Thank you. And first of all, we'd like to ask Kay if we're in compliance with the open meeting law. We're in compliance. And thank you all for being here. And we thought the best way was to get everyone from each board here at the same time to hear the same answers to the questions you might want to ask so we each know what the ideas coming forward were. And no matter what happens tonight and in the future for combined dispatch, I'd like to point out a few things that we have had a very good success in the last few years. We've had Bernie Romer as our joint purchasing agent. And we each, the city and the county, pay 50% of its salaries. And that's worked out very well. Some of the scales of economy have been passed on to the other municipalities in the county. The county highway department and the city DPW have worked well. Exchange equipment and different things they're able to do for each other. And as we were driving here, I'm sure you all noticed the harbor cleanup that's going forward. That was largely due to the shared services and the cooperation between the city, the county, and a lot of other departments and different agencies throughout the state and federal government. And another would be the economic development that we're working together and we're both funding. And I think those are a few of the things that are working well that we've had some shared services. And tonight we'll see if we can share some more services and pass on the savings to the taxpayers. I'd like to turn it over to Mayor Van Akron for some comments. Thank you. It's great to see everybody here tonight. This has been long talked about. I think it's time that we got together as a group with the county board and the city officials to see all the proposals up front. Let's talk about them openly. Let's answer any questions that anybody has from the audience after the presentations and looking forward to moving forward. You know, the county and city has been working very well together the last few years. Roger forgot to mention the clinic that is a joint venture between us and them in saving healthcare costs for both city employees and county employees and now the school systems joining in on that. We should be continuing to do that and look for any savings we can when it comes to joint services and saving monies for the taxpayers. We both serve the same taxpayers in this community and for us to continue to go forward, we need that kind of relationship between our police department and our sheriff's department, between our fire departments and the other fire departments and between our boards and the county board. So I'm looking forward to tonight's presentation and any questions that may have you from you. Again, thank you for spending time with us. And it's pretty unprecedented that the county board and city council kept together, but I think it's pretty impressive that we did. Thank you. Now I'd like to turn it over to council president Don Hammond, first of all. I'll keep mine relatively brief. First off, I echo the comments of Mayor Van Akron and the county board chair, Distroity, but I also'd like to thank some of the people that got us to this point. I remember last October I made a phone call to Adam and said, hey, can we have lunch? And that was kind of the beginning of this process which I believe is experienced over 40 years of conversation. We met, created a small little subcommittee, Inspector Bruckbauer and many from his team, our team and although the debate has been spirited at times, we were all moving towards the same direction and for that, I really think the entire group that was involved with this, many meetings, many, again, conversations, but it brought us to this point where we have at least some options and I think we're a lot closer now than maybe ever before to having a combined dispatch realize, so I would like to thank, again, that group. Thank everybody for attending and again, look forward to having an open and honest discussion about this. Thank you. I'd like to turn it over to the sheriff's department. Can you make some comments? Thanks, everybody, for comment. I'd like to just share a little something with you. We've been working on this collectively for quite a while and a lot of time, effort, consideration have been put into it and it's been a great work in relationship. I came out of our discussions dealing pretty strongly about the direction and that was based on working with city, city representatives, police department, our local, our county government along with our officers, certainly with Inspector Bill Blockbauer that's been involved in this process many, many, and I guess I'm gonna come out and I'm strongly gonna support that can go with combined dispatch for the very reasons that you're gonna be hearing tonight. You're gonna hear some of the reasons of all the time, the valid reasons, the avenue that I personally support and that had been discussed in our small groups was that we would house it at the county and supervise by the county. The reason why I support that, that route is for several various reasons. The number one reason that we need to go to combined and the idea that if we are going to be in the county we're gonna be the ones to manage it, supervise it, in-house is the way to go. Supervision is the number one thing that we need in our dispatch centers at both locations of the city and the county. We had taken a step to put supervision in, we have Sergeant Christie DePle who has made efforts in our dispatch centers that only proves and validates why we need to have combined dispatch. The efficiency and effectiveness that has occurred because of her leadership and her supervision in that common center has made a huge difference. And I can only imagine that when we combine the two services together with the adequate supervision that both houses need and deserve citizens should be in county or in the region. Now the reason why I support it at the Sheriff's Department, whether it's remodeling the first floor or adding on, it does not matter to me, comes down to logistics. Communication is a hurdle and a law enforcement agency that is 24-7, it's difficult to write. Now add with the Sheriff's Department, we already have two campuses and I realize this is similar with the Fire Department with multiple stations. There are some logistics involved that make it very difficult for communication. To house a dispatch center within one of our campuses would be ideal because we are talking about the integral part of law enforcement and that's our common center. It is a key component to law enforcement and EMS services. The effectiveness and efficiency of that common center in our house where we're supervising would be advantageous to us, to provide the greatest efficiency. I also strongly believe that while we being over at the county, we have the opportunity to expand in the community. I think it's wise to invest the money off the get go into a location where we can expand thinking forward, thinking into the future and being prepared for that versus they should pay kind of like a short time. We're looking to the future of adequate space for councils that are going to be needed and office spaces for the supervisors. The other component, the model that we're following is pretty much the model that has been throughout the state. I am not aware unless somebody knows of otherwise there. This is my position, this is my state, this is just how I feel. Where we end up, well, that's yet to be determined. I am supportive of a combined discussion and I hope that we can find common ground best service citizens are spreading common ground. And I know we'll get that. So I just wanted to share that with you. You're going to hear now from representatives that are going to articulate more detail why we need a combined discussion. I know several of you have heard it before. However, it's going to be said again. It is very recent one. At this time I'll turn it over. I'm going to have Lieutenant Jim Rissou give a PowerPoint presentation that will help with a little bit more details why we want to go to a combined discussion of the benefits of it. This presentation was put together a few months ago as a means to show some identified benefits to those of you that are on law committee and have been to that meeting or shared services community have seen this presentation previous. Just try to present an overview of some of the benefits that have been identified and try to put it on the place. I did add a couple slides since that time based on some recent events that I thought would help emphasize some of those benefits. And here are some of the benefits that have been identified. as a single point of contact for all county residents currently and I believe Chief Herman will demonstrate some of that also is that when the 901 call our cell phone received in our county goes to our county commentator and that call then has to once you determine exact address and basic nature of the call that call has to be transferred over to the city so that assistance can be sent. This would eliminate that in one stop shop for all communications. We didn't have to try and figure out where to call. Second thing, standardized training protocols for all personnel. Being a dispatcher is a profession that requires some extensive training, experience and development being able to do that on a standardized basis so that all personnel have the same training all up to the same standards and professional standards and also bystanders typically by statute. All dispatchers would have the same standards. The other thing with our benefit operation is that presents a larger pool of employees. As in any workplace there are temporary charges due to illness, injury or other circumstances and sometimes retirements we typically cannot replace a employee until they've actually retired and have to train another person which takes approximately four to five months. During those temporary shortages we would have a larger group of people to draw to fill those vacancies and a couple of their shifts to help the benefit that we currently struggle with. I'll get more into this in a little bit but the ability to handle large-scale incidents anywhere in the county based on more personnel and workstations in one location. How many combined center? Just as an example, four dispatchers working suddenly a major incident occurs and we have the ability with a combined center to shift personnel and we currently struggle with that because during the major incident still in the county we only have two major operations to operate from. We can bring in other people in public facilities with enough workstations and a lot of capabilities. The other benefit is a single location to allow for the remaining center to be used as a two backup center for large-scale emergencies or in the event of a primary center to disable. I'll cover this in more on a couple of other slides but recently in the past week there were two jurisdictions in Wisconsin that had their Sheriff's Department of Common Sense. The boat was temporarily evacuated. The boat was temporary. Those incidents can occur in those cases their services can be transferred to a two backup center across town, made a larger incident. It looks like it's going to be a long-term incident if you dedicate personnel. This is one of the recent events that I was referring to last week. The boat was very temporary. The Kenosha County Sheriff's Office had to be evacuated to do the gas line. The landscape was outside the building with the gas line. The whole center had to be shut down temporarily. I imagine that they couldn't wait to be evacuated. So that's just one event, one short-term event where the entire Sheriff's Department had to be evacuated. Another one occurred yesterday, although I still haven't heard what the cause of the outage was, that their entire phone system, phone network, non-emergency