores the garbage can is right here they take the bottles throw them in the street they take the garbage they throw it on the side they throw it on they don't even they're standing right next to the garbage can they don't use it they throw it in the street and the streets are filthy not we find the schools I don't know direct sorry I'll let you um I guess to just recap council president yeah we can talk about adding um sanitation um inspectors back to the team but I think I just want to remind everyone that a few years ago we coordinated these Services Under quality of life I know I know we can do both yep no um so later this afternoon they'll be here so we'll bring up that point again to for it to be discussed right and then um councilman Cay I think in just recapping there's nothing preventing us from hiring right finance will take the budget request I think just hearing two three4 I think it's more about coordination scheduling um and making sure that what the director's going to out in his RF makes sense because I do not think director Cur you put in a request for sanitation directors in your budget haven't you haven't so I think so if we go back to what we tried to with the consolidation a few years ago as you noted that we're growing and things that nature things change there probably needs to be revisiting of this maybe in a deeper dive in a separate meeting about coordinating what's happening on the enforcement side what's happening and what they're seeing in the department level and then we'll figure out you know in preparation for next year's budget what seems accurate and makes sense so um we don't have that request now from them but something to be discussed I think later on this afternoon qu of direct director is here yeah I just wanted it down so we can have that conversation because I don't know why we think we can't do both a city growing like this is like we only do this and that's it but with a city growing as rapid as it growing um they going to need their own inspectors too and quality life still works too yeah it's not like you just taking it away that's my whole point it seemed like once we create something oh it all has to go there no you can have that and you can have this that that's the problem I I think with this city too we just have one thing not realizing we need to have more than one thing and it's okay it's really okay because we're just growing too fast we we're growing fast and people behavior is is just it's just not pleasant all the time it's not our city is you know getting a of trash just like you know said the kids are not been trained to throw garbage in the garbage can your office I'm like oh my God but that's that's not that's something else so I would venture to say that your officers receive the majority complaints of quality of life related yeah um you know so having a redundant uh type operation if you remember what I mentioned earlier one of the things we looked at is is uh the possibility of hiring part-timers or seasonal um to do the litter patrols and then following up would be the sanitation inspectors you know where if they see these type of instances as Richard described then they take enforcement action you know it's it's just I went over to a bunch of the kids on the corner watching them throw the garbage in the street I said I live here would pick the stuff up you know what they did they all laughed they thought it was funny and basically told me to go to hell I went said so the teachers used to be out there you know if you throw that in the garbage if you don't throw that in the garbage you got to do serve detention but correct changing time we should talk to the public school system and you know if they're caught littering they have to do 10 hours extra of community service or something it's a concered effort all be in school all concerned yeah well it's a conversation that's what we see it's a conversation that we need to have to out you know to come out of the box thinking that's all I also changed I I just want to say on the record I don't know if Regional has the votes for the next year's contract and so they really need to step up their game because it's not good I I can't in good conscience vote for them you know if the renewal is coming up and I just want to raise that red flag right now so that city has a contingency plan we have you know that they're on notice and they got to improve know even if they're only they're the only game in town like I'm not going to vote for them so we have to figure something out so you've done a phenomenal job director I just want you to know every time I brought a brought an issue up you've been able to mitigate it you're like like I swear to God you're Lightning Fast every time it's not you but it's it's what we're dealing with on the street so we try and you know deliver the level of services uh that our residents deserve you know it's it's uh you know we're we're down a number of employees we're down to 273 it's a very very big organization one of the biggest issues that we're dealing down there and I I had this conversation with Jim Lao our Automotive guy we we have over 1500 vehicles in a fleet and what we've in recent times we've lost two diesel mechanics and one light duty mechanic and these are good workers they were interviewed they were positive they come on board unfortunately um they left you know UPS I mean we can't I don't know whether we have to go to that same salary scale but we have to get more competitive you know I mean a starting salary for a mechanic is $48,000 and with the technical knowledge that's needed today they're going into dealerships and they're making you know 60,000 we've lost experience mechanics where you know even with raises and everything else they're they're making $20,000 more so um we having problems getting people taking their jobs you know we have open positions they're advertised um when we think they're going to take it uh we find out no I can't take it I can't take a pay cut or I can't work for that amount of money so I mean that's moving forward I think what we have to do is align the starting salaries to the the qualifications necessary for the positions um we minimized our Outsourcing when I first come in down here we were spending over $3 million a year in out Source contracts which we've got that down to just pretty much about a million dollars and most of which is spent towards um the larger equipment that fire trucks and things like that that we can handle in-house so um I don't want to get back into that again you know I want to try and you know get uh be comparable to what the private sector is you know with our benefits package it's a good job but unfortunately the starting salaries is what's preventing people Union coming in yeah yes what you want to over the budget that's why that's why that's why I said with HR we got to start figuring out how because we see this is a problem and if we have so many fleets down there we don't have enough employees to service it what good is it we we burning out engines I guarantee you there's no oil in certain Cars the cars not mainten and so every year we we order ordering new cars but they burning out too because we can't maintain there's not efficient mechanics down there because really it should be like a a cycle or how you maintain a car like you know for us you know we drive there's so many mileage I have to take my car to maintenance you know it shows up so I take the car to maintenance but um if there's nothing in place for us as a city to have that then we're burning our engines you know police officers their cars they probably burning out engines everywhere that's what I'm saying we have to get to the place as a city to be competitive and that's why I think it's part of HR responsibility start thinking outside the box I'm I'm tired of them telling me it's Civil Service I'm tired of hearing that this is Union what can we do let's let's go to a highest resources you know far as the state goes because if we mandated by the state let's have a conversation with the state to see how we can have how we can make it better I'm quite sure we're not the only municipalities dealing with this other municipalities probably dealing with but everybody every time we get that oh it's the state we can't do nothing oh is we can't do it let's get the state involved so the state can see how we really having our challenges to uh move our city to the 21st century especially when it come to automobiles it's it's I'll give you a perfect example to what you just said Council the uh we had uh two people assigned to the tire changing um one had been terminated and then the other one went for another position basically the starting Sal on it is about $41,000 um the only Advantage is is that under the job specification they can handle a regular Duty vehicle like a police car or a fire engine so right now what we have to do is if we have a radio car say for Comm instance for a flat tire we have to pull a mechanic to deal with that we can't use that same mechanic on a heavy duty vehicle because of the job specification then it turns into a union issue where you have to heavy duty mechanic to work on a fir Tru so the recommendation was is that instead of starting them at 41 we start them at 48 what they can do both you know and that still leaves you the capability of the mechanics doing mechanic work but uh these are all challenges that you know we deal with u you know back to counsilman S the budget this year our request is $49 million $49 m294 and $294,800 14 and I want to get back to what I said earlier um 13 million now plus 2% comes off the top of it remaining portion of the budget and the increase is due to salary increases contractually obligated salary increases and costs of everything you know as I say let's get back to that water pump you know a $75 water pump is now $200 I mean we're not uh in a position uh that we're not receiving uh price increases like everybody else I I I mean we get discounts of bulk purchases but the fact of the matter is is that everything has gone up yeah so if you look at that and redact these we're still operating pretty much within the same amount of money that we've done for years it's just that salary increases and other additional costs we have no control over impact the budget guys want to add anything I don't know so um um just want to recap because I know it wasn't um here yesterday for hr's presentation but I'm going to review it uh later on today um I think what's going to be as a recommendation started a few years ago when Chanel was um downstairs and now she's back upstairs is that um when we wanted to do a management compensation study just for the management employee and we found and solicited some vendors that approximate cost was going to be about $300,000 if the city and the council wants to do a more comprehensive study um on management um and Union and the city's salary and wages that is going to be be a bigger launch and if you would like to see that request in this year's budget we would have to receive something and go back to the administration if this is going to be comparable because often Time Finance is asked to run the numbers and what we do we present a scale but then there's an element of human resource management that they own in regards to um management duties work Scopes that we do not do right so in finance we like to balance the budget and and get things in accordance to it but the director is only going to present a number based off of cola or what was permissible in the unions so that would be my recommendation to council something to explore and to cite as an example um for the 300,000 that we did not solicit to do with the management compensation study we worked with Kyle and Chanel and the administration to figure out some things on the management side and even those things out but I'm pretty sure what you saw yesterday or throughout this week is still we're still not competing right so those are just you know things that we've been exploring over the past couple years as we talk about growth changes and everything of the sort because most directors are basing their budgets on either last year or prior year kind of sort of work yeah just to give a number what 300 employees or management employees that we had that particular cost is going to be $300,000 so if you think about Citywide that's probably much greater but if that's a worthwhile investment that's something that to be considered or phased in over multiple budget years right let me ask you something uh director based on um the budget hearings and we've been hearing this for about two three years now that the salaries are not competitive you know and and we uh when directors are coming forth they how they're losing staff and and the loss of Staff really affects the residents I don't even think um sometime um residents really know all the back stuff that goes on and you know they get upset when we can't answer you know their calls on various things is a lot of times because the staff is not here there you know we don't we just don't have them you know and so now my my thing is this why do I need another study to know that we're not competitive you know I I cuz that's what you know with the manager thing but I'm I'm just saying um I'm hearing it all the time at this point I understand what you're saying and you got to do it from your point of view but I just wanted on a record because at this point it it it comes to a point and and we all up here and we see this all the time um we don't need another study to tell us that we're not competitive they're telling us based on their experience and you know the problems that they have and we got jobs listed and we can't find the people or we hire the people the moment that they we go through the physical and then they say they found a better job making more money I don't want to pay another 300,000 or whatever it is that Administration would say that I would need to do it I just know based on what I'm hearing and I know these directors are not coming here you know um lying saying no I know it and then even HR sometime they saying they having problem too I don't think the city should waste not another dime on getting another study that our salaries are not compatible what we need to do is figure it out that's why I'm saying that's why when I had HR here you know it's not you guys y'all got to just figure out the money that's why when HR is here how are we thinking outside the box yes we got these barriers I'm aware of the barriers okay but it seemed like we stopped because the barriers there there is a lot of intelligent people in in this city that are smart that can think outside the box and say you know what maybe we can try this let's go to the state with this let's partner with another municipality they're having the same issues I mean there's other ways to do this that that that's all I'm saying there's other ways you're and you're right and you just saided the example that we did I went out looked for vendors right worked in federal state and local level management and ation plans and we did it in house we're now here 3 years later still trying to figure out elements of what is human resource management and what is operational management from a financial perspective every when you work in companies or private SE HR has to provide scale over time and they work with Finance in order to get some things here I think what you're also seeing here and and regards to getting studies or or aspects of work is an operational plan yeah m plan those are all different things that are comprehensive to do so as Finance we look at the numbers if we can AFF it to do it we will do it but what you just described is what we did and so yeah those are just things that from finances perspective what we can administr do and tell you what we can afford But ultimately there are other elements here that do trigger other Financial impacts and have to be determined and would have to be prioritized I wholeheartedly agree with uh council president on this um the other thing I want to ask you guys is maybe I'm an idiot but who sets the salary range is it civil service that's setting the salary are we setting the salary like what is preventing us from having a different starting salary uh you know higher starting salary I think some of it is is regulated by Civil Service scale and then it would be the decision of the city where they want to be in that scale okay and you know one of the things too I think we that we should really kind of look at um you know the blue collar workers today are are the backbone of this country you know techn the techn aspects of of of like vehicles and things like that we have a lot of these these younger folks that are going to technical schools I think we should really look at kind of making a partnership with them you know to bring them in to get them engaged and uh you know I think when miss vote on that we had the tal the council president said the talent is there we just have to find a mechanism to you know to get them involved and I mean let's face it you know it's it's tough raising a family today on these salaries you know the folks that I have down there they're working two and three jobs to do that you know um but uh we are really really and even on the the uh the uh you know we have our electricians our plumbers you know the these folks are all long-term employees many of which are getting ready to come to retirement age and the salaries the starting salaries we're offering even those folks is is low know so I mean you know it's it's something we really have to examine it's and know let's face it everybody's going to need a plum everybody's going to need an electrician and and you know we have to be able to attract the best we can with you know and still be competitive otherwise it's it's we're going back to paying vendors you know a lot of money as opposed to bringing our own inhouse people in and know doing the work in house have to run but um I'm going to hand it over to council president and I know we aired a lot of grievances or I ired a lot of grievances but I don't want that to take away from the superb job that you've done and your directors and employees have done you have pages and pages of accomplishments