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September 24, 2024 St. Anthony Council Work Session - 2 <br />At the City Council’s Work Session on July 23, 2024, the Council reviewed a draft contract that <br />integrated the comments and concerns from both the City Council as well as the community during <br />feedback sessions. The City of Falcon Heights City Council also reviewed and offered comments, and <br />staff has integrated those thoughts into the draft contract for further review. <br />Staff has also updated future contract price numbers based on how 2025 budget process to reflect the <br />updated personnel and equipment costs that are more in focus now for 2025. <br />Also, the Police Department has been working through enhancing recruitment efforts and exploring <br />additional strategies to further those efforts. <br />Mr. Yunker provided an Update on the Exploratory Process – Staff has continued to work through the <br />exploratory process and is offering an update on the following areas: <br />Decision timeline. <br />Staffing plan. <br />Financial plan. <br />Draft contract revisions. <br />Decision Timeline – Another aspect of the process has been the City of Falcon Heights staff working to <br />secure police services starting January 1, 2025, until the St. Anthony Police Department would be <br />adequately staffed to begin services. This was ideally to be January 1, 2026, or thereafter based on <br />staffing levels. <br />The City of Falcon Heights explored temporary options with neighboring agencies on temporary services <br />with no success and made a request to the Ramsey County Sheriff’s Office to extend services through <br />2025. They declined and offered no more than two extra months of coverage through February 28, <br />2025. As a result, this has shortened the timeline available for the Cities of St. Anthony Village and <br />Falcon Heights to make a decision on entering into a renewed partnership. A decision should be made <br />by the St. Anthony City Council on October 22, 2024. <br />Police Chief Spiess reviewed the staffing plan. His number one focus is public safety in the City of St. <br />Anthony and Lauderdale and high quality of service. The wellness of every police officer, staff and their <br />families is very important. He surveyed the police officers and there was a lot of positive feedback but <br />the caveat was it needs to be done correctly. He believes it would be a good long term plan for the <br />police department. The partnership will allow the department to grow. It would be a positive to have <br />more resources available on a daily basis. <br />The department analyzed call data and identified the following additional personnel to support <br />expansion: <br />Police Officers – Additional patrol officers same as previous contract – 4 <br />Swing Shift Patrol – Additional officers during high call volume time – 2 <br />Investigator – Investigative capacity to adequately address call type needs – 1 <br />Community Engagement Officer – Sworn officer to coordinate community engagement for all cities <br />– 1 <br />Administrative Support – Additional administrative capacity similar to previous contract – 1 <br />Total additional personnel needed are 9. <br />12