land 9-1-1 was disabled. It was disabled sometime around 7 o'clock last night that they could come back some time this morning. That larger jurisdiction that had to be evacuated, they had to transfer their vehicle to emergency operations in the Waukesha County, including transferring some of their, I'm assuming it was probably some type of technical malfunction that had to be heard from otherwise, but those things can occur with the pen a large amount of technology, fiber optic cables, other types of components that can fail. In the case of Kenosha County with the gas line, there's utility construction going on in the areas and those things can happen. It wasn't that long ago that a fiber optic cable in front of our Sheriff's Department was cut as the short-term things can happen. With that backup center we can talk about larger incidents. We have traffic crashes almost anywhere in the county. High 43 presents particularly large problems with all the traffic. That is altered with the travel that loads into the day. Utility outages. We've had some major utility outages in the past in our common middle winter. There was one circumstance, one winter, where it was believed that there would not be sufficient natural gas pressure to supply the southern part of our common intermediate. Unfortunately, we avoided that with other related situations. Fairly blessed with being able to avoid tornadoes that would impact other areas of the state if those have occurred in the past. There are still significant fires in our county that we've experienced in those and NABIS calls. I'll get into the NABIS a little bit and if you permanently cover some of that too. But NABIS is a system that has been developed in the fire service where they are able to utilize the resources of their surrounding jurisdictions to better basically a preset type program based on the type of fire that occurs in fire chiefs and their jurisdiction. Resources from surrounding areas. NABIS stands for Mutual Aid Boxing Arm System. It's a preset Mutual Aid system. This did not print quite as well as I had hoped, but this is a sample of a NABIS card. This happens to be for the town of Mosul that you're kind of familiar with. Specifically notes, this is the card that would be pulled out for a structure fire. You see it's a non-hydrant. So water is an issue. You see if you go down the list, depending on the call that that fire chief makes when a structure fire would occur, it would simply go down the list to that category and then dispatch all those resources that are already listed in those jurisdictions surrounding. It also is a system that is set up so that those jurisdictions are not completely depleted and that they can still handle all the services in the area. It's simply pieces of firing. It's a great system as far as being able to accommodate a short notice of the needs of fire major operations. This is an example of just these larger incidents or multiple incidents. It was past spring and March. If you remember it was unusually warm and dry. Spring was quite dry that early. We had a number of grass fires that occurred. This one was along the city and county border.  During that fire operation, there was also a grass fire out of the Goja Gondula and our officer was diverted from there to a different call. And about that same time there was a second fire not that far away. So there was multiple grass fires one way after the other. You can imagine two dispatches in that place. Dispatch and manage resources. Having that additional resources available can shift some resources over to that side of the room and accommodate those calls in those situations that could be more efficient. Another incident that was not too recent in the past was September of last year when we caught fire in extensive explosions and things like that. There was concern about hazardous materials that may have been stored in that shed. That operation was quite extensive. It involved many jurisdictions from different types of emergency services in our county. An incident like that was more than two dispatches in no handle. A combined center would be able to accommodate that and dispatch resources and handle that and manage that call. We also remember the landmark fire. It was a large fire in the city of Chicago. It involved multiple jurisdictions and multiple burdens of services. We were blessed with a pretty mild winter this past winter. The previous winter was not so fine. This was just an example of a three day snowfall back in January, February 2011. Incidents like that where we have multiple traffic disruptions, cars in the ditch. Incidents like that can be overwhelming. Managing two people. I realize this affects the whole city. We have a larger center. Going back a little further, the operation crashed on October 11, 2002. It's a little bit far away, but if you look at this photo itself, you can see multiple jurisdictions, fire services, EMS services, state patrol, county, city fire, a lot of resources in one place. We also had other non-emergency resources like the Salvation Army, services that worked for the system at that scene. So there's a lot to manage and we're limited by the capacity that those of you that can remember this far back, my failure to remember it, but we can see how it's built right now. Emergency management director was able to find this photo. I believe it was taken from the parking lot of Tom and Country Golf course. That was a major weather-related incident for our area. Damage and some loss of life. We've been blessed with not having any incidents like that, but we're sure we know that tornadoes have impacted other areas of our state. Here's some other examples of things that have occurred on Wisconsin. The top two pictures are Barnabale, Wisconsin, Hopefield, Wisconsin, both experienced major tornadoes. The bottom left is the City of Fond du Lac when they were flooded a few years ago. The City of Sheboygan is also experienced at that level of flooding back in 1998. The bottom right is the Hawai'i Wiga train derailment that involved cars during propane. Propane is also transported within our county. Looking at all these incidents, there's nothing that prohibits these incidents from occurring. While we may not want to plan to be able to address the 100-year flood or weather disaster on a daily basis, we at least would like the capacity to be able to manage those incidents when they come and be able to ramp up these incidents. Thank you. First of all, I'd like to thank both governmental bodies for coming here and making sure that we get good information about dispatch. I would just like to assure everybody on behalf of the information that our dispatch centers and their personnel that are assigned to them, but there's limitations. What that means is that two dispatchers are literally responsible for all calls to service. These flyers, in addition to that, they've got to communicate that information back to the squad cars, dispatch personnel, in some cases, dispatch police, flyer, ambulance, and so on. That can become pretty overwhelming and pretty taxing on a two person or a few people. So, we see the proposal for a joint communications center as probably overdue and very necessary to position not only the city but the city and the county and all the investment resources to best respond to emergency conditions. We work together in law enforcement with the sheriff's department, and other law enforcement agencies who use flyer on a regular basis. So, on an operational level we're accustomed to that. We know that there would be challenges in policies for future joint communications and we're committed to working through that. We understand that there's a dispatch manager as part of that proposal. We certainly look forward to working with the dispatch manager to try to plan those protocols and make this happen for the benefit of the community. The incidents that we've got, I work with some of those cases and very taxing and very demanding. And the key to law enforcement, whether it be the communications center in the field, is cooperation, situational awareness, teamwork, utilizing resources to the best of your ability to answer those questions. And I think that by having a joint communication center both the city and the county will be in a better position to address those types of issues. Sometimes even relatively small things require coordination that is sensitive against the police services. By having a joint communication center, some of that situational awareness cooperation teamwork is going to happen not only over the radio but over the shoulders and keep communication ready in that communication center. Emergency response to the dispatch personnel better able to manage and apply the resources that are needed during the course of the incident. So I know there's a lot of concerns and a lot of things to be worked out yet for coming from a purely conceptual standpoint. We're very much in favor of the joint discussion. We want to work together with the current city police facility or in the sheriff's department's facility to understand the details that have been worked out and how that impacts the larger community. But we're very committed to making this work with the government. Twenty-five fire chiefs and their departments in the county closer. I'm speaking tonight on behalf of the twenty-five fire chiefs and fire departments within the county. I think most of the elected officials received the letter of support that was sent out earlier this year. It was a unanimous letter of support from all twenty-five departments. Rather than going through the issues that were in that letter I won't take that time tonight. If any of you have not seen the letter just let me know and I'll get you a copy of it. I also received an email from Steve Dickman who's the head of the division Mavis Division 113 which is Sheboygan County in the state. His email was a couple of issues that combined dispatch would take care of with Mavis events. And for those of you that don't know Mavis really has kind of taken the place of mutual aid in the fire service. Combined dispatch would speed up dispatching resources that go into and out of the city and county. It would be easier for dispatch to keep track of all city and county resources on fire scenes. If enough dispatchers are in the Joint Center one dispatcher could be assigned as a Mavis dispatcher during an event and not have to worry about all the other duties that they do now. The way Mavis is set up is that it really needs to have one dispatcher take care of that event as it's going on. And as the other speakers talked about whenever we have a major fire major incident going on there's so much going on that you really need to have that dispatcher focused on the emergency responders that are at that scene. Anytime that we have a major incident whether it's fire, law enforcement, when that's over with we always do a critique of that incident. After the drowning on the North Pier here we got together. I can't tell you how many organizations were in that room. There had to be 70 people there. And one of the common themes that comes out of all of those critiques is that our communication could have been better. And I think I speak for law enforcement and fire and that's always a common theme. Communication needs to get better. And what we see with these separate dispatch centers is that with the different agencies we're on different frequencies. We have a hard time talking to each other. It just becomes very difficult to communicate and that's where we see our problems. In particular, incident on the North Pier is a very complex incident in that we had three agencies initially dispatched. The Sheboygan Fire Department, Sheboygan Police Department and the Coast Guard. In addition there was some discrepancy as to whose jurisdiction it really was. The city's jurisdiction goes out 1,700 feet out