here and I know you couldn't all fit it into like this crazy thick packet but it's been a and pleasure to work with you this year and you know really want to thank you for your Lightning Fast Response just being on the ball all the time and you know you and your directors and your employees so well as I say as you know there there's no uh I in team we have a great team there my division directors are phenomenal and uh my workers are they speak for themselves you know they're day of the week on what they have to do thank you for everything you do for the city director and everyone in your uh in your department for that matter we finished no I have to leave he has to go somewhere but let me ask this this question here I see on your organizational chart for each division that you have um there are certain vacancies there I don't know if um I wanted to ask Finance are they in the budget like start let me see I go to you'll see in the um automobile PowerPoint presentation that the same organizational chart is in there and the positions are color coordinated uh for what is funded um those items are shaded green uh obviously the white white boxes are existing um green boxes are vacant and funded okay shaded blue would be um not funded a new request that got you y okay so that's what um what I wanted to so there is vacancy and the funding is there it's just trying to find the trying to find I guess people who can fulfill it based on salaries it 48 that's the single biggest problem we encounter there again you know we we have applicants that are interested in the positions but unfortunately during the interview process as soon as we go to salaries we lose and uh um you know we're down I believe we're down we have approximately 272 273 when I first come in down here we had over well over 300 some of the positions have been vacated um but the positions that like for instance director Dublin I had a conversation with her yesterday it's down roughly seven positions on the custodial side yeah and you know we get you know calls for service and we have people traveling from spot to spot to spot you know so the these are all positions that you know we would love to fill as as soon as they become available and funding becomes available to you know ensure that you know we're providing the services that's expected okay and I know one time we we we talked about the sweepers I know um the new sweepers that we had purchased at one time they weren't the best so how are we now with the uh sweepers did we get U Better purchase of sweepers the little sweepers that come are they good we've had some actually we we've had them we've getting complaints over the last couple of weeks with the leaves the ravo S is pretty much basing out the council was gracious enough to approve funding for the um the bigger sweepers yeah do a better job you know you have the mechanical sweepers as opposed to the other ones the other ones were uh they were B on an experimental basis they never really fulfilled the needs that we had so what we're doing now is as we receive complaints we have our sweeper supervisors going out and we're phasing out the ravos and putting the the elens on those locations um I don't know whatever reason this year we had a lot more leaves out there and they're still around so yeah they Clogg the trucks up which necessitates them going back to Public Works takes them off the route they have to get back and you know traversing the city through traffic and everything else it becomes pretty difficult but um we are addressing that now who's responsible picking up these leaves is the homeowner if it's his tree we you know the homeowners do a pretty good job picking but unfortunately okay not everyone does their due diligence they blow around and things like that and you know we have we work with the MUA especially during potential storms to make sure that catch basins are clean most of which are you know blocked by leaves and things so um this year it's been a challenge you know for whatever reason must be I guess more trees more leaves okay good is there anything else you want to add director I'm good Finance anything got it rich uh wait wait we finished it yeah yeah all right Greg I call you a million times and you take care of everything and I want to thank you uh you're really good the only thing I disagree with is I wish far Street was a little better and talking about the leaves my neighbor just got a ticket for leaves in front of his house there were no leaves in front of his house and fight nature on that one I appreciate thank you Greg appreciate it directly she all that you guys do I really do hey may I have a motion to adjourn at 11:25 a.m. motion motion made by council president Waterman may I have a second second second by council person banel all in favor of the motion to adjourn at 11:25 amm please say I by acclamation I we are out of here at 11:25 a.m please stay tuned for our next and last budget hearing for the week all right everyone we're about to get started if we can silence our cellon I see that all the doors are closed that is fantastic good afternoon everyone we are on the record today is Friday the 20th day of December in the year 2024 this is a budget hearing for the Department of Public Safety with the Jersey City municipal Council we get it schedule 1 pm start the clock on my cell phone is showing 10:6 pm and instead of doing a roll call I'm just going to announce the council per members who are here council person ban and council president wman here we have two council members present at 106 p.m. in addition and its time its preparation the notice of this meeting was similarly disseminated on Monday December 9th 2024 at 531 p.m. to the mayor Municipal Council business administrator Corporation Council and local newspapers so I can certify as to our total compliance with the Sunshine Law director what we're going to be doing is we're asking all the department directors and their staff who's over here just to identify themselves for the members of the public who are watching on the live stream we know who you are but they may not know the members of the public and we'll go around the room to do that before I turn it over to the municipal Council just allow me to put the camera on you and then we'll be good to go director you're on I don't think that's on you just got to flick it up top up top on the mic itself uh Jim Shay director of Public Safety toana Moody Police director Bill O'Donnell direct uh Department of Public Safety Carmen gendall Director of Finance Kyle grees finance department Danny B not finance department thank you so much and I'm going to turn it over to council president w good afternoon um director just go over your presentation and we'll ask questions in between okay yes ma' then we're going to start with the division of police our biggest division okay okay so we'll just go down the line and we'll just do the operating numbers is that fair guys or you is she okay let's follow the um okay that's fine follow this and just let us know a p whatever we okay this is just our overview of everything that's done and the inside of Public Safety which is the police division overview and that's all of the units that falls underneath which is traffic um enforcement school crossing guards the police officers as well as um traffic and car pound okay um what the next page is is our budgetting staff which as you can see our adopted budget um that we asked for in 2024 to 25 that we introduced number was a little bit slightly a little bit um I think it was like 105 it's because we did lose a lot of our Deputy Chiefs okay um on our civilian end of it we went from 61 employ employees on the civilian side and now we only have 50 swor we went from 9:13 to 8:36 that's our organizational chart on that one and the next page page is our divisions that's broken up traffic Communications um the investigations and it's just broken out into all of the divisions and the staff that we have there what we had is some um key incentives that we always you know do we've been doing since 2018 and as community outreach is just a couple of the pictures of what it is that we do between bridg and the gap inside of the police department and all of Public Safety our next key incentive an accomplishment was getting the deescalation um Building open and as you can see there it's really just showing you um a lot of the training scenarios the breakout rooms um car stops okay that we have there um keeping the One-Stop shop going we have the ABC unit now in in public safety building and of course um we have the program that we're dealing with with ar Rob together so that was another one that we did get up and go in there wait a minute D Rec let me go back cuz um people are watching and I want make sure clear that's I want to make sure they have a clear understanding okay let's start out with because um we understand it but when the public is watching there's certain things that they don't understand so it's easier and everybody's been doing it it's um like when you did your um police safety overview um with Public Safety and the department of of the chief um it might be good if you read like The Office of you know Deputy Public Safety you know that portion read that in there so the people can hear that so you're talking about the page Council page two okay start there and then go back to you know um the budget and staff total let them know that you know the analysis and the head count and then when you get to your o chart Patrol Bureau let them know it's the north southeast west you know what I mean because they they don't understand it gotcha you going through it we understand it we looking at it but they can't see the presentation so I think the more information we give them better off it the be and then the divisions the traffic and got you how many staff how many vacancies okay okay that's perfect this way they can understand it no problem so then on our Public Safety Division overview is the deputy director of Public Safety the office of the chief which we have that's underneath there um that handles all of police related Department matters including Services provided by traffic enforcement unit the school traffic guards um unit the police fiscal we have the Firearms Department as well as the police record room that's where you get all of your police report traffic guards assist with various of Crossings throughout the city and Jersey City and not limited to just the crossings because they help with the parades and the festivals that we have the police um fiscal is responsible for all of the police budget as well as as well as the fiscal duties related to payroll pension Etc that we have including both sworn and civilian firearm department is responsible for all Firearms permits and the record room is responsible for all of our police reports throughout the city and we have let's go to this page which is our police budget and staff that we have the budget that we had I think last year we had I want to tell you exactly our budget was 110 million that we had um we spent 106 million and what we're asking for this year is 126 what we have civilian wise you have 61 employees we had last year this year we only have 50 our police number was up we had 900 887 sworn police offices as of last year as of this date we only have 836 okay okay yeah that so we have the the everything that falls underneath police is the chief office we have the patrol Bureau which is the north the South the East and the west and Citywide Burgery and housing unit is all that falls under Patrol the investigation unit is Street crimes Intel major case SVU um juvenile ceasefire and criminal warrants that's what Falls underneath investigations the chief offic is internal affairs special Investigation Unit the Medical Bureau um and our body one camber that we have as well as the traffic and in a quality of life unit Support Services is our property room BCI Megan's Law scoff central booking and motor schol our training Bureau is our Force unit investigation training unit background unit and the academy so on this one is just the breakdown of traffic bishop and the BC the divisions we have in traffic we have staff 237 and we have 65 vacancies the traffic for Bishop Street we have communication where we have direct director we have staff of 125 on to there cound VES right no vacancies on on Bishop Street no the numbers keep varying for there but it was like 15 we needed because we keep going up and down car pound of course that just opened up we have staff of 12 with five vacancies we still need some of those because they just opened up as of the 2nd of December okay the record room we have in the inside of their's two six and seven of them with two vacancies that we have in there we have our fiscal unit which is the two vacancies that we have in that unit we have our seizes who runs all of the plates to make sure we're good that whole unit is Staff um so we don't need employees there but we have on staff there it's like 10 of them okay gun permit is still one person inome permit which we have two vacancies definitely a difficult one here to fill UCR is the unit we had to do that um we had to build that we need to get to seven and we have in there right now five what is that UCR UCR is where the uniform crime reports come from like that whole end of the year we just did the U the UCR is the federally mandated Uniform Crime Report that we must report to the state and the federal government so they can compare crime across the United States okay and they recently changed it and made it much more involved it used to be a two-person office it now requires a seveners office okay that's all around the state that's around the state that's nework and everybody else yes okay um we have our police staff and um support staff that we have and that's like more of our uh F the people that's down at the the escalation training room our investigator civilians that's there is like seven no vacancies needed there we have no one we need there BCI is the staff that we have there and we just have three vacancies on that one and that's where they process all of the Pres got okay our uh police okay just going to give her a break because she's been doing all the reading so I'll take over for a little while we'll keep switching back and forth that's okay Public Safety police division key initiatives uh this year one increased professional development for our sworn personnel training such as active shooter training hostage training arriv together program training Etc uh this includes all of the mandated training from the attorney general which mandates went this year from one day training 18 hour day to 4 to conclude all of the training ex explain to me what is um the um ride on uh training what what is that the which one you said Ride Along training no arrive together that's the uh that's the attorney general program that we're committed to the one day a week where we have a social worker ride for eight hours with one of our trained police officers and they do follow-ups on emotionally disturbed persons they do not respond to 911 calls they do follow-ups on previously identified nonviolent emotionally disturbed person that's one day a week one eight hour shift a week now okay direct one two what is oh so to toana just said we just got up to two two we've told them that we'll fill as many days as they can give us okay but right now it was one and just went to two Okay so the social worker is from um what department is that the hospital medical center okay so the medical center is providing two social workers to ride along with a police officer 28 hour shifts I mean 28 8 hour shifts and it does the shifts um vary like could from 7 to three or is s to three it's 7 to three that's it Day Tour okay that's what they given us seven to three all right okay next initiative uh bridging continuing to bridge the gap between the community and the police department through constant communication such as our uh Captain's meetings at every District at every month and our annual activities uh are rock the blocks with our senior citizens and are rock the blocks for the juveniles and young children uh we plan to continue those they've been expanding and getting larger every year so we're hoping this year to get uh even bigger we think we're going to need two blocks instead of one okay uh continuing our commitment to promote from within uh to consider current employees for all of our promotional opportunities especially our civilian employees to give them career paths so they can move forward our sworn officers know how to do that but our civilians were giving them more of opportunities and then of course our number one priority constantly working to decrease crime across the city with our increased presence our fixed posts our use of cameras and technology and our investigative initiatives okay now when you said a fixed post CU I know for the community sometime that's that's that's challenging because sometime they'll see a officer like in a uh patrol car and they're they're on a certain corner or whatever the case may be um they can't move from that corner if something else happens correct like let's say let's say there's a a a child or something in the need a block away and they posted there could they get up and help and somebody come say please please help help of course of course they can uh that adds to the sum of misinformation that's uh there of course they can can the point being of course if they're assigned if we take the time to take a police officer and assign them to a fixed post it's because there's a condition on that location that needs it for ongoing drug dealing uh you're aware I'm sure that one of the locations that you've bought our attention many time we just executed a major search warn at after months of investigation and made three arrests and recovered large amounts of narcotics but if the community is complaining about major narcotics going on in a corner and we assign officer to that corner to curtail that activity that's their primary job now if someone comes to them and says oh we need you down here of course they can move there okay but what they can't do is just drift around their own discretion they need to address that