6/24/25 Council Meeting [98:09-103:11]

Number one, I'm not asking. I will still have a transport spot that I'm not asking to fill. I still have a jail spot that I'm not asking to fill. And both of those spots I'm not going to put in next year's budget. So that's not just this year, not feeling I'm going to eliminate those from. Next year's budget, which is a savings of about $72,000 a piece for that out of next year's budget. And then other budget considerations that next little hitting there will be a savings in next year's budget. One of our merit spots. We're on board approval and commissioner approval, but it's been the contract. It will use been drafted and it's being reviewed by both sides. But one merit spot. NLCS is going to pay $75,000 of the total salary and benefits of that deputies. So basically all but somewhere around $12,000 NLCS is going to cover to be a school resource officer. So that will also be money that will show the next year's budget, but it's not really going to be come out of the budget because we will get that money each quarter in NLCS pays their share of that back. So we get $75,000 of salary and benefits of that person back. So those are three spots that I'm not asking or that it's going to be savings moving forward even until next year's budget. And that next form, when we get to it, I'll break that down a little bit so there's no confusion there. But as we talk about these hiring requests, if you look at that points to consider, even if we were fully staffed to include the transport spot, the geospatial, the things I'm voluntarily offering to eliminate from the budget going forward, even if we had all of those bills, we would still have the same money as we did seven or eight years ago. Nothing has increased. No positions have been added. So we've got to keep that in mind. Even fully staffed with the ones I'm offering to get rid of. We will be seven years, seven years ago, manpower. We have these two merit-depping spots that I'm asking to fill in my house tonight. We start the one on military leave and we'll be for the rest of the year. We won't be paying his salary. We have two in the academy right now. We just had one new hire that you approved start. He's currently training. He will start the academy in September, so it'll be the end of the year before he gets out in December. So then he'll be able to start working and add to our main power. So really, I think we have another spot that you approved last time that has had a conditional offer of employment. Pending, passing his perf and psych and polygraph and all that, which will happen sometime in July. So when you look at all that, it means that we're really operating seven deputies short. So basically 25% of our manpower short, if fully staffed and that was again, manpower from seven years ago. And I told you right back in January that this was going to happen. We had a long time first to get somebody through the hiring process and to get all this going. And I said, if we didn't approve these, as we've run along, this was the spot where we were going to be in. So, you know, it was kind of a side effect of all this. When you don't have approval to hire, we've actually lost out on a couple of applicants that had had the police academy training and would have really cut down our amount of training, but they took other jobs because they didn't want to wait around until they hired them. Right now, we also have two deputies that are gone for the two-week guard duty. So really, for two weeks here, we're operating nine people short. So 33% of our manpower down. Myself, the command staff, I don't remember the last time I worked the list in 13 or 14 hours in a day. We're covering calls, working weekends, trying to do as much as we can to cover all this stuff. But obviously, that's not sustainable. I mean, we can't keep doing that. And, you know, I don't know. Public meeting, probably shouldn't say this, but July 1st, I have my surgery. And so, I'm going to be out a few weeks where I'm not able to take calls. So that's going to eliminate somebody else who's able to help take calls or short-handed. A few weeks I'll be back to office duties, but it'll probably be, you know, seven or eight weeks before I can help start taking calls again. So we've got that meanwhile, while operating, you know, with the seven short that we're operating as of right now,