into the lake. It's very difficult to figure out where that 17 feet is. Is it the city's or is it the county's? So the initial incident commander at that incident was the Sheboygan Fire Department commander. Shortly into that incident he received a radio communication from the Kohler and Cedar Grove Fire Departments asking where they would like them to locate. Our commander didn't even know that they were responding because that was on a different frequency. He wasn't sure who requested them. It turned out it was the County Dive Team which the Kohler and Cedar Grove Fire Departments are their support teams which is fine. We needed them there but with being on separate frequencies it causes a lot of communication problems. Another issue on that call is we had actually had rescuers that were swept off their feet off the North Pier and put into peril. Not all of the agencies that were on that call knew that occurred. So had we needed to go out and do rescue on the rescuers not everybody was even aware of all that. And I think the part in that call that disturbs me the most is at the time of that 911 call the Sheboygan Fire Department engine that houses the water rescue equipment was located in the Marina Parking Lot at the base of the North Pier just finishing up another call. It took nearly 7 minutes for that fire engine to become aware of that drowning call. It wasn't because of dispatcher error. It wasn't because of any error of any person. It was because the person that took the 911 call was sitting in one dispatch center. The dispatcher that knew where that fire engine was was in another dispatch center. As great as technology is today face-to-face is still the best communication. Had those two dispatchers been in the same room we probably would have gained 7 minutes of response time by that fire engine. I know we talked about a lot of the major incidences already. I would actually prefer to talk about the everyday efficiencies that we can gain on the calls that we see every day. The importance that every minute really makes to our emergency responders. The choking call. The fire call. Fires double every 2 minutes. We're seeing in the new lightweight construction, building components are failing in as short as 20 minutes. So every minute that we're there quicker really helps out the responders. The assaults, the robberies, cardiac arrest or medical issues, all of those every minute really counts for the person that is in need of the help. Biological death occurs roughly 8 minutes after sudden cardiac arrest or a person stops breathing. So you can see how every minute is important. The average time for a dispatcher to take a call and get responders on the road is about a minute. The average response time is roughly 4 minutes.  This afternoon I spent a lot of time listening to some of our 911 calls that were transferred and I think it's been reported before that the average time to transfer our cell 911 calls now between dispatch centers is roughly 45 seconds to a minute. I would say that that was probably accurate. The ones I listened to, that was all pretty close to that. I'd like to play a tape for you of one of those calls. It occurred recently that you'll be able to hear actually the time it took to transfer that. The first voice you'll hear on the tape is from the county dispatcher and then transferring the call over to city. Now as you heard this was a pretty routine call, not life threatening but as you heard the person had to repeat twice their call for help. Now picture yourself in that situation if you're calling in a life or death situation and it's one of your loved ones and you're put on hold and you're asked to repeat your request a second time how frustrating that can be. That call there took close to a minute to transfer the call over and get people on the road and then it takes us another minute to get that call dispatched. That's a very important minute missing that the first responders really could use. I talked about medical emergencies. We have a lot of cardiac events and the doctors have told us in a cardiac event if somebody needs catheterization they need to be in that cath lab within 90 minutes of the onset of that event.  The nearest cath lab to the city of Sheboygan is in Ozaki Grafton. So you can see how every minute is important to the Sheboygan fire department ambulance orange cross ambulance, Plymouth ambulance, Usper Grandum Lake whoever it is we need every minute we can get and those the minutes that we lose transferring calls are really important. The police officers, the firefighters, the medical personnel that respond to emergencies in these catastrophic events we're really putting our lives in the hands of the dispatchers. That's why it's so critical when we're having these calls that you have a dedicated dispatcher who's not distracted by other telephone calls who's listening only to the event that's going on. Really one missed made a call, one missed call for help from one of the emergency personnel can actually mean the loss of life of that person. I'm sure the sheriff, the police chief, all the fire chiefs we all read line of duty death reports almost daily seeing what we can learn from those reports to prevent them. Again the common theme you see in almost all the line of duty death reports is communication. Lack of communication. We needed better communication. If we had better communication this may not have happened. Combined dispatch gives us that better communication. We spent a lot of time as our small committee here talking about staffing. I don't know how many meetings we had where we went over what's the right number. We looked at other communities that have done this, Rock County, Waukesha. One of the things they always said was make sure you have adequate staffing if you're going to do this. Make sure you have adequate staffing when you begin. As I said we spent much time on this. I believe that we've presented a plan that has adequate staffing to begin with. The current centers have two dispatchers in each one. We're beginning with four dispatchers in a combined center. I think both sides have admitted that we're lacking in supervision at our dispatch centers. We've also provided for that within this proposal. And it's basically cost neutral. So we have some big gains without any big cost additions. Many of the response issues I've talked about can be fixed, can be improved with combined dispatch. Whether it's that one minute for transferring the call that we gain, whether it's that seven minutes that we lost on that drowning call out on the North Pier. The people that we serve cannot afford to lose that time. You never know who it's going to be that needs our services and needs that extra minute. It could be somebody in this room tonight. It could be your family, friends, neighbors. You never know when that call is going to come. The police chief, the sheriff, all the fire departments, we've all done our work. Our small committee, we've put this together. I think we've presented a very great workable plan. It's now time for these two governmental boards to come together and make this happen. There's no more time for excuses. We've got to get this done now. If we do not, we've failed the people that we're working for. Thank you. Good evening. Why haven't we been able to get this done? Why can't we get this done? We've been talking about combined dispatch for 30, 40 years. Both the common council and the county board have approved the concept at least a couple times each. Why can't we get this done? I have the task of focusing on a little bit of background here because as decision makers in the room, and I know we have a number of common council members and county board supervisors, sometimes it's helpful to know where we've been and the painstaking work that's been done for years on this issue to make a decision on how we go forward. And I want to thank Kayla Renz, my assistant.  There's 10 pages of history, and I promise you not every meeting, communication, action by one committee or another, one unit of government or another is in there. She simply took a couple of immense files in our office and tried to summarize them. I am not going to go through every single one of these areas, but I want to point out a few to you because I think it will help guide us as we move forward. This just goes back to 1999. As you've heard, we've talked about this literally for decades. There's been a lot of discussion over the years, but the last 10 years in particular, I think that discussion got cranked up. And people around the table and particularly Inspector Brockbauer, I know, has been very, very active with these discussions. You'll see that as you go through this frequently, anytime there's a study or a report or a group commission to get together, more often than not it is recommending combined dispatch. For the very reasons that you heard articulated this morning, and I thought the chief in particular did an excellent job sharing that the focus isn't so much on our employees. It's difficult. They have difficult work, but the key is the people we're serving out there and we want to make sure that we improve that service. But why isn't getting done? Say one reason it hasn't gotten done is because what we currently have in place is working all right. Some people are satisfied with it. I don't think anybody is in law enforcement. But generally speaking, what we do at the city, what we do at the county, it's been working all right with dispatch. There's been a lack of public interest, a lack of public pressure. How many of you council members and county board supervisors have gotten calls from your respective constituents saying, we've got to get this done? I'll bet you most of you can count on one hand how many calls you've gotten from your constituents in that regard. You've probably heard from some law enforcement professionals, emergency response professionals, but I think the public at large isn't real engaged with this discussion. And that's too bad. Cost. Like another reason we haven't done this is simply cost. And the cost shift that will occur. City taxpayers are paying far more for dispatch services today than rural taxpayers are. And to go to a combined dispatch, it'll create a cost shift, which some people might say there's winners and losers. But in the end, it's a more equitable approach. So we hope to get there. But certainly that cost and cost shift I think is given policy makers pause. Political will. I think the political will's been there to see it through. I'm hoping that's going to change. We've had more pressing priorities. When the state puts a cap on property taxes and our ability to generate additional revenue and make improvements, when we have unfunded mandates come our way and we have to deliver services that takes time and attention. And of course we've had other political distractions in this community for a number of years now. And hopefully that's something of the past. So there are a number of reasons why we haven't taken action. But if you look at the history to get on the first page there, you'll see that the city county shared services committee in 2006 really said alright, let's retackle this. We knew it was looked at in the 90s. Let's take another look at this opportunity. The city of Sheboygan passed a resolution in 2006 saying let's have a feasibility study done. So the common council took action and said alright, let's revisit this. That's fantastic. On the next page you'll see the city county shared services committee heard reports from surrounding counties. Those have already gone to combine dispatch. Got experience from others. What's worked? What hasn't? How can we get it done here? As the chief said, all of them said it's the right thing to do. And when you do it, make sure you don't do it on the cheap. Have adequate staff in place. Because we have lives at stake here. Let's do it right