Community complaint all right okay uh we maintain we want to maintain the grand opening of our new deescalation center and Training Center which will continue and which ties in with all the required training that's being thrown at us now gives us an opportunity to do better training for our officers and the community relations uh maintaining our One-Stop shop I remember last year we bought all of the public safety permitting requirements to one place so that our citizens no longer had to drive from the East to the north to the South you know to the center of the city in Journal Square to get different permits for the same location now they come to one location and they're helped by one of our customer service representatives and they get everything they need from us at that one time director I I just want to go back to the deescalation uh training I don't know if you heard I'm quite sure um the administrator probably reached out to you because my concern was that I know we um hire um for deescalation training but I asked the question because times is changed and there's so much going on is there a way that staff can start benefiting from this deescalation training because there just there's just too much going on in the world uh um the staff need to be trained on how to um deal with the public if someone comes in um they should be trained on how to speak to them just like you are training your police officers now and I think the staff need to be you know you know trained on what to do I I brought it up with the um with the U mayor's office when they were here and I I told them to uh reach out to see how the staff can start uh benefit from the training I know when we first started deescalation I know there was a big training downtown I went down there to see exactly how it was then there was training throughout the city different churches had training I remember that all right but uh my concern is now the staff needs to be trained I mean we had incident with people coming in you know they didn't know how to handle it what to say what to do so I I I just wanted to put that on the radar I think that's something we need to start looking into for for staff to be trained it's just a different day you know we can't take it for granted and how many buildings that we have as a city now yes ma'am we can we can certainly use that facility for that and you know we've hired outside trainers that we had a lot of success with before training our 911 operators our traffic officers who interact with the public in negative ways a lot uh we can probably extend that too so we'll look into it yeah but I I I I would prefer though if possible that the training be on the uh sites of the city building because it's one thing to get trained in another facility and you know where all the exit is it's different when you get trained in the facility that you're familiar with you'll know what to do where to go you know I don't know you know this this is just a concern yeah I understand your concern and we'll talk to the mayor's off okay I just wanted that on your radar I didn't know if they reached out to you go ahead and then finally of course our Command Conference Center is finally open in the center of the city for any emergency event so we've been working all year on getting the tech to catch up to the physical space and now we're confident that we can run any major event that happens in the city from that conference center next page uh 2024 goals yeah uh was the grand opening of the new deescalation center we wanted to implement cross training of our civilian staff to help them their opportunities to grow within the department and better serve our constituents we wanted constant professional development for sworn and civilian Personnel we wanted proactive training for all of our sworn off officers like the Tactical training incident response training deescalation training and we wanted to increase our CCTV cameras Citywide helping curb crime and protect our constituents I'll just quickly go through the deescalation center is open the cross training of the civilian staff has succeeded and we're continuing we're finding better opportunities for some of them and we're making sure that the ones who interact with the civilians are trained to to better serve our constituents uh the professional development is is continuing the proactive training for our sworn officers is continuing uh we're comp we're happy with it we're still testing it by use of um simulated events however uh that's been impacted by again the attorney general has changed the state requirements for training so we're going to have to quadruple our time committed to the state requirements some of it crosses over the escalation training Etc we're confident we can do both but we're going to have to focus on making sure do what's required by the state first and then any left over time we'll commit to our desire training and finally wait let me ask so when the state um requires us to do something do they give us any funding I'm just curious no know they can come change at any time and we could be training in one way and then all of a sudden here come a mandate we need you to do this but then that can cost us another extra 100,000 so um they don't contribute it's a completely unfunded mandate both in money and time and the time is more important because if we have to train an entire police force if they if you add three training days the equivalent to three training days that's three times 800 2400 days that they won't be out on the street so now when we train though because then explain it to me because I'm not a police officer I know how this really goes now when we're required by the state to do certain training and if um we have so many police officers on duty okay how do we balance that out with the protection of the city do we say okay 30 police officers have to go in training so we only going to have like maybe let's say a 30 on the street you know what I mean and whereas on that day you could had 60 I'm just giving a number but now since this training is required I got to take 30 and put in training you know how is that done and how that keeps us kind of flowing as a city or or does that kind of us well we're a little ahead of the curve because director Moody had developed the training Bureau a couple years ago she must have had a crystal ball to see all this stuff coming but it's a good question bottom line is we never affect the safety of our citizens okay so we know what we need to answer the radio runs to handle car accidents to be available in case citizens call for help uh detectives to investigate crime emergency service to support our officers in emergencies we never allow that number to shrink on any given day what we will do is if we have officers in excess of that number we'll try to get them into a training module or we'll have to bring them in on overtime now this year um the contracts are up okay and one of the things we're exploring with both police and fire is whether they would be willing to add training days to their yearly you know time that they come to work days dedicated to training so that we would never have to impact those um days when we have people out on the street and they're very you know they're interested it would be Revenue neutral for the city because we would pay for eight hours but we get eight hours of training so it's a fair deal for the city and it would allow the officers to go to training on committed days and not kind of go peace meal when when it's available so we're exploring that with both unions now and we've gotten a positive reaction from both y' can just jump in I'm just jumping okay okay go ahead and as far as increasing the CCTV um we had a meeting the other day and I think everybody knows uh we are comfortable with our coverage now and this year we used um Federal money available and grants to increase the backend the servers the storage one of the things we're finding is uh several of our initiatives that we're doing are very storage heavy on these videos uh the body cameras are excellent our CCTV is excellent but maintaining those videos for a increasing period of time in case there is a civil case in case there's a criminal case uh is um extensive so we are having to put a lot of money not just us Nationwide we're just a little ahead of the curve because we're doing a better job I think under director Moody than a lot of people I'll give you an example uh it's we had to put our funding this year into those back things as opposed to putting new cameras out there so we're comfortable with our camera coverage and we have now increased our storage and server a ability one of our initiatives this year that's taking up that servers uh under director Moody and the chief we have started an initiative where we document every interaction with a person in crisis okay and we not only document it we take the video of our interaction with that person it's reviewed by supervisors to see if there's any training needs and then it's kept so if we have another interaction with that person we can look back at the first one and see is there um negative uh are they going in a negative direction do we need to like were they more Lucid or less Lucid are they getting better are they getting worse is someone who's supposed to be taking their medications showing signs of not um all of that is now available to the social workers to the medical people if they want to look at our interactions with any person in crisis it's also available if there's ever a question of how we handled that person in crisis so now every single interaction with a person in crisis in Jersey City is documented is and all the film is librar for one of a better word so that we can always look back at our interactions if there's a question but that takes SW space up now we believe the entire state if not the country eventually is going to go in the same direction we think we're just the first ones to do it and so with the social worker then I I I assume that because she's or her or they whoever is riding with the police officer for 8 hours 2 hour shifts right um they would have some information if a person is in crisis because only if a person is in crisis I don't think this may be their first time so then that social worker should already have some information and know how to accompany that police officer if they know it's the same address am I correct yeah yeah we've always had that relationship with the crisis response team uh yes they're riding around out there but again don't want people to think this program is something it's not uh they cannot respond right persons in crisis at that moment like we just had one today we just had a walk in about an elderly went to the apartment it was a barricade uh the person was threatening and had barricaded their apartment we were able to resolve it peacefully but arrive together cannot respond to that job until the scene is secured but they are available like the crisis team always was right to tell us well we been there 10 times before or they they should be able to have some I I know they can't respond to it but if they hear a address over the um system I'm quite sure in the car they should say well you know this address you know there's a person in crisis I I've known I've been there so then when the police officer arrive they should know pretty much how to assess it and deal with the situation that's that that's what I'm saying because they should have some information if they if they do they absolutely share it okay that's that's my concern they they should be sharing would if they help this at this address numerous times and so if a police officer is getting a 91 911 call then um there should some alert go up with them I'm quite sure to say okay no that this person is a person in crisis even before the police get there that's what I'm saying I mean we're ahead of them even we have for lack of a better word uh heat customers yeah and um we have informational supplies to all of our officers identifying who persons in crisis that have been in touch with us before uh things that have worked you know ways of communications that were fruitful ways of communication that were not fruitful um danger signals when they're dealing with them so between all of us we we we kind of break down into two categories people that we repeatedly come into contact with that we're well aware of and we know and everyone knows and then lately we've had a couple that they just moved into Jersey City the one person that now he's now a repeat customer but our first barricade was the first time though he had an extensive history in New York right and like today's yeah pday is an elderly person that probably um it's our first time dealing with them I doubt it will be our last but it's probably uh onset you know recent onset the police and the police are train in crisis yes every member of this every member of the department okay has received a crisis communication training every single member uh our 2025 goals uh we want to get the new East District open for the grand opening we still would like it we ask every year I know we're never going to get achieve this or we don't seem to be but we would still like a mounted unit for our downtown area and for our Parks uh somebody will somebody someday will new going I believe that uh director uh the new East District me mean in Hoboken were you opening it no it's in Jersey City sir yeah on 16th Street 17th Street what a j that is uh building going up there we would like to expand the department for more police presence which provides more safety for our constituents every year that's our goal uh the mayor and I uh going back I guess 10 years now we looked at the department did a full study I still believe this department should be between a, and 1100 officers uh with the decline in hiring and the decline in applicants Nationwide for policing we will not achieve that next year uh we will though we hope we have now and I mentioned this in our last meeting we're past the 25e mark of the large classes that were hired during the safe Street safe City initiatives of the late 90s okay so we are not expecting any more major um bulges of retirements okay through the pipeline and we should now hopefully next year be able to catch up a little and to chip into some of that decline but we will not get to the Thousand to 1100 that we think the department should be at because everybody's done pretty much reached the age of retirement that is retiring so we will pretty much have a pretty much um full police force in another two years yeah uh we have some people coming up for retirement but much less than came up over the last two years because there was that huge amount of H under the federally funded Street safe City back in the lake yeah but a lot of them are not leaving retiring a lot of them are leaving to other departments because they're tired of what's going on here in Jersey City yeah I looked into that when you said last time uh no we do not have a large group of people leaving for other departments we had one officer leave for the port authority right uh any officer hired by the Port Authority that is traditionally yeah when they go but other than that no we don't we did have two officers leave for other departments who returned oh they went to the other departments they came back yeah so uh director how know sorry councilman Solomon not to interrupt you but I just want to Mark you present at 109 PM so we have three council members present I'm sorry all good um what would be your goal of how many officers will get into Academy and hire in 2025 what how many seats can you get so right now the county gave me 20 but the police test has to come out it doesn't come out again until March so we have a current list right now with 75 on it but out of that background would I get the 20 seeks hopefully but then we would have to wait for a new police test to come which doesn't come into March and when do we get those seats the 20 no the the um traditionally we have filled every seat that's right that they've offered to us uh what we have now is we have the final 75 residents that are able to that are eligible to be hired they're going under background investigations by the time some of them will decline some of them will have found other employment you know in the meantime our experience is of 75 we will probably get 15 to 20 uh that enter the academy we'll probably lose five in the academy and we'll end up with 15 uh we will then there's a new test in March it'll come out we'll now have the top of a new list we will try to get as many as we can we'll shoot for maybe 50 to 100 uh so saying 70 that's right in the middle there but uh that will depend now on how many seats the academy is able to give us because just like we'll have a new pool of people to hire so will everybody else so every jurisdiction will be kind of a jockeying for those seats that are available in the academy to get people trained and certified as police officers now the Hudson County Police Academy has been very good to us and they have like bent over backwards to try to get the seats that director Moody needs to get our people trained we're the large engine of of Hudson County so they will work with us but if you ask me I would love to get 15 to20 into the first class and I would love to get somewhere between 50 and 100 into the second class by the end of the year and right now what are our recruitments effort it look look like in advance of the March testd me what do our recruitment efforts look like in advance of the March test uh we still have our recruiting our training people out there uh police recruiting has not been our problem uh after we it was Council president'll remember when we all took over 11 years ago it was a big problem uh we now have um our recruiters our juvenile officers our school officers have kind of talked up the test we will still sir um make the computers available for people who don't have computers we'll help people file for the test we'll do the pre-physical training for them so that they make sure that they can pass we do all of that uh quite frankly police now the police department very much reflects the city everybody is involved every community group has representation we're not as worried uh we're still struggling with the fire department and it's not because we'll get to it later we're getting more applicants but we're still not getting the penetration into certain communities we want and it's a tougher one because one fire is an elemental Elemental fear a lot of people just do not want the job they want they don't want to know anything about going into a building that's burning on fire we have to do a lot of training to make them understand what the job entails what the opportunities are how safe they'll be the efforts we'll put into them to get them there number two it's a very family oriented job it's a job that historically across the country has been family oriented and families go into it so to break new people into that is taking us a lot more effort than we needed for the police department uh uh so increasing our cctvs we still want to increase now that we've got the back end covered we are going to start increasing our CT cctvs more and um counil members that will include we've now succeeded at this we'll have to go back to those first cameras we put in and we're going to have to start replacing some of them they've reached the end of useful life and we're going to have to replace those and those are at our real key locations so we'll do that this year and expanding the vehicle Fleet which director Moody will talk about later okay you want to go to budget change I'm going to pass it back to director Moody now for the budget changes so on our next Pages would be I'll just read the expenditure and then what we're asking to introduce is that fair or do I need to read something else besides that because the it'll tell you my expenditures of what I spent so the budget we ask for in 20 24 was 1,836 430 1 and then this year we are asking for the 108 687 670 um for salaries because as director Shay just alluded to we had a whole lot of retirees which was our Deputy Chiefs andm that did retire because it was so many big classes coming and you have a lot of the younger salaries that's coming through now because it's the new classes um our parttime is wasn't there overtime I cannot stress this one enough where you guys gave me 8.5 um I'm at like I spent 9.9 million but I asked for $14 million just so that we can go back to how the ag office is putting down all these trainings you have to train these people we can't tell them no because their licenses is tied to it so they have to take these license you know they have to get these classes and that's overtime cuz it's no way we we can do it without paying overtime so if we had 913 offices or 887 last year and now I only have 837 of it I still got to do the same amount of police keep in there if not more with less cops that I have that's out there so the $14 million for the last want to be fair here five or six years I've always ask for the 13 or 14 and by the time December come I'm close to the number but never over the 13 million so this is basically because of the training that the AG is demanding us to do so we have to increase our budget because they demanding this and they're not contributing to this they do not pay us for that we have to pay for that is a cost that's for us here in the city yeah and just to be clear because I know you understand but you mentioned the people watching they're not just demanding it they're mandating it and they we cannot leave police officers on the street unless they do is training the New Jersey now has a licensing requirement for police officers and as part of that license for them to perform the duties of police officers they must perform this training every single year so where we used to be able to get a it was a day twice a year now it's three days twice a year to get all the 4our blocks in that we have to get and that doesn't even include the training that the mayor yourselves that we want our officers to do do the you know that's only the stuff that's mandated from the state that we are not allowed to deviate from so it's it's a huge unfunded mandate across the whole state um what is the training that they demanding I'm I'm just because I don't know I mean one of them was just what is it I'm quite sure what that the state is man I will send it to you but I mean they just added four hours of jiujitsu training to us uh for really yes uh there was four hours of active shooter training we were a little ahead of some of this I'm proud to say I'm not I'm not I'm not trying to make fun of it but I'm just trying to figure out you know the state is demanding this and I just want to know what is the training that they demanding our offic to do this way the public will know the state is demanding them that they learn what yeah jiujitsu yeah okay a lot of these okay not a lot so that's that's a way that they can I guess um approach somebody without using the gun uh there's different thoughts oh I mean I I we have we have an incredibly restrain police force we're ahead of most of the training requirements we've been doing like they they were surprised that office to find that all of our officers had done the crisis you know we crisis communication qualified we do incredible training uh every twice a year we test the escalation techniques we have a training Bureau we monitor all our Officers Training we bring in people we have a force investigative unit started by director Moody that investigates every single use of force no matter how Minor by a police officer and offers training to our officers on how it could have been handled differently so we we're ahead of a lot of this uh council president one thing I will do is get you a copy of all of this required trainings that's changed this year and I'll send it to you to distribute to the council thank you okay so the next line is our uniform allowance that's part of contract we have to pay that number out which is the $1.1 million the holiday comptom that's contractual can't do nothing about it and that's for every officer that can sell back days um retirement the lump suum payout of course that number was high because as I said to you we had a large class 887 like 50 something people to leave so you have to do the payout for that um then we'll drop down to my operating number that we need down here our office supplies different stuff like that which is line 2011 it was 32 we spent 36 which again just want to be able to put we ask for high numbers but then and I get it when the budget office have to you know cut back it's just the unfortunate part is hard and so they do work with me to try to get me the necessary things that I need um photographic as you see we didn't use that um our food line is the stuff that we normally use for the block bodies that we have that's out there um constructions is none line 220 212 again the rock the block parties the night out that we have to spun because that's all the way around that we do it um our wear an a pair and that is to make sure because at Public Safety everyone wears uniform unless you have the office job um but we make sure everybody have wearing a pair especially with crossing guards cuz it's contractual that we put it to them our line 218 is our Police Supplies which is our ammunition even with our with the new deescalation and as you just heard all of the training ammunition is not something we can play with we cannot play with ammunitions and the supplies that go there because the guys have to qualify now twice a year so that number is as well so they have to go and qualify and taking off the street some is four times a year because of the way they switch it so that's like all of those things and them you know like that we can go through it is because those are all of that affects our overtime number because you have to get that part done um that was my ammunition then we have just like the regular rentals that we may have some of them just increased because we now have to put rentals in some our location or increase them um supplies some of it went down which is you can see our dues for 306 we brought that one down training and meeting expenses again training is not something we can get around so that one we did to 75 but with us having a deescalation center it does help a little bit in cost and with um HR now taking over the tuition so that's why that number that's normally high is down as well let me ask you a question director do anyone use our training facility the new deescalation center that we just so um is a fee for them or it it is a fee okay yes ma'am um we're GNA actually do I believe they want to do press on it at some point but yes multiple police departments both in state and federal are using it or asking us to use it and are willing to pay the fees to the city to you know to to use it so it it will become self-sustaining we hope as we go and it will chop in you know we'll ask you for money but we'll be able to return money to the general fund now is it possible then is there a portion of that maybe a percentage that can go to like um training the public with it like deescalation I I don't know because now if this facility will pretty much pay for itself then there should be a portion of that I don't know if it's 5% I'm just you know asking the question 5% or whatever that can help the uh community in some way or another um you know help with the training and you know get them on board get them to see certain things you know have them apart in some way I I I don't know yeah because you know because we really Community orientated and so if that deescalation Center is going to be I want to say a help to us because other entities are coming in wanting to rent and it will pay for itself but a portion should always be set aside ESP especially um when it come to the community and some type of community get back or some type of community training or you know some type of uh mental health uh social worker come in and give a work class I'm just saying that's all I'm just think outside the box because whatever we do we want to try to especially if other people coming in and want to use our facility we just want to put a carb a portion of that out because we don't want it to keep coming out of your budget per se but if this is going to be a mechanism in which funding can come in just take like 2% or 5% of that and and build it back in the community in some way that's all you know what I'm saying it's a thought right yeah as the like as as the revenue increases that that would be again for the C the bus administ the reason why I'm saying this I'm trying to bring all this on the table because this is a budget and so when things out on the table we could say okay you know I remember there was discussion about that is it a possibility that we can do that when that funding s to come in we could take 2% or 5% of that and create something for the community in some type of way that that's what I'm saying instead of keep going into our regular budget trying to get this because we see now if everybody wants to use this facility that's a revenue that we didn't have before because we didn't have this we didn't have the place yes so what the council can do with uh Administration and Public Safety is amend the the municipal code where those fees are outlined um you'd have to add language to dedicate a portion of the funds I'm and obviously adopt the ordinance at with the Amendments and then we'd have to get approval from the state uh to establish um a dedicated fund for that similar to what we did with um cannabis attacks yeah I I just think so since it's you know since they come in to use a facility we should figure out a way how we can give some to the community you know some way or another you know Community policy something like that thank you go ahead then we the last that we have on the page 11 on that one is literally just the leasing that we have to pay for for guys all of your Council people thank you so much for the new police vehicles we now can get them around CU we did have bad Fleet going so our number went from to 1.3 up to the 2.8 and that's just to pay for all of the leases for the new cars that we got let me ask just something is there a mechanism in the police department with these vehicles that um there's a log book over there when they should be maintained because like when they come in and so when they supposed to be maintenance y'all send them to the order Department to DPW anything Services when it should be checked the supervisors on duty make sure there's no accidents that might happen they they inspect the car when every time it's supposed to go down for service tpw normally let us know this car need to come on down okay so it's DPW responsibility not you guys responsibility so DPW should have a log saying okay we got this yes it's a Shar but that's your responsibility because they'll send us the list our responsibility is to make sure we get it down okay we work with DPW and they do a great job with that okay because I don't want to hear about no more you know engines blowing cuz ain't no oil in the car list I I don't want to say too much but the problem with cars and policing is know no car was ever designed to put up with the stresses that we put it through driving it almost 24 hours a day so you're right though regular maintenance increases their life but it's just that's eternally imp policing we're going to be tough on cars and we're going to need to replace them faster than other people uh go ahead no go ahead you then I the last page which is page 12 that's just the justifications of the budget changing like to any line that I need in 212 it was the increase as director Shay said that a lot of our community events the numbers are increasing um so that's the increase for there the wearing a pair would just be that one stay the same the ammunition was line 218 because again we have the building that's down there and the mandates that we have to do to qualify was the increase of that and other than that um 2025 needs is just the increase for the foods for there and the lease um payment went up cuz we have the more vehicles uh director Shay Mr Shay uh are you the Police director are you the Police director I'm the public safety director I thought I introduced myself in other words we have two directors yes nice because when the mayor got in uh the taxpayers all right I have a whole load of questions to ask why is the parking authority short 65 people number one can you answer that it comes to parking enforcement right we we put in the request if the budget is not there we got to wait until the budget office is approved for us to put new employees there and a lot of the employees sometimes they can go out on different leaves we can't do anything about that part so they have been doing a great job of getting us new employees over at parking actually The Parking Authorities should be making millions of dollars for the city I see the sweeper come down my street no ticket Giver several cars park there nobody's getting tickets and that's all over the city all right the Parking Authorities is a mess your school guards I get complaints all the time who's ever running the school guards uh the school guards are the morale was horrible the police department why' you take lieutenants off the desk and put sergeants behind the desk that's a simple one so simple we yes we Consolidated and I know you were in a Precinct so this should we Consolidated the booking procedures to a central booking the reason behind that was after talking to the cops we realized we were doing excessive transport of people that were under arrest and we were bringing them first to a district doing part of the processing there then transporting them to Central Booking finishing the processing instead now both they and their property go directly to Central Booking that limits the time that they're being transported where they can get sick where they can get injured where there can be a negative interaction with the police officers and it brings them into contact with a more professional Cadre whose whole job is dealing with people under arrest so they do it every day they're familiar with the challenges and they're good at it by removing the responsibility for prisoners and property which are the two Lar responsibilities of any desk officer by far by removing those from the districts it was no longer necessary to have a lieutenant as the desk officer in the district in central booking it is still required for there to be a lieutenant as the supervisor on the desk in the districts where now their whole responsibility has been kind of cut back to turning out the new platoon getting them out on the street and then just waiting because no prisoners come there no property is handled there Etc now that can be handled at the sergeant level now I'm sure you know I was the one who put lieutenants back on the desk when I took over the Jersey City PD it was sergeants on the desk I was the one who put lieutenants back there because at the time their responsibilities included these prisoners and property so now that we have removed that and centralized it there's no longer a need to have excessive resources on the desk yeah but the lieutenant has the experience I worked in a pre for 36 years the lieutenants have the experience you got new sergeants you're taking experience out from behind the desk and it's more professional to have a lieutenant who has the experience over the years behind the desk rather than the sergeant uh all right that's uh I think maybe the both of you should get out and start speaking to the police officers because the morale in the police department and the fire department is horrible and I have them stopping at my house I speak to them all the times I said I taught most of them in the police academy and uh I listen to them and when you said they're not leaving many will be leaving this job here they're going to other departments they're looking I know several right now that are looking to other departments to leave Jersey City you have to build the morale back up you have to get it back to the way it was because it's a shame and the ones who were suffering on the people of Jersey City and the last two days uh director Moody you got a call from Rachel SE about a car to respond for they broke into her car the other day did you call the police did you call the