the first time. We heard that loud and clear. The sheriff had a feasibility study for combined dispatch in 2006. That was shared with the law committee. With the city county shared services committee. And in fact, in November of 2006, they put together a subcommittee. A subcommittee made up of county board, supervisors, county representatives predominantly from law enforcement, city representatives predominantly from law enforcement, and folks from the general public. In fact, in the audience today I see Gary Maples led the second ad hoc committee. I think you were involved with the first as well. Were you not, Gary? He's nodding. He put a lot of time and energy into this to see if we could bring people together. Ultimately, that first combined dispatch study report in 2007 presented several options. It was shared with the respective committees. Didn't go anywhere. In 2007, the city county passed a resolution took action. Said that the common council approved the city county shared services subcommittee report recommendations. They liked what that ad hoc committee had put together. We want to create a new negotiation team to discuss this more. And it is the intent of the count and in doing so they would like a joint communications center that the county pays for including the building cost and the personnel cost and to spread that across the county. Hindsight showed that was a non-starter. That wasn't going to get the job done. So, the law committee reviewed that. Reviewed the ad hoc committee report, the first one. And as you can see in the third page, there was a letter from the chairman at that time, Glen Marcus to the mayor that said the law committee was impressed with the subcommittee's report. There are a number of benefits of combining dispatch. However, ultimately the law committee agreed that it wasn't worth pursuing in light of the common council's resolution specific point that the county absorbed the full cost associated with this endeavor. So, we had an experience, we tried something, didn't work out, died. The city common council to its credit came back in 2008 and said, let's give this another shot. The current city of Sheboygan emergency dispatch center remain in its current location at city hall until a logical fair and complete shared services study takes place and very shortly thereafter, in 08, they passed a resolution saying we're going to rescind that 07 approach that the county run with it and pay for everything. Let's get back to the table and start a new negotiation process. In that one, Alderman Jim Gisha and Alderman Hannah presented a joint dispatch proposal with the committee with the, what was it, the city county shared services committee highlighting a plan to house a joint dispatch center at 833 center avenue the building across from city hall. That was being vacated. Hey, maybe we can all get together in there. In fact, at that time, they offered to provide $2 million to ramp up that facility and they offered the police department as a backup. That was the proposal. That proposal ultimately was discussed by the city council and went to the city county shared services committee. The city county shared services committee asked Gary Maples if he would kindly step forward and share an ad hoc committee to visit, revisit, combine dispatch and the concept and would it make sense to have this at the facility across from city hall. Ultimately in December of 2008, on the bottom of page five, you'll see that the joint dispatch ad hoc study committee final report to the city county shared services committee was. The report indicates that after reviewing the cost to locate a county wide dispatch center at center avenue or at the LEC or law enforcement center compared and contrasted that that was part of the charge that the city county shared services committee gave them. It was determined that it would be most cost and operationally effective at the law enforcement center and that the city police department be the backup. That is what the ad hoc committee comprised of city representatives and county representatives and people in this community don't care about this issue. That's what they came up with. And as it relates to financing, the report proposes that the city commit two million toward ramp up and support costs, provide one million backup dispatch facility at city PD and provide ongoing maintenance for the backup facility. That's a much sweeter offer than what was being considered a year earlier, isn't it? These are real dollars to help ramp up and transition to a combined dispatch center. What happened? Well, we went to the law committee. There was discussion internally our finance director at the time Tim Finch had some reservations about the county absorbing that cost and what that means for our levy and distribution and whether or not we'll see a return on the investment. The law committee held a special committee meeting to consider it. The city county shared services committee got together in January of 2016. Gary Maples presented a very professional overview for probably the fourth or fifth or sixth, I don't know how many times, he was relentless at sharing information and making sure it was factual and people were involved. And ultimately the ad hoc committee's recommendation, what I just laid out to you, was supported by the city county shared services committee on a vote of eight to two. Alright, we've got something. We've got a proposal that has legs. Our city county shared services committee combined with county board supervisors and city common council members. It's not 100% consensus, but we've got something. Well, what happened? There was concern with how we were going to deal with the cost. This is a big cost shift to the county. I mean bottom line is the county board has approved the concept at least two or three times. It's that almighty cost. How are we going to manage this situation? And that allocation situation. As you can imagine there are rural supervisors, some of the room tonight, who if this ultimately goes forward will see their constituents' taxes for combined dispatch double. If you're going to pass that kind of increase onto your constituents, you better have some pretty good rationale for it. I think you heard some pretty good rationale tonight. What if the public's not engaged? If they're really not that interested or concerned, any tax increase of any kind is generally not very welcome, is it? So this created, okay, what are we going to do with this? We've got a city county shared services committee that supported this proposal. It's got some merit. The city's putting some real dollars in up front to help ramp up for this. And for the county to take it over, it'll be in the law enforcement center. The police department will provide the backup. Okay, this has got legs, but we have to figure out how do we incrementally implement this. It doesn't happen overnight and you sure as heck don't want to make mistakes when it comes to combined dispatch and emergency response. So we put together a five year plan. In 2009, again, the city county shared services committee supported this January 12th of 2009. By the end of January of 2009 we thought let's put together a five year plan. So in 2009 we thought let's get our memorandum of understanding we're all on the same page. And the city county shared services is a segment of the overall council and county board. They're not the final decision makers. This is their recommendation. In 2010 we want to create a calm communication center manager. Half time supported, a full time position, half supported by the city, half supported by the county, because both entities as you heard earlier are supervisionism what it should be. Alright, sounds reasonable. 2011 through 2012 we're going to add some much needed supervision. We're going to get our protocols in line. We're going to get our architect renderings, our plans in place because that doesn't happen overnight. And then in 2013 we're going to remodel the law enforcement center. We've got a plan. What happened? Well if you turn to page seven you'll see that consternation continues. Where is this going to go? How is this going to work? Ultimately in March of 2009 the county board adopted a resolution supporting the concept of combined dispatch, a very common statement and entering into negotiations with the city for this communication center dispatch manager. So I took that as alright, let's get our memorandum of understanding and let's get at least our dispatch supervisor in place so we start incrementally working toward this. Not bad. The committee city of Sheboygan grievances Salaries and Grievance committee, they recommended that the report from the county be accepted and gave a favorable recommendation to the common council. Sounds good. Let's get that MOA in place. Let's get that half time dispatch manager in place. In fact I know both units of government budgeted for that position. Making progress. Very shortly after that budget processes really got rolling. And to make a very long story short, ultimately those positions were pulled from both units of government's budget because of other priorities. We took a step back. The memorandum of understanding was never prepared or signed or agreed to. The five year plan was put on the back burner and as far as our records show, very little happened. In 2011 Chief Dumbagolski to his credit, doer face to the community, certainly not aware of all the history, blood, sweat and tears that have gone into this, wrote a letter to the city county shared services committee and said hey, why don't we have combined dispatch here? And I'll tell you what, let's have it over here at the police department. Putting out the Alvage branch. This is hurt. Well we've been down that road. We've touched on that. That has not come with a lot of enthusiasm for being at the police department and we'll all touch on that a little bit more in a few minutes. But discussions started getting renewed. All of the history seemed to kind of dissipate. We didn't even talk about the five year plan. Ulderman Hammon to his credit made a phone call. We got some discussions going. It appeared that maybe we'd revisit it. Maybe we're starting from scratch, but essentially all that good work just seemed to kind of fade away. And we seem to start over again. People like myself and others go back and look at history and where were we and where have we been and what progress have we made. In February of 2012 the city of Sheboygan passed a resolution approving combining dispatch services between the city of Sheboygan and Sheboygan County. Once again we have support for the concept. The city approves the recommendation of the city county shared services committee to begin the process of implementing a combined dispatch center to be initially housed at the Sheboygan police department. Well that's interesting. So we're going to initially go to the city police department and then I guess return to the law enforcement center. May have some merit. Maybe we can get this combined dispatch going more quickly, but as you can imagine all the time that it takes to ramp up and get that done, we're going to ramp up there. We're going to ramp up at the law enforcement center. Is that real practical? The fire chief sent one of his and Chief Herman I think has been so consistent about the importance of doing this and I compliment him for that and I appreciate that. The Sheboygan County board very shortly thereafter passed a resolution approving county administered shared dispatch plan operating out of the law enforcement center. Very shortly after that this group started meeting and speaking for myself, my personal point of view, it's crystal clear that there's support for combined dispatch. Crystal clear the concept has been supported time and time again. In my opinion it's very clear that the needs there, it's the right thing to do. We should be striving to get this done because it's the right thing to do for this community. So on that premise, how do we get there? What's always the biggest hang up? Of course it's the almighty dollar and an equitable cost allocation. My hope is we were past talking about how many dispatchers we need. I love a Pete. We've been talking about that for a decade. The Sheriff's Department if they run this, that's going to get figured out and let me tell you the county board isn't going to allow them to have any more staff than we can afford. Location. Well where should it go? Speaking for myself, I was hoping we were past that too. If the Sheriff's Department is going to run this operation I think it makes absolute sense that it's in their house. Communication. How many times have we heard communication is the key? Well if we need supervision if the supervisors are right there in place, I guarantee you communication is going to be better. It's going to be quicker it's going to be more efficient and ultimately we're going to provide a better service. I'm not looking to save a few dollars here on the old communication front. If we're going to do this, let's do it right. Let's put it in the house of the people that are operating it. So what we focused on the last six months is cost. Terry is going to get into the key distinction between allocation and who really has the most to gain here and again with all due respect from a cost standpoint, not a service standpoint. From a service standpoint we all have something to gain here and we all should take ownership forward and want this to happen. But from a cost allocation standpoint, if you were a city taxpayer right now, you were paying so much more than a rural taxpayer for dispatch services. And when it comes to fire protection, emergency response, you name it, I'll tell you what, I want the best, most efficient response that we can provide. And I think everybody does. Combined dispatch will help with that. So what do we propose from a county standpoint? My direction and charge to our internal team was what is the most money that we can ask from the city common council for them to help ramp up or transition for the county to take this over that will still allow them to pass on the savings to their taxpayers. So initially our first proposal in June was to have the county take it over, run it out of the law enforcement center, and we were asking for $5.7 million As you can imagine when we shared that with some of these good folks from the city, Jaws dropped. Everyone's struggling. Where are we going to come up with that? The thought was $5.7 million will help with our ramping up costs, the remodeling, and there's a lot of equipment, radios, all sorts of things associated with the importance of emergency response dispatch services. $5.7 million also allowed, however even bonding for that and paying for that each year over a 10-year period, each year city taxpayers would still see a savings. And after 10 years of course it's a tremendous savings, but throughout that process it was a savings. So my hope was, perhaps naively, was that hmm maybe common council members will hold their nose and support this because they know they're passing on a significant savings to their taxpayers, and ultimately it's a huge windfall. As for the county board, here's where I think the tough sell is. The rural county board supervisors, it's tough to look your constituents in the eye and say I'm going to double what you're paying. But if they can look them in the eye and say you're going to get all these improvements that you just heard today all this is going to happen and the city is going to really step up and provide a significant contribution for this transition to ramp up to allow it to this to happen. I mean significant. My hope was that enough rural county board supervisors might be comfortable enough with that to say alright it's time for some give and take we can support that. A couple of months into our process we reduced that number from $5.7 million to $3 million. If $3 million was provided by the city for the county to ramp up, city taxpayers would save $222,000 per year. At the end of 10 years we'll have saved $2.2 million, and after 10 years we'll save $613,000 a year. It will be paying significantly less for dispatch services. That's with the $3 million transition cost. What will that mean for in fact on average $150,000 home, currently those of you from the city, if that's your average $150,000 home you're paying $75 each for dispatch services. If this occurs you'd be paying $60 each and after 10 years $37 each. As for the county, rural taxpayers right now they're paying $17 currently. Far less than the city. They would go up to $17 as well so everyone would be paying the same. Significant reduction for city, significant increase for rural but ultimately everyone's paying the same for the same important life-saving service. To put in a perspective that's $3.13 a month to get law enforcement, fire department search and rescue, ambulance services to your home or business as quickly as possible. $3.13 a month on an average $150,000 home. Whereas these same people are spending $600 annually or $50 per month just for fire insurance. In my opinion when you put it in perspective that's a pretty important first step to make sure the fire protection isn't as needed. So of late our committee was focusing predominantly on that proposal, that $3 million I don't know if the county board as a whole will support that. I don't know if that's enough of a transition cost for rural supervisors to say I can hang my hat on this and I support the additional improvements. I don't know if common council members can support it because boy $3 million is a lot of money. But I think if you look at the direct impact the taxpayers involved again with all due respect I think it's an easier decision for common council members to make than it is for rural county board supervisors to make. Now during our discussions though most of our focus was on this the city, Jim Amodeo, Don Hammond shared the proposal from the common council around June or July offering the city police department internally at least from a county perspective we kind of talked about it as a non-starter. We've been there. We're not going to go to the city police department. But it is a proposal, it's an option and I'll turn it over to Jim to talk about that. I feel like in about 60 minutes we've got point counterpoint here. You know I'm a pretty practical guy. I try to use common sense in my approach to most things. And from a city perspective we made a proposal that we thought from the city's perspective we thought we made a proposal that made a lot of sense and was the most cost effective. I think in the history that I put together was great but you have to remember as well the city really didn't have its own real police department until 2009. They were actually living out of the first floor in city hall. So we really didn't have room to expand anywhere. The cost savings to the city and the approach by the county was great in that it would save residents $600,000 a year after we would pay $3 million of debt off. But if we just go back 20 years and if we just pick a number of $500,000 that city taxpayers have been overpaying for this support, that's $20 million. And that's not going back to the beginning of time. So we have to put it in perspective and the goal is to get more people motivated about what costs are really in their tax base. The city has been paying 100% of its city dispatch and almost 30% of the county's dispatch costs forever. What we're trying to do is make that equitable and we're trying to do it in the most cost effective way. In February the council passed spending $356,000 on the city PD's facility to expand it to make room for supervision in the manager and to put another council in it as well as to put fiber optics cable in between the city hall and the city PD. That which has many benefits, I won't go into them but it actually provides high speed connectivity, it provides redundancy, it gets us off our microwave net which at times is not reliable and it also provides backup for not only all the squads in the county as well as the city but fire protection as well. So when the city looks at it and says that we have an extremely viable facility which is 3 years old it can be expanded and we talked about this for a long period of time about how long we could live there before we had to bust the walls out and it was probably passed a lot of our lifetimes of people sitting in this audience so it's pretty far out and that was based on numbers of calls. So we have to be careful on looking at expanding and how much the county is going to grow in the next 15 or 20 years. Certainly we'd have five consoles which is far better than we have today one would be used for training and supervision overview. So the city's position is that we use the city as a PD. We would save $3 million of cost that would be allocated. We would be able to start combined dispatch at least two years earlier than the county is proposing and we would finally allocate equitably the cost for combined dispatch to city and county residents. And that's what the city has laid out and that's the proposal that we have on the table. It makes a lot of sense to me it's probably the most cost effective that we can provide and as long as we have management whether it's run by the city or county that supervises the approach right now is one manager and four supervisors that would manage 21 to 24 dispatchers. I believe you could put that most anywhere in the city and it would be run effectively. The real key is the benefits you get from that center being combined. So where it sits it's kind of turf war. We think we have a facility that we would maintain at no cost to the county and it's the most cost effective alternative. Alright I'm going to walk through the county's or the current proposal that the county has forward in regards to the $3 million that Adam referred to in his presentation. I think we went through a lot of background but essentially the background is you know both entities are looking towards the combined dispatch center and we were looking at the opportunities for improvement and the sheriff and chief Herman. Alright all gave the good presentation on why we want to do a dispatch service. Essentially the proposal that the county put forward was that the county will run and support a combined dispatch operations out of the out of the law enforcement center and the city would fund the remodeling of the law enforcement center dispatch facility and associated equipment costs in the amount of $3 million. We projected that the annual debt service for that investment would be $391,000 a year for 10 years at a rate of 2.5%. We thought that this would be a win-win under this proposal the city taxpayers would be saving $222,000 per year while funding the debt 10 years of debt service and at the end of the 10 years $2.2 million will have been saved and $613,000 a year will be saved thereafter. Sheboygan county as a whole would benefit based upon the improved communications that we went over in great detail earlier. In determining how much the city pays for their dispatch service, how much the city taxpayers pay for that versus what county taxpayers are paying for dispatch service, I looked at the overall levy and right now we look at the city of Sheboygan is providing 27.6% of the tax dollars that the county collects in its property taxes. I know there was a little bit of reference in regards to paying $20 million of additional money for duplication services, but if we just look at this pie chart for one second the population of the city is approximately 40% of the county. This is not 40% of what's being paid. In addition, a lot of the services that the county puts forward are used by a lot of urban centers, not taxpayers but residents. So