radio room so what happened is Rachel did call my personal phone personal to ask me in reference to her car getting broke into and she said to me director because of whatever the situation that they did she had to call over to there and I did do a followup to make sure that the cops were going to show up there and in between they switch uh changing of shift so then she called me to let me know direct that they did not get there and we followed up called the radio room and said for them to get an officer over there so yes I did assist all right about two hours later I had wait wait I want to say this I don't want nobody's personal business here thank you this is a budget hearing yeah this is nobody's personal I'm not no but you brought up a personal person I'm not comfortable I don't want that uhuh I don't want that out here yeah this is a budget hearing let's stay focus on the budget if there's a situation there Rich you can pick up the phone and speak however I'm going to just since that scenario was portrayed I'm just going to say for the sake of the people watching anyone who is the victim of a crime should call 911 not someone's personal cell phone number 911 is the call is where is the way to get the police immediately to respond if there's a problem we'll handle it but no one should be encouraged to call anyone but not if they witness a crime or are the victim of a crime well an hour and a half later I had a call right so let's on I'm in a traffic traffic and for all right I have one more question and that's it I gotta leave on 12224 I sent director Shay a uh asking for information contain uh let me put my glasses on containing the below concerns we sent you a list of concerns uh I you have not answered them and I know the other Council people want are interested in these problems and we'd like an answer and you would said at a meeting the other day you have to go to the Ba's office no you don't have to go to the Ba's office you're the boss and PE the people want answers we want to know what's going on and we'd like you you to reply to this uh to to the questions we asked okay I know we had a closed session too some things were addressed there but we can always set up another meeting if none of your um concerns was addressed at that meeting I know you were there so send it over to me Rich exactly what you want because we did have a closed session with them and certain things were addressed um so the next thing we going in traffic enforcement come on council president councilman we do that I just wanted a more council person to lay present at 1: 152 PM so we now have four council members present just before we left PD if I could ask a couple more questions um you obvious mentioned the arrive and it something we've talked about we have the two days is there anything in the budget that the city could put in to ensure that we can expand to more days and more hours if the Attorney General's office is willing to expand upon it yeah and I'll just no we we have the resources because like our offices are out there anyway basically all arrive means is that we're chaffering the social worker because the crisis team was out there anyway and if we needed them were out there but through arrive we partner up now we're driving that social worker around while they do their thing we've told both the Attorney General's office and the hospital we will support as much as they want if they can do it seven days a week 20 24 hours a day we we will support it if we ever get that which I doubt maybe we would ask you know to increase the budget a little but we're comfortable that we have the people right now she's doing an on a pilot program using our training units Personnel that are highly trained we can always come come up with the people to do that if we have to I think it's going to be more a question of their resources to provide people and then um given you know some of the declines in the number of sworn officers have has there been any redeployment of officers to foot patrols and kind of community policing and generally the Patrol Division versus you know other uses of the officers our priority is always and our minimum maning the first thing we have to do is answer the radio as and provide so our our minimum Manning is six cars right per unit now uh about two years ago during the uh intense conversation about policing in America and de deconfliction and everything we switched from one officer cars to two officer uh we've seen a huge benefit from that as far as uh less negative things starting less things be beginning to grow uh less um aggressive situations getting out of control so we're going to continue that program of having two officers every car we put out has two officers in it uh when we have ex extra officers we put them out on foot patrol once the cars are filled uh and when we identify a location that absolutely needs the foot patrol to handle it like uh downtown's uh Newark Avenue you know and stuff like that we will put people out there on foot patrol but the first priority is always filling those six response cars so that we can have handle of radio runs sure and and to what extent are we able to um increase deployments for the traffic for not just the of of sworn officers in the Traffic Division uh to increase the amount of traffic enforcement the city can do this is where the officers to them so I just okay kind grab Adam so we have the which is Travis Lieutenant Travis r that helps with the enforcement there and you know the boulevard is handled by the counties so they normally do it there so if we get like high areas of volume like if you guys reported our community do we put the radar out there now so that we can see where we would need to enforce more where they're speeding when kids are trying to go to school some of those high traffic areas um we now invested in uh the radar system so we can see how many cars are going through so that it'll help so right now we don't have a police officers that's designated just to traffic you have the traffic investigators that go out if there's a car crash or accident that's with any car in the city that they address that particular part but if we have to enforce after any of the numbers come in high or reported we then send officers over to those areas so Travis basically has the authority to pull officers from a district If he if he identifies a condition that needs correction okay I was going to ask uh regarding off duty assignments uh how are we assigning those assignments are we doing it randomly like can we put it through a computer system instead of like traditional methods um would that be something that you guys would be amendable towards yeah we you to pass an ordinance saying you know off duty assignments have to be through put through a randomizer they they don't go through a randomizer it's a list and they go in order on the list based off of based off of seniority okay based off of seniority so they go in order down the list they used to do it with a pck system there was a lot of corruption around that we changed it now we have civilians in charge they go right down the list if you're called you're given the opportunity for a job uh if you turn it down then they go to the next name and they come back to you now the problem is some jobs are more lucrative than others and some officers want those and don't want the others and that's it's not going to happen under this system because when your name comes up you're going to get offered whatever job is available so we constantly have complaining about oh I didn't get this job I got that job but this is the system we put in place after the problems we had with corruption around the off-duty and it's it's as random as can be when here's a list of your names someone calls in for a job we call you and say we have an off-duty job at 7 o'clock tomorrow here you either say yes or no if you say no we move to the next name and and it'll move around back to you again but any of the complaints that come about it when we dig into them we find it's people who are trying to manipulate the system to get the more lucrative jobs and no it's just pure luck if you get if your name comes up when the lucrative job comes in you get it now if nobody will take a job you can go on this secondary list of people you can call me if you can't find anybody to take a job that tends to be our younger officers who want you know they're they're younger they're stronger they're willing to work on their three days off uh they can end up getting extra jobs only because they're willing to come in at a moment's notice but they don't go to that secondary list unless nobody's taking it off the primary list just cuz I was going to say we just graduated five officers the other day there's obviously a recruitment crisis and I'm not sure why that is is it based off of the contract that you have to go off of seniority is it departmental policy like what is the um where is the origin source of this policy so just just to grab at that he already makes it as Fair as you can all the way across the board because a PO can work it a supervisor can work it and it's anyone that can work the job everyone is just one less it's not I'm a boss and I get it because you you know have a higher rank we do not do it that way to speak about the system the problem becomes where a second emergency list comes in at what happens when you have an emergency in the middle of the night the machine can't kick it out and say there's a water main break or the the light pole or public service and things like that so we put it together where an emergency list comes and say I can find someone to help with assist because right now what we do when emergency comes we call whatever that district is and take a car off the street to protect the the the incident that we have going on the emergency and then we get someone over there to off duty so we can send them back to patrol so we do the senority because it's all the way from a captain all the way down to a PO that uh works all of these jobs when you get the five like you said we just have five The Graduate five that just hit the East District that finish with their six months training that hit the district we don't have huge numbers with there but we do make them wait a certain amount of time before they can work off duty because we feel like they should learn a job before just working off duty also I don't know if this was touched on uh regarding like emotionally distressed people like I know sometimes you know they they can be a danger to themselves and a danger to others but do we always have to send like the Cavalry uh in terms of like every like ESU um because it just I I don't know if that's like the most um productive or conducive way to deescalate something and I know it's probably to protect people's lives but when you send that kind of response you know I know and you've stood out there for hours to make try to deescalate deescalate a situation but I don't know having all those people the boys with the big toys like come out it it it's intimidating that's what I'm saying is I don't know if that's the best way to respond but maybe you can elaborate on that yeah H that's that that just as intimidating to me as like a as a lay person and I just you know I want to know if what I understand but uh like persons in crisis calls are some of the most dangerous calls we get and that response has been tailored and developed over decades and New York City responds to every emotionally disturbed person with two cars a supervisor emergency service and an ambulance before they respond uh that we are medical personnel will not respond until the situation is secured uh the attorney we send a car a supervisor an emergency service rolls toward the job you know if they can if they're not called off uh the Attorney General reviewed our procedure and thinks it's better than most people in New Jersey because we demand that supervisor immediately respond you know along with the officers the bottom line is uh the they're very unpredictable you know jobs and having resources there prevents it most times from getting out of control uh as opposed I know it looks counterintuitive but the truth is that by getting there being able to control the scene we reduce the number of negative interactions that we have with persons a crisis not the other way around and our numbers bear that out and again we meet the director and I went to a full uh meeting with the Attorney General's office about this and they were shocked at number one how much data we have around what we're doing and number two how few times we actually have to use Force despite how bad it looks how few times we actually have to use it with by our tactics so unfor I mean we all wish I I say all the time I wish I was not in the person in crisis business I wish I could pull my officers out of it and it could be handled solely by medical you know and psychological Personnel but unfortunately the medical and psychological Fields have decided that they will not respond understandably until police officers declare the scene secure and no danger to anyone and then they'll you know and then they'll come so we are going to be responding to these jobs for the foreseeable future and the way we do it is the best way we can come up with it's impossible to tell I mean we just had we had one today that somebody just walked in and said their elderly parent or elderly relative uh is becoming less responsive and they'd like what they call a health and wellness check when we got there the person was violent and barricaded the door with a refrigerator again against us uh thankfully having enough people there meant we can cover the windows we can cover the doors we can evacuate people you know from the surrounding things all the things that we have to do and it was resolved peacefully and fairly quick supervisor is there immediately to take command to uh call for crisis communicators everything else and that we reached out to the attorney G I mean to the prosecutor's office we reach out we have a whole procedure we follows the last one we had one yesterday somebody with a warrant we handle this job all the time a very minor warrant we should have been able to just escort him into court do some paperwork with him let him leave instead it turned into a barricade on a roof threatening to jump off a roof because the person was more in crisis than could have been anticipated based on the information we had again we brought it to a successful conclusion but that required emergency service deploying the anti-all equipment you know in case the man jumped etc etc so we found it's better to have it there and uh that's going to be our response for the foreseeable future though we understand the concerns you know I don't discount everything you're saying I'm just saying if there are advances in technology non-lethal advances in protocol that we can continuously learn from that we you know can we we don't rest on You Know The Laurels of past protocol and that we continue to find better a better way because I don't think it's fair to the EDP and it's not fair to the police officer to put them in that kind of like situation and just you know that's the situation it is what it is and we we want to find a way to resolve it and you're you are saying it's the best way but I I think that you know we need to perpetually look for a better solution I agree councilman uh we I will promise you we will if people come out we're constantly testing less lethal devices we're constantly testing equipment we're constantly testing tactics and seeing what other negotiations like all of that yes we've increased our negotiators our crisis communicators uh two of the things I'm not sure you were here before that director Moody and her team have put in this year one we now um have a separate form that every officer fills out every time they're in contact with a person in crisis any type of Contact self-initiated radio run Etc we also document using their body cameras the entire interaction and we're creating a library of all of those interactions they're reviewed by our Force investigative unit and our training unit uh whether Force we used or not they're reviewed for good tactics for bad tactics for Lessons Learned we keep a record of how we interact with certain individuals that we interact with continuously what works what doesn't work what Communications are effective what Communications are ineffective and we're also um piloting a program where we are sending out to all our officers on the on their devices uh uh persons in crisis that we interact with frequently both photos descriptions uh effective techniques dangers do we have family members on that list we don't give family members out to every police office but yes we know who who we can contact uh medical personnel that have had success we're starting to document all of that and again we're keeping all of that video in a library so that if a family has a question about how we interacted with a person in crisis we're now going to be able to bring them in and review the video with them as long as there's no criminal investigations going on and they're going to be able to see all of that so we started doing that this year and we're going to be moving forward with it we have a weekly meeting and our arri together Personnel are invited to attend that meeting sometimes they do sometimes they're busy meeting is this sorry we have a weekly meeting of we where we review all our per our interactions with persons in crisis for the previous week do we have information where where that is and what time that is and well that's just that's just us in the arve together program but we'll get you information if you'd like to attend one and see what it looks like and you're not open to the public right now because you run into HIPPA laws and everything else the persons in crisis are protected their information is protected would you commit to meeting with and we spoke about this in closed session but I just want to get it on the record that you would meet with NJ together um regarding the arriv together program so I'll meet with anyone about it except like I said I can't share certain you know certain information about individuals okay okay let's move to traffic