I think if we did a real cost analysis of what the county is spending, I would think that we would expect a bigger piece of the pie to come from the city, but that's not the tax structure that we're in. That is also not how this dispatch center was originally set up. So I don't think that we can go back and look at what's double taxation and what has happened in the past because that is the difference that we have been dealt with. I don't think that whatever we do now can rectify anything that anybody feels from the past as far as double taxation or if someone's contributed more or if the city is not contributing enough. I think the best approach is to look at what we can do forward and what looks equitable from this point on. So looking at this we then use the tax levy that the county has for dispatch services which is $992,000. The city has a total tax levy of $932,000 for their dispatch service. We applied the 27.6% to the county's portion to come up with $274,000 that the city taxpayers are paying to the county for dispatch services and then the city's portion may fund the service 100% of that. So if you add those two numbers together the city taxpayers are paying $1.2 million for dispatch services. Under the proposal the total tax levy for the dispatch services would be $2.1 million. This might be a little bit low, this might be a little bit high. It all depends upon how we end up funding it in the long term. For the percentages all stay the same. So the percent paid by the city taxpayers is 27.6% and that equates to $593,000. Now if we include the debt service for this facility and that transition funding that Adam talked about we would be looking at a total of $391,000 for that debt service. Adding those two numbers together the city taxpayers would then be paying $984,000 a year for the dispatch services. Now the annual savings during those first 10 years would be $222,000 so at the end of 10 years it would be $2.2 million saved. Beyond that we would have $613,000 that the taxpayers of the city would be saving per year. How that looks and Adam touched on this briefly was if we looked at what an average equalized value of a home in the city, it was $150,000 currently they're paying $74.52 per year for dispatch services. Under the county's proposal with the $3 million contribution that would go to $60.80 so there would be a reduction of $13.72 but after year 10 that would go to $37.62 so that would be cutting the total amount that the city taxpayers pay by almost in hand. Whereas under the county we would be looking at $17.36 is what they currently pay for dispatch services under the proposal they would be paying $37.62 so that's a $20 per year increase and that was part of the cost shift that we were mentioning earlier and allowing the broader county supervisors selling that to their constituents so that was the desire to, as Adam put it, try to get the most that we could but now we're looking at the $3 million amount. But the key factor to look on this is at the end for the dispatch services both city and county taxpayers would be paying the same amount for dispatch services and looking forward not looking at the past and not looking at the hard feelings and setting all that aside I think when you look at it and say 10 years from now everybody's going to be paying the same for the same level of service I think that's something that the community can say this is definitely a win when everybody's getting the fairer piece for what services they're receiving. Looking at the equalized value for $1 million that was just for business representation so there were businesses or higher end homes we could see what that impact was and we just did a little analogy that the $37.50 annually for the dispatch services equates to $3.13 per month which is very minimal and if we look at what fire insurance is for a home of about $150,000 we got a quote that it's about $600 annually about $50 a month. So this improved communication can definitely help the taxpayers if they're ever in that situation because you get that reduced service or reduced call time and it's only costing $3.13 per month compared to the $50 that you would pay for player insurance. So we thought that this was a very equitable solution and one that both entities might not necessarily think this is a great deal but if both people can walk away and think in the long term this is going to be good I think it's a viable solution. Thank you Terry and to all the presenters and appreciate your comments. The mayor and I both spoke earlier and we'd like to open it up for questions if everyone could try to be brief and try to get to everyone. Of course we'll try to get the questions from the City Alderman and the county supervisors then open it up to the rest of the public and the mayor is going to walk around and get the speakers to...you got the first one right there. Thank you I'm Corey Raysor I'm the Alderman from District 1. I appreciate all of your work and everything everybody did to organize this meeting. One component I think that everybody's getting about that I think needs to be mentioned is the actual employees and the dispatchers themselves who are going through this process as well and the stress that's been put on them. And when you look at this timeline starting in 1999 I kind of look at it as a business that's been bought out by another business and each week or so the employees wake up and read the paper and find out whether or not people think they're staying or going or relocating or what exactly their future is. And I guess my point to this or my comment is I'm looking for some resolution and hopefully a quick resolution so I'm asking my fellow Alderman and county board members to try to keep them in consideration when we're trying to come to some resolution and do so as quickly as we possibly can because the stresses on these people is immense and whether it's the city or the county I'm sure that the resolution is what they're looking for so that we can move on and again I'm not lobbying for one way or the other but just some resolution thanks. Anybody else? Any county supervisors have a resolution that was passed towards the end of the last county board term called for the sheriff's department to consider and go to the police department first. And as a county supervisor and past chairman I was disappointed when that changed in the current negotiations but I think we all have to realize that it changed and I don't think it's going to go back. I think that the sheriff's department put a lot of thought into this and they looked at everything but that's the direction things are going now and I think we've got a rally around that. The other thing that I want to bring up is elected officials for the last decade and a half we've all been trained that we can't bond for too much money. We've had caps in the city for three million and caps on an annual basis for bonding of four million in the county. And I really think that because we've had those caps for the last decade to the decade and a half we are in a position where we can bond for more than we have in the past. Interest rates are at an all time low and I think this really fits the situation. The other thing that you have is you have our bond rating agencies who are saying that it's not going to hurt your bond rating if you bond additionally to that three or four million and you also have the lowest interest rates that we're probably going to see in our lifetime to help us out with this move. Thank you. District 2. Anyone else? Mike, can you see me? Oh, Mike Alderman Hammond. Oh, there you are. Thank you. I completely appreciate your comments about the bonding limits and where we're at with that. The challenge I think when we look at three million dollars and if we were still housing the PD in City Hall like Alderman Gisha and Alderman Hannah had proposed early on I would completely support that position. The challenge I have is we have a brand new or nearly brand new facility that would take $356,000 to ramp up and get into a position to be doing combined dispatch in a much quicker time. I think there's a lot better uses if we're going to bond for three million dollars inside the city of Sheboygan infrastructure, various other things that not only impact the city of Sheboygan but also benefit rural citizens who work and play inside the city of Sheboygan so it's not that we can't. Is that the best use for the money when we have a perfectly good facility inside the city limits? Way back in the corner. Dick being this District 23 on the county board, representing a rural area, I'm glad I don't own a farm because when we figure tax base we don't own a land that's old, not $150,000 house. Any other City Alderman or County Supervisors? I am John Bellinger and I'm the also served the first District Council Member and I agree with Alderman Hammond and his point and I find all the work that's been done I want to commend both governmental bodies and the committee here. Very good information to share but I have a very hard time representing the city and again trying to build something that already has just recently been built. We've got a structure that is brand new. We're willing to put like Alderman Hammond said $356,000 to ramp it up, get it quicker and I just have a hard time with the logic of an argument saying that the management and supervision will be less effective if it was at the city versus if it was on county property. I think the effectiveness of the managers and the supervisors it's going to be fine no matter where it is and that's what I think and I think that it would be a foolish waste of tax dollars to build something or remodel something when we've already got an existing structure that works out fine. I completely empathize with that point of view and as we were discussing this early on we thought well let's go to the police department let's try that initially as you know with the wording and then we'll come back to the Sheriff's Department and I think that language was selected to appease everyone those who wanted to go to the police department, those who want to see it ultimately the Sheriff's Department. But with all due respect and I completely empathize with that point of view and what was just shared I don't go to my next door neighbor when I need health advice on my children when they're sick. Talk to my wife she's a registered nurse. If I have a roofing problem I go to a roofer and though I again completely appreciate the challenge here I think if you're looking long term and focus on the savings to your constituents this is a winner. Where I'm putting my hope and trust is in the law enforcement professionals that do this day in and day out. Though I appreciate and respect your opinion and it probably could work at the police department I'm going to put my faith and confidence in the law enforcement professionals that have to run it and who are telling me how important communication is and that seconds and minutes count and that we need that supervision right there. Even under the proposal we don't have 100% supervision all the time whereas if they're in the same building literally steps away that's going to be beneficial to the overall oversight and logistics. The other comment on that is we checked with all 72 other counties and no one else is doing it the way we're possibly considering you know running a county combined dispatch center out of the city police department. No one else is doing that in the state. I don't want to be the guinea pig when we're talking about a possible response to my family or my friends or the constituents in this community. I don't want to take that risk. So again with all due respect as I recognize the challenges we're all struggling with and this is a big investment but right away you have immediate savings to city taxpayers and I'm going to put my, I'm going to air on the side of what the law enforcement professionals are telling me that are responsible for this and do it every day. Thank you Mayor. My name is Peggy Feider and I represent district 18 on the county board. I also am privileged to chair the city county shared services committee this year. My comment has nothing to do about where this facility is eventually housed. What it has to do is with the notion that we as local politicians have a chance to take hold of a long term view of our future emergency plans for the county and in that vein plan for its financial stability. To that end I think that we need to build a plan that calls for cash reserves to avoid short term bowing on either the city or the county's part. Thank you. I just, I guess I don't if I don't cover what he's going to cover he'll have an opportunity. I want to add when it comes to the location and looking at 2012 to get up and running we're not going to make 2012. Just the logistics of hiring enough people qualified and trained to do the job of a dispatcher we will not be ready. The reason being is when we go combine nationally wise statistics say there's a 20% turnover right off the get go. 20%. Now we can only train so many people at one time and then to let them on their own takes up to nine months, five months, that's what it was. Five months for training and I let go just not too long ago one individual just a few months ago. I had to let an individual go that did not meet our standards. Now we're right back to having to start over with a whole new applicant hopefully getting from training. So if we're talking about a 20% turnover we're talking about a significant number of people that right now I know from our department if we go combine and the anxiety that this is causing I know of several dispatchers that will plan on retiring because they can't. The whole combined dispatch causes an awful lot of anxiety on both houses. It's just as the older men have said. There's an awful lot of anxiety with these guys and gals that are doing the job wondering are we going to combine do I want to put myself through that. I can retire. I think that is going to be tougher for the city dispatchers because they're not accustomed to Mavis. This is going to be a rude awakening for those dispatchers. I can see that it's going to be easier for the county dispatchers versus the city because the city has a great system in place to dispatch their fire department. We're talking about numerous volunteer fire departments and services throughout the county that have to use the Mavis system and it's going to take a while. And some are going to throw up their hands and say you know what I can retire I'm going to go ahead and retire. So even the quick turnaround to use the facility of the Sheboygan Police Department we won't be ready that quick anymore. If we're going to end up being responsible for it I am going to request that we have more time to set ourselves up for success. And that would mean we can actually then prepare to have a facility within the LEC and hopefully the timing works out that we do it as quickly as we can with the mindset that hey we're going to do this right and we're going to do it as quickly as we can to prepare ourselves for success. Okay and I think we can save the money up front from starting at the city because we're not going to have enough people because I know there are several people. If we pulled our people on each side of the house I would venture yes we're going to lose several people and we will be hurting from ample. We just got ourselves up to almost full staff and it has taken us what was it six years almost five years to get full of staff to find qualified people. Now the city's had some great success lately. We're recently getting some good success and getting qualified people. Oh boy if we're talking about a mass exodus we are also talking about having to have enough people to train because you're going to burn out our trainers. We can only train so many at a time. So it's going to take time to get ourselves to a staffing level that we can make it work. So one thing I guess I want to add is we're kind of viewing ourselves. I don't think we're viewing ourselves as one big community. We're always at a point in time. We are a large community and I think we're seeing ourselves as individual communities yet and I think it's time for us to start making some decisions especially in this arena. There's a bullet coming down the road and a prime example of this bullet. That's coming. It's heading our way. One example of that and we dodged this one and that was a Broward State Parade several years back there was a pursuit that was cut off by the county ended up in the city and it was by the grace of God that nobody was killed. It was heads up police work, observation skills by officers working the parade that prevented a tragedy and that could have been prevented with this concept of combined dispatch because that situational awareness would have been there. Those officers would have had that heads up and plenty of time to remove people from harm's way versus split second decision making. I think we need to start taking a look at this and making some decisions as a larger community. We all live in Sheboygan County and we need to do what's in the best interest for the citizens of Sheboygan County to look for the right reasons and the right way and learn from the mistakes from other combined dispatch centers that have paved this way and followed their model and I thought we've had put a lot of work and effort combined in taking into all that account of those previous efforts of combined dispatch and all the pain that went with it to our benefit. Apparently I didn't touch on what the inspector wants to talk about so I'll turn it over. Thank you. Hi, I'm Inspector Bill Brookbauer. I've been with the county just over 31 years. A third of my career has been spent on and off for combined dispatch. It's probably safe to say that I probably have more time invested in this than anybody else in this room. I just want to touch on a couple of points really quickly. One had talked about that Northern County in the state has a county department or a city department running a dispatch center out of the other agencies' jurisdictional headquarters. Not one. There's a reason for that and it's just a goal and it's operational. The main reason that we have for us is you've got to realize we talk about adding dispatch supervision into our comm center. We're talking about four supervisors and a manager and it's not enough people to provide a certain supervisor coverage in that comm center. Roughly 20 to 25% of the time there will be no supervisor. Currently in our houses we have now our patrol supervisor provide that supervision. If we are, the county is running that dispatch center and it is housed at the city police department and it's at one of those times I don't have a supervisor working. My patrol supervisor is down at the sheriff's department. There is no supervisor in that comm center. That's the first reason. We all heard earlier that one of the main emphasis, one of the main squad points of doing this is we're going to get some supervision into our comm center. We're actually taking a step backwards if we're putting it at the city and having a county run it because we're not going to be able to do that part of the time. We'll end up with none instead of having it all the time either dedicated or at least a patrol supervisor may be able to do that. Second, most of you don't realize that the county is responsible for issuing the vast majority of warrants and commitments within this county. Roughly 2,200 warrants or commitments are issued by our dispatchers in a year. All those warrants who are under current regulations they have to have a hard copy of that warrant in front of them when they enter it. You have to have a hard copy of that warrant in front of them when they cancel it. That means that those warrants that are now taken care of by our court officer who basically walks back and forth between the court house and the sheriff's department thousands of times a day just drops them off. It is not a logistical issue. If we move out to the city all those warrants have to follow. We have to somehow get 2,200 warrants every year out there to enter them if they get canceled they have to get back. It's logistically very troublesome for us. Also, all those warrants have to be validated. That's another 2,800 a year that they validate. We don't control that. Those warrants we get a number from the state says you pull these warrants you validate them we have to do that. Those warrants again we have to have access to them for them to validate that. Logistically which is why initially when this was brought forward it was never intended to put this at the city and leave it at the city if the county was going to run it. Never. The initial plan was we could start at the city while we were innovated at the county if we wanted to get it up and try to get it running a little bit sooner and then we would move it. The original resolution was an ordinance I can't remember that was passed by the county states that. There was also some additional beneficial cost savings because we could use some city dispatchers currently while we were there but as soon as we moved back to the county we'd have to hire. There was a short term limited savings also. That's not going to go away. So the other thing we talked about that they have a modern facility it's up to date and it's newer. That's correct. The facility is newer than ours. However, just past our five year capital plan we have to upgrade our entire radio system countywide. Every council in both houses are going to be brand new within two years. All the equipment will be replaced it will all be brand new. The furniture will be there. All the electronics that actually does the dispatch is all brand new both houses. If we build it at the city or at the county they only have five councils if they expand the city. If we remodel at the county we will have six. That gives us two councils basically that we can use for training purposes and we can immediately under situations where we need to have additional staffing or a larger dispatch presence we can immediately increase our dispatch capability in our primary center by 50% without moving anywhere. We only have five at the city. Five is too much for not too much but it's going to be more than you really need for a backup center. If you build at the city you don't have to remodel at the county. You can leave it as it is. You don't have to spend a dime on remodeling or taking any additional office space away from the police department. You can stay as it for a backup center. So there are advantages for us to go at the LEC outside of just the cost and logistically to stay for expect us to stay there for a long term. It's just actually chipping away at the reason we're doing it. It's to give complete situational awareness to create a situation where we have good and consistent dispatch supervision and an effective and efficient as best as we can possible dispatch center. If we're putting in at the city but having us run it you're chipping away at the very foundation of why you're doing it. And it's for $3 million. And I know $3 million sounds like a lot but we're talking about an investment in something that's going to be serviced in this county for decades. And it's larger. You're even going to for a long time have to expand a longer time frame at the county because it's going to be a little larger than what you can build at the city currently. So you're even pushing the idea of when you have to expand it or remodel it or whatever even farther off than you can at the city. So there are definitely advantages to putting it at the LEC and after much thought and looking at it that's why you decided that if it's going to be run by the county it should be started by us built there and