come on and you can do the numbers okay traffic division uh we got a cover page page two uh parking enforcement responsible for the management and operation on and off street parking enforcement of applicable laws ordinances and regulations as to the parking of vehicles within the city of Jersey City the division is also respons responsible for the promotion of free movement of vehicular traffic and subsequent relief of congestion on city streets during critical incidents or events such as parades or uh unplanned events such as demonstrations hereby improving the conditions affecting Public Safety and the welfare of our residents therein our goal is to further expand and streamline the services provided to our residents through the use of Technology proper Staffing and Innovative problem solving strategies the division is responsible for the enforcement of all parking violations covered under New Jersey title 39 and Jersey City municipal ordinances under chapter 332 and is also responsible for the issuance and maintenance of Records pertaining to residential parking permits and utilizes vehicle integrated License Plate Reader software to assist in enforcement efforts uh the division is responsible for the issuance and maintenance of Records pertaining emergency no parking signs utilized for construction projects and special events events operates and maintains 17 over 1700 met parking spaces Citywide recently implemented and updated the park mobile digital parking system and maintains 11 Municipal parking lots with 426 metered or permit only spaces next page three is uh following the same pattern we use with the police department the budget analysis for parking enforcement and you was saying just with the civili the hiring at that last year we had 50 employees that was inside of um parking enforcement right now we have that number up to 75 and of course we would need the more because once they take leaves and everything else we want to be able to keep continue to cover all we up to 75 so far thanks to you guys in the budget Department assisting us there it's on page so now when when it comes to that division though I know during school time like okay when school is over you lose those employees correct how do how do how does that happen you talk no well we're talking about the parking en forces that maintain the streets meaning the ticketing and stuff right right I'm talking about those guys so you keep them all year round they don't have yes no no they all year round they are all year yes cuz they have that particular one right now they have the projects that's down here they are on streets to make sure that they're enforcing and none of the D par cars here are Jal Square certain areas we have that we put out there to do it but they are they are all year round it's just a crossing guards that's part time tying into what we mentioned before the crossing guards have the option to apply for the traffic like when they school year ends and they're no longer employed they have the option to apply for one of these available jobs in the traffic enforcement division are they aware of that yes they are however most of them choose not to because they have their own income requirements that they don't want to exceed what are we doing about the WhatsApp the WhatsApp is like a mess it's a dumpster fire can we find another app to yeah like we are looking into another one yes the uh you know the original developer of that it was very successful but the original developer uh is somewhere in the Ukraine in the Ukraine somewhere in the Ukraine has he doing has returned to the we don't want to know anymore I agree so our so Chris's ability to him has degenerated and yes we're looking into are there other apps that would provide us with the same type of responsiveness for our citizens okay that's been a frequent great yes because we had several people who used it very effectively and they were almost neighborhood watch you know keeping an eye on things and it was great but we've we've lost some of that because again the developer who was wonderful at the beginning and who was very responsive and excellent uh I'm not sure what he's doing in the Ukraine but he has returned to the Ukraine do we have a timeline on when that would happen um a new app so we do not but what we do you know because so the public can know that the WhatsApp still works the parking enforcement still answers to that when you send a call through that app the parking enforces still do answer to that it's just H good because right so the 2 24 hours with doing it as long as parking is working they are working with the w to be able to do in so he shuts us off if he can get parking author parking enforcement to answer their phone maybe get something done okay next page page four is our table of organization uh it's just the uh broken out where we have people employed one thing we'd like you to an initiative that we did this year the scaf booting uh we increased that to 10 positions we have five open right now but we have um very much increased our use of the booting because one of the biggest problems we had is we were issuing summonses and they were being ignored and nobody was going down to the court so now using the license plate readers in conjunction with the booting we are going after anyone who has what is it three or more yeah three or more open summonses that are overdue and once they're booted they have to pay them they can no longer like go court date court date and keep dragging it out for years because they had an opportunity to do that and failed to so that booting unit is B becoming very successful I think that's a great initiative I see a lot of license plates from like every state imaginable um when I'm in the Heights and you know I'm just wondering are these people even residents you know that they have a Florida or like you know Ohio or Pennsylvania plate and um there needs to be more enforcement and then Boot and Tow if they don't pay those tickets cuz it's out of control you know yeah that's one of the place where we're having success is the out ofate plates because they used to just be openly scoffed they wouldn't they thought nothing could happen to them so now they're learning but a lot of them do live here uh just paying less insurance rates is that it like or they have two residences and they have an option to you know to register their vehicle at either one I okay but I just want to make sure Finance based on their presentation what's in green they do have funding for with the Staffing because I know that was like that so um I actually I looked into this prior um for the parking enforcement officers outside of clerical staff they have 12 funded uh supervisors and 60 parking enforcement officers so 72 in total funded positions in this 72 which was carried over from last year there's no change in budgeted headcount on the enforcement side want to make sure yeah I mean there there's just I mean there's a like difference of three employees I'm sure I was looking strictly at um current titles so maybe that's why there's a discrepancy but majority this positions are funded sure okay in the interest of time our key initiatives are similar to last year's continuing working with the Department of innovation trying to expand the own parking hours downtown keeping Watts implemented and operable Staffing a minimal number of officers to proactively go out to enforce those scoff law violators and implement the booting program and initiating the implementation of the safety stick program to en enforce parking violations in those High injury networks uh on the next page six we have our goals of 2024 and 2025 uh 2024 the goals kind of go over what we just covered implementing and deploying the safety sticks and the higher injury no locations to fixed cameras for enforcing parking uh were partially achieved we still have work to do there we're still increasing those areas uh goal two creating our specialized units for scafa and zone parking we've created them we've begun the booting but we need um we're still looking for more Staffing there and that's a matter of hiring not a matter of funding uh purchasing vehicles and equipment for more efficiency we pulled off in 2024 hiring additional parking officers we did that but we'd still like more hiring additional dispatchers to cover operational leads for the special units we'd still like to do and purchasing an equipment for a more efficient work product that we've done we purchased the six radar and speed monitoring units to collect and analyze the data and our congestion Trends and we've also purchased the additional boots so that we can go out there and boot more cars uh 2025 goals increase the number of police crash investigators to cover a 247 operation uh kind of in line with what the councilman and I were talking about before about the persons in crisis uh we have excellent police crash invest ators what we'd like to do is investigate more crashes we'd like to investigate in addition to any crash involving death or serious physical injury or a city vehicle we'd like to extend that if we have more investigators we'll start doing more investigations and determine if there's anything we can do to reduce the number of act you know vehicle collisions and crashes so we'd like to get more people trained and have more investigators we also of course cover the entire Hudson County for the serious fatal accident investigations because our people are the most highly trained uh we'd like to we always want to increase our supervision uh increase our school traffic guard staff that's our Eternal every year I want 50 more traffic school school crossing guards uh we get we we pick it up we can never seem to get to what we need uh we lose some we gain some but we are always on the lookout and I will reiterate again I hope we have a lot of the public watching anyone interested in a school crossing guard job please please contact us at the public safety building and we will accelerate that process for you because we are always willing to hire new school crossing guards we can always double up on Corners if we get extras and I have many people through the city as you all know who'd like us to investigate new corners for crossing guards if we were able to uh purchase updated um dwe equipment uh that's mandatory they've changed some of the rules so we're going to have to purchase a new equipment this year for our driving while intoxic ated testing uh we'll do that uh we have to and complete the deployment of our safety stick enforcement program allocate resources and create a unit specifically designated when take the budget changes now I'll turn it over for the budget okay uh oh put it back okay so we have our overtime line Nest there of course we didn't go as much which is line 103 for us we are requesting the $400,000 um we did pretty good with staying within what we were given last year with the employees that we had come in um the parking enforces uniforms is something that we because everyone in public safety wears them we make sure that we keep all uniforms up and current so that they would have the right uniforms there line 2011 is office supplies we're just asking for a little bit more there because the supplies and amount of things things that they need and cost of the vendors is what's going up not so much as we're trying to add stuff it's just Cost is it's just ridiculous across the board with that um the tools um as before we ask for the 25,000 we stay within so we only ask them for 20 80 is the wear and a pair that's contractual I have to give that to the crossing guards is they have they're mandated to get uniforms every single year in set M so I have to so that's contractual that we have there 305 is all of your printing of parking signs right so last year we asked for 62 um and now is 50 because a lot of the things the visual all of those different ones that we have don't need as many um we had some left over so we never want to ask for more than what we need because it's other areas where we need it so that part of it we did not touch um maintenance is not our contracts is the regular Services um that we use is the same again just cost of the vendor is what went up there um that we had on that line and then it was just the motor vehicle so because it was very hard for us to get the scooters so now you guys were able to give us the cars and I think we got I want to say about 10 or 12 of those so it's just the lease and payment that we have that's over that parking other than that it's not really much that we have that we need over that parking did we change out all of the uh little three-wheelers or like can we I mean just cuz they don't have any heat there's you know right so that was one of the reasons but what happens is the parts are so expensive so in a minute we ain't going have none anyway because they all breaking down so that's why you see the new cars that they going into so that they're heated them so most of them are going out of service because the parts by the time you get the parts you could buy a whole new car and that's what why you see the new vehicles that's there so most of the cars that do not have the we don't take them off and DPW have those yeah those tricycles aren't built for Jersey City roads I think and uh you know they are dangerous and I'm sure we gotten a lawsuit or two over over that in the past and um I just think cars transitioning that whole Fleet into car probably the best you guys been great we have been getting new leases and now we're just waiting for them to come up with some more cars making cars has been a back order as well like the new police guards it took that was probably out there for like two years before we actually got them so we did put in a request to get some more of those who in the vendor has them they reach out to DBW to let us know tricycles I call them tricc many tricycles do we have out there I think they're dangerous they're very dangerous we have Under 12 but I'll will get you that number because the cars came in so now we give the cars up and explor is what the supervisors use so we're trying to get them out there because if they used then we don't want nobody to say we didn't clean their street because you don't have a car to follow so you got to have enough cars to the amount of employees that's coming in do we have foot patrol for like let's say areas like Journal Square everyone's like you know double parking parked them properly like just because when I go to another municipality parking enforcement officer like comes out from behind the bushes in full camouflage and they're just like you have a ticket right before you exit the cars so the good thing about jno square right here um B crispy creen all of that area by a PATH station you have the parking en forces that's on foot that we have in that area McGinley Square General Square where the bank is at where the school is at over that on that side but you also have the SIDS that's over there as well which is the sworn officers that's on foot so it's two sets of enforcement that's out there on foot that's yes and on to those particular locations some have from Thursday to Sunday they out there and I have spoke with the different Council people or the sit to see what days do they need them and we have them out there because they paid for that part that's why the Sid has to hire off duty cops because you took all the cops out of Journal Square when we used to have motorcycles and cops and that's another thing we have no motorcycles we have no Traffic Division we're a major city and it's an embarrassment we're the laughing stock of the country right now I wonder is there a way that we can see how many tickets are serviced in those areas give us that account and that that will let us know really um about the Manpower is it really being effective when you know how many tickets you given so let us let us know that that that has stopped be honest okay are you guys resistant to having a motorcycle squad or I mean like what's the what's the policy there um in terms of having it doesn't have to be an exact motorcycle now the motorcycles are different but like what's the I never understood why why it got removed why it's not coming back like we were supposed to get horses at some point well I'd love if I had my choice I had my choice I would much rather a mounted unit that we could use parks and there could be more available in the Parks and able to move around but the bottom line it's a res it's a resource issue uh we have X number of police officers we have X number of Y number of priorities for our police officers preventing violent crime etc etc uh we looked all over the police department we looked at what that the PE persons assigned to what was then a motorcycle Squad were doing and we discovered that most of what they were doing did not directly impact Jersey City uh most of of them were doing escorts you know on funerals to places it's what I call and I've been in policing since 1991 it was a Prestige unit if we had a thousand police officers I would consider having nine on motorcycles who could lead parades and things like that but when we have less police officers than we need and we're struggling to make sure we can do our anti- crime initiatives our traffic initiatives put foot posts out where people need them putting people on motorcycle Les was not efficient in addition we had problems with the leadership and with the deployment of that Squad uh I was involved in a investigation of that Squad by an outside law enforcement entity with oversight capabilities over the Jersey City police department and when they questioned members of that Squad uh well here it says you were doing a Day Tour but you put in a slip for something else how you explain this they said we work when we feel like it the supervisor lets us work whenever we want to work that was the answer under oath in an investigation so when you added it all together the disciplinary problems the lack of accountability the um lack of return to the Jersey City residents on what we were putting in I made the determination that the officers assigned to that Squad would be of much more value broken up and divided among the four districts where they could and so radio runs and handle