you start there we don't move. Anybody have any other questions? Good evening. My name is Tom District 15 town of Plymouth. I'm on the county board and I'm also a member of the law committee. We've been debating this issue for many, many years and I look back and initially I was not sold on the fact that combined dispatch is the way to go. I have shifted my ideas about that and I would say combined dispatch is a good viable and important program to have but I have some reservations in it and let me start and I'm going to be dovetailing on some of the things that Inspector Brockmore has said but what I want to also bring up is the fact is I think there are things that are not being mentioned that eventually will happen as a result of combined dispatch. There are programs that I know that there's a lot of emergency medical systems want and one of those programs is emergency medical dispatch. Now this I think is a good program but it's a very expensive program and we're not really looking at the cost of this. Another issue that has been brought up a long time ago and I'm going to dovetail again with Inspector Brockbauer and this was an issue that was brought up by Rock County many years ago when we went to them for advice on emergency medical dispatch and they told us at that time if you're going to do it do it the right way and not cheapen it out and the reason I bring that up is initially it was told to us by Inspector Brockbauer and a lot of the people that were researching this that nine supervisors is needed for 24-7 365 coverage and eventually I think if we go into combined dispatch eventually we are going to need that supervision to implement this program I think they've lowered the requirement to get the program going and I understand why they're doing that but eventually it's going to have to be done the correct way and that is advice that we can give them by other jurisdictions. Once we start this program there's no going back also in other words we're not going to say give up we're going to go back to go away. Once we start putting money into it it can be like a sinkhole if we don't do it right. I'm convinced that this would be a good program but I'm also looking at some of the operational costs and processes that eventually will come down that we're going to have to pay for and I'm approaching this in a cautious sense knowing that that there's stuff that's coming up that I know that eventually the taxpayers are going to have to pay for and I think that pretty much I'm sure that I wanted to bring to your attention but I want to see it done and done right if we're not going to do it right let's not do it because we've been given that advice from other places. Thank you very much for your time. Any other discussion from the augment? Otherwise from the general public we have a few minutes left. Any questions from the residents of the county or city? Please give your name Dave Augustine, City of Sheboygan I'm going to be talking from two points I've also been had fun being on the committee and there was a lot of hard work put in a lot of good thought, a lot of up there, a lot of planning, a lot of debate and the original plan that was put together was absolutely right it was going to be housed at the city first for the short term phase where that would allow us to get our management staff, our standard operating procedures, we get the routines and process to find after that the longer term was to relocate it at the county which that's what we wanted originally however if we have it in a phased or planned approach it can give us time to either like Peggy was saying we can budget funds to put at constructing that facility so it doesn't hurt so much when we do want to do it and then have it staffed because either way if we want a backup center we're going to have to do our testing back and forth so that's how I'm going to talk about that was as a citizen Adam you're absolutely right you want to go to who you trust for what you're doing. The communication is important however as the staff the management is there with the dispatch center that communication will be there. Now there is going to be some process changes or whatever but my background has been in IT where I previously was I was in health care I managed data centers and all the infrastructure for three hospitals and multiple clinics so I places all over the place that I managed and talk about life threatening situations when a radiology machine doesn't work you know that's life and death as well it got done it's through your standard operating procedures it's through your processes you change to adapt it can be done this is all I'm saying it's just kind of maybe a win-win to get to the win-win situation or through things to look at you know it's just a different twist which I historically have been doing so as far as that goes. Thank you. Anyone else? I'd like to comment on the emergency medical dispatch issue that was brought up I don't think that should be confused with the combined dispatch that's an important concept that probably should be in each dispatch center probably a little bit more important in the county dispatch because of the longer response times out into the county but yes there is an expense to it but I don't think it should be put into this argument I think it's something that's needed in both centers right now or would be helpful in both centers whether it's coming down the road or not yes there is an expense to it but I don't think it should be confused with this issue. In addition when we spent a lot of our time looking at the staffing levels and I know it's been brought up are there hidden costs or not I would offer that I believe there are hidden efficiencies that we haven't looked at we all looked at the numbers we've never had combined dispatch here we've looked at our call volume we've identified that there are times of the day days of the week when there is lower call volume we don't know if we're going to need four dispatchers at all times so I think if we do go to this as we get down the road a year or so there may be other efficiencies that are there to begin Anyone else? My name is Gary Maples I'm a resident of Sheboygan Falls and Adam was kind enough to mention my name a couple times before I was in chair of two subcommittees that looked at combined dispatch over the last six years. It's been a long journey as was mentioned. The first documented study of combined dispatch that I'm aware of goes back to the early 1970s when the law enforcement center was being built and at that time it was decided that there was no need for combined dispatch so a missed opportunity so 40 years have gone by and my one comment tonight is that 40 years from now I will be a hundred and eight years old and I don't want to be talking about combined dispatch or leading a subcommittee when I'm honored to meet ahead of the committee. Just a couple of things quickly there are, I see this as being two significant issues. One is the cost whether you're talking two million or three million or four million or five million dollars that's a big ticket number that's not small change but I want you to understand but what we learned from our studies was that is actually a bargain. The counties that started from scratch said let's build a facility from the ground up brand new, no not modernizing and existing building or rehabbing it. They spent eight to ten million dollars to accomplish combined dispatch. When you look at that perspective again is two million dollars or three million dollars a significant amount? Absolutely categorically it is but because of the things that have been done in the county in the city you really are poised to do it at a relatively low cost compared to what others have experienced. So I recognize the city's position and say but if somebody to come to the city and say we can save you two hundred thousand dollars a month, excuse me two hundred thousand a month that would be pretty good, that would take it. Two hundred thousand dollars a year and then in ten years six hundred thousand dollars a year but you have to buy this three million dollar piece of equipment well you might give that serious consideration. Two hundred thousand dollar return the first year on a three million dollar investment is a seven percent return on investment. What else can you get a seven percent return on investment? That's not too bad in this economic climate. So one issue is I think the city needs to recognize that there is a cost of getting out of dispatch and I don't know what the right number is. I don't know if it's five hundred thousand or five million I think it's fair to look at the city and say to save money going forward in the future there's a cost to accomplish that. The second issue is the cost to the rural resident. I cringed a little bit when Adam said the cost to the rural resident was going to double. Yes it's going to go from seventeen dollars a year to thirty four dollars a year. Now if they were paying two hundred dollars a year now and was going to four hundred dollars a year for dispatch that's a different issue but that boils down to a dollar sixty nine cents a month. I really don't want to see the county board hold this entire project hostage for a dollar sixty nine cents a month. That is so incredibly short sighted. We have the opportunity to give the best level of dispatch and emergency response that we can to equalize it all the way across the board but both parties are going to have to give a little bit in the process. So please don't make me come back when I'm a hundred and eight. I'd really appreciate it. It's about eight o'clock the time we said we'd be wrapping up so we'll start wrapping up here. Bob Wallace city police I just want to comment on one thing I started my comments this evening by saying that we fully support the concept of a joint dispatch whether it's in the city police department managed by the sheriff's department or in the sheriff's department managed by the sheriff's department. We believe that can work at either location. With respect to whether or not that occurs anywhere else in the state my understanding is that the players have been doing it for thirty years offering out of the dispatch out of their city police department. Some of the other things are operational issues things like warrants you know some of those types of things are really getting ahead of ourselves. If the two governmental bodies agree to work out the details go forward with joint dispatch operations. There's going to be a lot of time to work on protocols and policies and transition people to learn the different jobs whether they're currently city dispatch personnel that would be going to a county with joint operations or the county personnel as well. We believe we can make those things work. There's going to be plenty of time to make transitions to provide the proper training. Those employees are going to have to be provided proper protocols with respect to supervision I'm convinced that no matter where it goes there's going to be proper supervision in that communication center. They're going to have some dedicated supervisory staff, a dispatch manager and if there's occasions where that has to be supplemented by supervisory personnel we'll make sure that happens. They're going to have people to go through to make that to get that direction and get that advice. So some of the operational things I would say don't get hung up on the details. We've got a bigger question in front of us at the moment as far as commitment to make this happen. Thank you. Thank you all for coming for the good information we received. Are there any closing remarks from anyone else or not? Then I'd like to once again thank everyone if I could have a motion from an executive committee member to adjourn the meeting for being ordered. A motion and a second. All those in favor say aye. We adjourn. Thank you all for coming.