the uh crime fighting things since then um other than people wanting to see motorcycles around which I understand at the beginning of parades or something else there I have not seen a reason why I would remove officers from any task they're doing and place them in there and since then we have been mandated to put officers into other units licensing uh background investigate we've received multiple unfunded mandates to put officers into a four supervisors to just do police licensing for the state New Jersey etc etc and the director the chief and myself have come up with other priorities like our Force investigative unit our training Bureau that requires Personnel too so it's just a low priority to me to have people riding Harley-Davidson's around and maybe giving summonses or maybe going to do an ES for somebody outside of Jersey City I mean one time when I investigated them they went and escorted a high school team that's not even in Jersey City from their location in Bergen County to their game in a different County never even touched Jersey City that's just an example so bottom line uh I have no intention of authorizing a reauthorization of that Squad at this time question just uh just to follow up I I know when I first got elected that there was about 10 or 12 bicycles in the North District in the basement each one cost like $4,000 like can they use the bicycles and do community policing during the summertime um that's a request from the constituents that have you know that came up I'm not sure if you bought it up or some of that came up at the closed meeting also the bicycles yeah it might have been councilwoman Denise might have been one of the others or it might have been you I somebody bought it up and we're looking into it uh the problem with all these special units like so if if I want to do a bicycle Squad now I have to train them how to ride a Bic it sounds stupid I know everyone knows how to ride a bicycle but no I can't just put a police officer out I have to train them how to ride the bicycle now I lose training days H it everything we do comes with these added comes with these added requirements that pulls people off of the street and I'm loathed to authorize them in view of I think the success we're having in the violent crime fighting which was always our priority this Administration was trying to prevent the violent crime the shootings the homicides uh we're arguing now and I I agree 100% but now I'm down to trying to figure out a strategy for uh unattended package theft and as frustrating as it is I'd much rather be doing that than murders you know that so I can't call Amazon and get some of their life back like I can so like we have our I'm loathed to move the resources from where we have them deployed until we really nail in the gains we've made which are fragile and then if we keep increasing the size of the department we may be able to do you know some of these other things director when you talk about motorcycles I hate to say this but you're not from Jersey City I was part of the motorcycle squad for six years they were fantastic they kept traffic they were used for traffic they were used for many many things and the problem you had with them was because supervision and the top levels weren't doing their jobs so don't talk about motorcycles they were fantastic the people loved them and they were great for traffic in the city and you know we do let's touch on fire not much time left just before I know we don't have a lot of time sorry director just just briefly before just two things one is you know for my end it would be wonderful if a goal of the parking division was to to fully staff the open positions I understand it's difficult if the starting salaries need to be changed it's just I get so many complaints and concerns about um you know lack of parking enforcement just for example um guys have been great but around ps37 and ps16 you know unsafe situations with kids and and we're getting to it now but it's been pretty regular and these positions do pay for themselves so it's just it's always one of those questions of like look if we if if we get those officers out there we can we can push and then just the last thing is just to rate I asked it earlier but I think all of us are just hearing pretty consistent requests for increased traffic enforcement um on all types of unsafe driving behavior and it's you know bikers it's drivers it's speeding it's the whole nine yards and just as you said talked about the importance of saving lives through you know prevention of murders obviously traffic violence can can lead to exactly that right that that when someone dies on a street they're dead and then then that's it it's all we can do so just want to convey to you guys how important both those two things are on my end of increasing parking enforcement uh filling those positions and then significantly increasing traffic enforcement as well yeah and just we are in negotiation with the Union right now to increase the salaries but again that has to be negotiated with the union we we can't do it Billy okay uh Fire Department of Safety Division of fire then I'll turn it over to the assistant for uh the fire division uh page two you see our budget comparisons uh employee headcount swor and civilian director yeah you just turn sorry the um employee head count sworn and civilian the civilian headcount is mostly our fire inspectors correct Billy uh the employ so it's mostly sworn officers we went from 671 to 685 that includes all the sworn employees of the fire department on page three you see the public safety director the fire chief these three boxes are the same size but obviously operations should be huge and then training and Fire Prevention uh a small piece of the operation our fire division key initiatives provide training to ensure our Personnel are fully prepared uh proactive fire prevention public safety education and risk mitigation deliver effective and efficient emergency services and maintain our ISO class one rating which we achieved for the first time uh two years ago uh in the training piece We are continuing to build our fire academy and we're moving our training out in that direction it's right next to our deescalation Center also uh as one of our initiatives last year we created the two new fire companies we went from 26 to 28 for the first time in uh Jersey City history we enlarged the size of the department it had been going down since the 70s and uh those two are mostly focused on high-rise you know operations as Jersey City continues to expand next page five are the line items bill you want to take over there we go B first first line item is your salary line item uh we're requested we were adopted at 75 million we're requesting 80 for 2025 most of that is for contractual increases um we're also looking to put a small class on to maintain our uh our staffing levels overtime numbers um last year you gave us 500,000 we are requesting 1 million uh acting uh at a title acting cost cost we're maintaining holiday pay uh we're requesting 3 million this year and that's just based on that's the amount of time that they can sell back that's increased just based on their uh their salary levels increasing uh the seasonal the those are the part-time fire inspectors all of that money is uh recuperated uh through State funds um office supplies everything else uh we're requesting the same uh 15,000 for office supplies cleaning supplies we're remaining the same at 40,000 our petroleum gas levels uh for our marine unit we remaining at 10,000 uh our tools line we're requesting 170,000 this year uh just uh based on cost increases uh line 214 chemical and medical we increased a little bit just based on our EMR program we just reintroduced the first responder program to train every firefighter in Jersey City as a first responder so so this is to equip the fire trucks with the appropriate medical supplies uh line 305 $250 just for uh very basic uh printing material 306 uh du's subscriptions is $1,000 uh just for our annual uh that's recurring costs uh line 307 our training line we're asking for 10,000 line 310 we're asking for 200,000 for the maintenance of our equipment line 312 we're asking for 70,000 line 314 we're asking for 200,000 for contractual Services that's for the cleaning of the PPE gear uh we were only allocated $60,000 last year for uh cleaning our uh PPE gear which we have to send out twice a year twice a year for professional deep cleaning on that what's the reason behind the OT you know you had 2024 is 500,000 but expended 379 and now 2025 is going to be 1 million and I feel like we're already fully staffed as a fire you know the whole fire department where where does that exorb not ex well where does that number double from like why is that number doubling yeah I think it's important to remember the overtime number is it's a request that we won't spend unless we need it obviously it's not like spent we don't get it and say okay now we have to spend a million dollars uh you're 100% right we have increased the department deliberately uh when we took over the department there was an incredible expenditure on over time that that number was uh I'd have to look it up but it was Millions upon millions and they usually had used it up by June and had to go back for more money uh we went the opposite direction we didn't want people working 20 48 hours in a row 30 it's not safe so we uh increased the amount of firefighters and fire officers and we bought the overtime numbers way down so from six to 7 million down to that 300,000 you see now however we would like a little cushion that 300,000 number kind of covers late jobs fires that happen right at the turnover so we can't safely remove a company we have to keep them on the site while the new company comes in and takes over it accounts for us sometimes bringing people in it major fires if we have everybody fighting a fire we might want to bring in a couple companies just to sit around the city in case God forbid there's a second fire covers things like that if we get like we've been blessed in the city during my time here if we get like a hurricane Sandy we'll eat up that million really quickly so we'd like to have a little cushion if we could so God forbid we get an event like that that we're not expecting one of those Black Swan events we're not coming back to you and saying hey we didn't budget for this at all but we doubt we'll have to spend it we we would anticipate probably that overtime number spent coming down a little not going up but I wouldn't mind if we budget it a little more in case of an emergency and they're very good on the fire side they do not waste it we don't waste the money it's only used when it's absolutely necessary with a city decide how many um stations could we have closed at a time we never close a fire station you think you think companies some stations have multiple companies companies okay yeah so we we're up to 28 we had 26 we raised it to 28 uh we should never close a company contract actually one of the deals we made with the firefighters with both unions was uh we would maintain a certain level of hiring and they would guarantee that nobody would take off below the numbers required to staff all those companies we've maintained our hiring we're still having some challenges getting them to live up to some of the promises that they made in their things we uh we have a couple ideas for the new contract bottom line is when the fire chief comes to work every day he has sufficient manpower to man every single company in Jersey C okay now if people ask him for a day off and he decides to Grant it knowing that that will remove a company the fire CH our fire chief is the expert he has the authority to know whether he really needs all 28 that day whether maybe it's better not to have somebody come in because they have an emergency you know a family emergency Etc but by contract they have to we have to maintain enough to man all those companies now that's a is the fire chief call I would like to say remember uh when we took over when we came in 11 years ago uh the people before us were routinely blacking out companies and only turning out 19 or 20 we fixed that we got it from 20 to 22 through pain through 22 to 24 to 26 and now we're up to 20 now we're up to 8 uh on certain days uh I don't want to be flip about this but it seems to happen on weekends or Super Bowl Sunday or other days like that where you would where where illness seems to coincide with a major event that people would like to stay home and observe uh we get a challenge and we might have to knock out one company or two but since we increased by two from the 26 we always have that play in the system and we still have full coverage around the city okay what are the efforts that uh you guys are doing to diversify the fire department do we have any incoming classes like we have top-notch fire department but uh I I think uh criticism that I've heard is that it's not diverse enough or there's not enough like happening in terms of recruitment from diverse communities we have made major efforts to recruit I mentioned this before you weren't here but we have made M we in terms of the police department in comparing we have made major efforts to recruit we have had recruiters we have used our minority firefighters as recruiters we have went out into schools we have opened up firehouses for people to come in and apply in the firehouse so they didn't have to do it from their home so we could ensure that they didn't make a mistake on the application uh We've run into two problems all the time uh and this is difficult for us to overcome the first is that uh and when we talk to people more people are willing to be police officers than firefighters even with the negative things around police there's an elemental fear of fire we talk to people and they say I don't want to be a firefighter I'm not running into a burning building there's just a human fear of that so it takes a lot for us to explain to them just how safe the no job is safe but just what with the efforts we put into equipment to training to making sure that you're you're as safe as possible while you're doing that job secondly historically in the United States and everybody struggles with this it is a very family oriented job people who are firefighters tend to have had fathers and uncles and aunts and sisters who are firefighters and they tell their relatives you know to get into it and it moves on that hurts us as far as diversifying because it means we continually are getting people out of the same pool and they're doing better than other people on the civil service test now a new problem we've ran into just last test and we're going to rectify at this test is uh the state does the physical testing and we had successfully recruited and gotten good test scores out of several minority candidates that then failed the physical and there's no reason they should have failed the physical and we we went back and studied it and we had to do this in policing too we had the same struggles when we Diversified the police departments what we discovered was that they weren't failing it because they're not physically fit they were failing it because they weren't prepared for the tasks that they were going to be asked to do so now when we go we we will now take our candidates and teach them ahead of time how to pass that and again we had to do we had to do all this for policing too as we as we are Diversified it so bottom line we're making a lot of efforts but I anticipate it being slower than the success we had in diversifying the police department anything let me ask you something with the police department when there's not enough um you call police officers in and they get overtime correct with the fire department if there's not enough they can't call in fire you know fire officers to fill in we can do one or the other but when we negotiated the contract we had a choice we had to go and the unions were 100% aware of this and all signed off on these contracts we said we can either have less firefighters and use overtime to fill the holes we did not want to do that as an administration because we felt it's safer for them to work their tour get their appropriate rest come back in for the next tour it's safer for them for our citizens for everyone I don't I didn't like the idea that I had people out there on trucks that had been at work for 48 hours for 48 straight hours so we committed to hiring a fair amount a fairly large amount of additional firefighters and to promoting a fairly large amount of additional captains and and Battalion Chiefs and we negotiated those numbers with the union and we accepted their number for every position we have we maintain 5.2 people so if I need one Captain we have 5.2 captains to ensure that we have that one Captain for every tour and it account for days off emergencies sick time and stuff like that but by doing that we spent our money on hiring people and we told them we're not going to do this if we do this we're not going to have money available to give people the day off every time they feel like it you're going to have to commit to having that minimum number of people come in every tour and they agreed to and they agreed they agreed and we said If by some chance someone calls in at the last second we not going to let you play that game I'm sorry I'm going to call it what it is we're not going to let you play the game of saying oh yeah I was coming in but now I'm not coming in etc etc you are go and we have enough companies we can do this because again we created two new ones so I've got some wiggle room in the system we said you will you'll maintain your your contractual obligations and we'll make sure there's enough people so I think we're better I know we're better off because like I said when I took over the fire department they only had 19 companies and they were routinely bling people out we now have 28 and on a rare occasion Super Bowl Sun Christmas I anticipate Christmas Day and Christmas Eve that I will have a wave of illness it just seems to work like that but we will make sure we have enough companies to keep the city safe if we had to okay we would bring in overtime but we never reached that we never reached that level that would be a major contractual VI by them and again we have spent the money ensuring that we have enough firefighters to to come in how many officers or not officers um firefighters Andor officers would we need in order to cut the overtime to make it I mean when you spend overtime it means that we don't have enough no we still no there's some overtime in in in Services some overtime is just baked in and it's in fire in fire especially it's when there's a fire that's carrying over from one shift to another because it's impossible for me to just say okay you stop leave and the next people come in we have to keep continually fighting the fire so just to switch over from the old tour to the new Tour by necessity involves some overtime also if you get like a major fire and we haven't had that many but remember when we had um earlier this year the one out by the by the turnpike that was like it kept jumping and jumping and jumping we had to call we we he Billy authorized bringing in like four extra companies and extra officers because that was just we were losing it we with fighting that and protecting the rest of the city we said no we need more people so we bought in extra people on overtime that doesn't happen often but we have to be ready for it if it does the police over time as well has been a big problem you know in terms of the amount um yeah policing is uh completely different though because I know police we don't have enough I would much rather do with the police what I how many do we need to hire if we're higher like to to get rid of the overtime I'm down I'm down two if I could hire 200 officers I could cut that overtime to almost nothing but I can't and so the I have this conversation with the fireb like overtime it's not candy we give away ideally we'd have enough employees and we wouldn't need any overtime except for those jobs at the margins you know where we have to turn over and stuff like that because then we're better off I don't want police officers out there for 12 hours or 18 hours either it's not good but we cannot hire the amount of officers we need whereas in fire we were able to so in fire we increased the numbers to where we didn't need the overtime anymore and we believe we have a safer better more professional product in policing we're still struggling to get to that number or to get to that number of officers and quite frankly we don't anticipate it this year just based on the pool we have have to pull you know to hire from we don't anticipate being able to get to where we need legally how how long can an officer work and how long can a firefighter work legally like a truck driver can only drive for so many hours then they have to pull over by law so when it comes to police um by law how long you know are they supposed to work because I mean if they burnt out and they going into a situation I can't see their reflexes right or favorable whereas also with a fireman if he's burnt out I can't see his reflexes being so is there a law saying okay a police officer only can work 12 hours and after that he has to come off no the short answer is no there's no law regulation we would like them to just have to work their regular shifts unless they make an arrest and have to process that arrest you know legally and move out and get them home get them some rest but there are no regulations we work to make sure that nobody is working in excessive amount you know amount of time that we spread out the overtime we make sure we don't order people and so with fire too I know yeah but that's so with fire too there's no set time I mean hours that they have to work like y'all only can work 13 hours a day or what you know there's no law that's what I'm right because I know he said by law of policy rather not meaning what you're saying for them not to get burnt out and we look at it as a double shift which on police side it would be 17 hours cuz they work 8 and 1/2 hour shifts and for fire it's 22 4 hour shifts which is 48 hours and that's for the safety reasons because you don't never want somebody to go past that and be burnt out but you can do 17 on police and 48 on fire but now okay I've always been concerned and I always been advocating for this but I gu because these unions you don't have the power to do it what type of mental health do they go through like do they go I know when they first hir they have to go through a mental health evaluation but once you hir like there's nothing in place I know this is Union if I'm still right Union to negotiate this um but we we have the right to and we do uh you're right on hiring everybody has to pass psychological screening anyone involved in a traumatic event is sent for psychological screening before they return to work so if anyone is involved in any type of traumatic event anything involving death a fire we would send them to for psychological screening and to be you know authorized for return to work but that's we don't do routin like we don't routinely send people every six months you know or anything like that it would be triggered by a precipitating event that we would say you know what that's incredibly stressful before you come back to work we would like you to talk to somebody and be psychologically cleared but let me ask you something director in order for something like that to happen shouldn't that could we negotiate that with the unions I don't know if they will agree to it but I know they have these Union contracts the only reason why I'm saying it now it seemed like these positions are stressful period I don't care what you said it seemed like you're always under stress I mean to go and to have to protect somebody to know you don't you're not sure what you're walking into whether it's a policeman or a fireman it seem like it's just stress itself you know that's that's just like a person who is in the medical profession and you deal with people who deal with um cancer after a while mentally you have to go somewhere um stressful wise because you you you you tired of seeing people pass die it's it it just seemed like we always waiting for something to happen but why can't we prevent that's what I'm saying it's for their health if we care about them you know to see like can we negotiate that this way nobody would feel like anybody's you know um taking um you know filling anybody out because I know when you get in certain professions it's like if you ask for certain things people like kind of um put a uh label you they label you just because of certain things may ask for some police officer may want to go through a psychological evaluation because I mean just seeing people die all just to see bodies all the time to me psychologically that could mess with you you know what I'm saying that that's what I'm saying when when far as the police I mean police and fire fire you going into buildings I mean you you seeing people in in in conditions that you know sometime you go home your mental is not right I'm just saying is there a way we can negotiate this you know even in their contracts that they just do like a a into evaluation yearly because I think it can help everyone involved because sometime you you're reacting over a situation that may be something you saw in the past and it's still on your psyche I I don't know why we can't see this as people I mean we're in contract no we're in negotiations now so I'll look into whether it's possible I mean it's just mentally you know I'm I mean I think it would help it don't hurt speaking of where are we with the Cannabis and uh law enforcement and or fire um we had a lawsuit this year you know we didn't come out on the winning end of that I believe um the use of cannabis from the police what's the policy right now and are we going to continue to fight that legal battle like what what we we have I don't know uh the fire department there is no policy because firefighters do not carry weapons the we we are not no one knows whether I'm Pro or anti- cannabis uh we what I am is pro following the law there is a federal law which no one has addressed at the state level despite the multiple people saying oh no uh what's happened is we immediately warned when they legalized marijuana in New Jersey we immediately warned all our law enforcement officers and said and we weren't the only ones so did the state police unions everyone else we reminded them there is a federal law that says you cannot possess transfer or own a weapon a firearm if you are a user of a schedule one narcotic marijuana is still a schedule one narcotic in the federal system we asked the ATF they said absolutely that guidance is still in effect even for medical marijuana never mind for legal marijuana the ATF has reiterated that one time since at least two people I know of have been arrested based on the fact that they were using marijuana and were in possession of what otherwise would have been a legal firearm but they were using a class one thing so we warned all of our officers several of them chose to use marijuana and it was discovered during tests not that we gave that the state gave we're completely in my opinion the victims in this because we took no actions other than following so the state tested them the state discovered they were smoking marijuana which brought them into conlict with this federal law and we were stuck in the middle of it since then what people think we lost a lawsuit no the state continues to act as if we have quote unquote fired them for using marijuana and refuses to address the issue about the Firearms now we are in court getting that addressed but we have to wait for the state supreme court to rule on it thankfully the state is not testing any more of our people so we're not becoming aware of any other legal conflicts which again we we only became aware of because the state insisted on testing them I don't know why but the federal government I'm sure people know still maintains marijuana as a class one narcotic this this year several people said they were going to change it but they didn't they won't they still do we have told all those officers the day the federal government removes marijuana from that schedule one we will reinstate you that day because you will no longer be in conflict with these laws but until then we need a ruling from the federal government which is where we're going to end up so in the meantime they're on modified duty with no guns and we've won a couple a couple of them have been terminated because of different reasons uh the others are waiting and I am confident that we are going to I hate to use the word Prevail because we don't want to be here but our view is going to be validated and then someone at the state level is going to have to do something about this conflict that they just ignored when they passed the law it would have been very easy to fix when they passed it but they just ignored it why would the state test our officers for Narcotics the Attorney General is always the one who orders drug testing always it's cops the Attorney General of the state of New Jersey is the person who orders narcotics testing at random for officers not the individual municipality he's got to be replaced okay I think we're about finishing up is there what's what's left go ahead the only thing we have left on that for line 316 is the uh the leasing line the increase on that to 1.2 million is for the uh training structure down at DPW cost of that um reminding of this morning's conversation with DPW that you said you wanted to bring up um in the afternoon regards to enforcement oh yes yes yes Quality quality of life we had a conversation with DPW this morning um with the director because when it come to sanitation it's the inspection um that they don't have in DPW right but the inspect are in quality of life so I I brought up why can't we have both really I understand that quality of life may need the inspect inspectors there but DBW needs them too and the director did say from DPW they do work well when he comes he's not knocking that but he does believe that if he had his own inspectors that probably can help him even the more he he's not he's saying when they work together they work well but there are resources and stuff that we are losing because he just don't have his own that's it so I I am I am encouraging that we somehow or another get DPW those U sanitation inspectors because we are having a problem with Regency with this trash so and and I want Jake to know you're doing a fine job okay we're not saying that you're not we just trying to do more because our city is growing that that's it and I think sometime we we don't realize that this city is growing in Leaps and Bounds that we have to start really thinking outside the box and box and seeing how we have to service the whole city okay we have quality of life I'm not saying shut down quality of life I want to make it clear but I'm saying can we also have inspectors in DPW too can we do both it's like when you in government we only could do one thing we only could do one thing but I'm just saying can we do both and if there's um f um funds there um we just want to make sure that we have it to give some to DPW because they have vacancies too is just how do we alter And to clarify titles that that that's all right if I got it right and to clarify um from Finance perspective D did not put in their budget requests for those indicial inspectors and so what I reminded is that we were directed years ago for consolidation everything of the sort and whether that would be taken under consideration for you guys as a question that came up this morning right right that's it got it because uh he needs them too we just got to figure out problem also uh HC was here uh yesterday and we were discussing construction work on the weekends and they basically said call the police I mean is this something that uh if if someone is working on the weekends without a valid permit is that something the police officers are capable of enforcing writing a summons um yes because we're the only ones working okay that's the I mean it's it's going to fall to us because we're there so yes they it is the right correct thing to do it doesn't make sense to call a closed HDC office call us okay and uh fire inspectors do we have enough fire inspectors because we recently came under Fire from oped um over that there's there there is a request in the budget for additional inspectors we'd like to have six full-time right now we have two that's only because we had recent departures recent I mean like last week recent so so but yes there is a request in here uh for uh additional inspectors but are are there special certifications to become a fire inspector is a state license that's required through the Division of Community Affairs okay so how many did you lose recently we lost two recently and so you lost two you have have two so total you have four totally you had four four vacancies yes you had four before now we're down yes exactly that's what I'm saying so you need to right right you know what I'm asking right not mathematicians here yes we had four with two vacancies we need two we had four with two vacancies we've always had we refilled you know we use the firefighters who have the qualification as per DM employees to fill that because it's hard to fill these because someone has to go get a license to be hired it's eternally hard to fill so we fill the Gap by our firefighters who have that license working on a pum basis in filling so we have plenty of fire inspectors out there they're just not fulltime then right now we lost two of our full-time so now we're down to two full-time with four full-time vacancies but we still have plenty of those pum firefighters coming in and doing it on their time off and filling that Gap how far in advance of FIFA World Cup do you guys start planning I know it's in 2026 you know and then basically will you be that's a curve ball listen we're here you guys are here so now we attended our first meeting about three weeks ago with the state police and the Govern you know the governor actually chaired it so that was the first meeting uh that was a stakeholders meeting Jersey City is going to be a huge stakeholder as I'm sure you're aware uh the working groups are now being put together and we will have representation on all the working groups in addition to being the uh Prime person over the events happening here in Jersey City one TR one one of the events is in Liberty State Park so it'll be the State Park police will be the premier agency but will be huge supporting Agency for them other than that we'll be in charge of everything here and we'll be supporting all the others also we've seen a lot in the news regarding drones and I was wondering does the police the FAA recently like a few days ago put a ban on drone activity in Jersey City and a few other municipalities do we have anything in terms of like uh enforcement mechanism for people that might be using drones that you know against FAA guidelines or Municipal guidelines yeah the listen the it's the wild west the drones Congress hasn't gotten together to do any type of Regulation about them so our enforcement options are very minimal however we do have the capabilities and we've done it the past when we're having large events or something like that to make it impossible to fly his own in C you you in certain areas okay so we can now we both we are a member of the federal task force on that and we also have within our emergency service unit our own people who are involved in both using and protecting Against drones we have no problem thank the lord we are not part of the problem with drones yet they did include us we're aware of it we're going to we're going to cooperate obviously with that and in en force it but so far we have not had we have not been part of the New Jersey drone problem okay all right with nothing else may I have a motion to adjourn at 3:18 p.m. motion motion was made by council president wman and I'll give the second to council person Cay all in favor of the motion to adjourn at 3:18 p.m. all council members present by acclamation please say I we are out of here at 3:18 p.m. thank you so much everyone in attendance and everyone watching at home as always Teamwork Makes a dream work and stay safe happy holidays to everyone take care e