you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you you All set. All right. Good evening, everyone. I'd like to welcome everyone. The time is now. We're a little late here getting started. It's 6.07 pm Tuesday, April 15th for our first work session. All set. All right. Good evening, everyone. I'd like to welcome everyone. The time is now. We're a little late here getting started. It's 607 PM. Tuesday, April 15th for our first work session of our budget fiscal year 2026 with staff to discuss the following budgets special appropriations human resources building inspection rental registration the library town manager town council town solicitor police and fire. So I'll kick it back to Christine, who will get us started. I think the town manager might have something to do. That's okay, that's fine. Yeah, just for some folks who don't know. Thank you. We have three evenings of budget work sessions where the council has an opportunity to discuss with department heads, myself and finance about the upcoming budget. This evening, there are 10 components of departments that will be addressed and we will get right into it, I guess, with special appropriations. Go ahead, Christine. These pages actually are a little out of order. So if you flip to the last page in that packet that starts the special appropriations, it'll say 001 1950. It should be the very, yeah. Is that good? That just happened to be a little out of order. So we can start there. Like Jim said, this is the first of three nights of the budget workshops. jobs and we will hear all the departments present their budgets on the last night, the third night. We finish with parks and racks and DPW and then finance and then we get into general revenues, general transfers, op-ab, pension, debt service and then any outstanding items that we've discussed during this workshop in preparation for the second public hearing. So I don't know who's here from the special appropriations. Folks, I don't know if we want to call them up or if they just want to stand in the middle. Yeah, maybe if we welcome up everyone one at a time. Since you were here first. Hahaha. And just please state your name for the record. Hi, my name's Lynn Wagner and I'm here representing South County Museum right here near Gansett. On behalf of the South County Museum, I would like to thank the town of Narragansett for their continued support. In the coming year, we hope to provide increased opportunities for community engagement through our School of Craft where we teach natural die workshops and weave in our Fiber Set. Letterpress, excuse me, letterpress in our print shop, blacksmithing, and make shaker boxes and bird houses in our carpenter barn. Additionally, we were finishing up the build out of our upcoming fire museum where we will house two antique fire trucks that are currently at the nearer Gantsett Firehouse. We are excited to partner in the stewardship of these historic trucks. We are requesting $10,000 from the special appropriations budget for this upcoming fiscal year. These funds will directly support the general operating expenses incurred while maintaining the eight acre campus and our seven buildings. Thank you so much. Thank you. Next. Good evening. Good evening. Nice wheels. My name is Paul Schauer and I'm representing St. Peter's Church, the community market at St. Peter's Church. We're a nonprofit organization that works totally on volunteers. We have about 30 volunteers who put in about 40 men with hours per week. And we run on a almost totally debt utility free basis. We have utilized the services of the church facility and utilities. And we guess that that represents or we've calculated that that represents about $65,000 in kind services through the church. So therefore, we're running on a no overhead basis. So 90% of all of our donations and grants that we take in are utilized for the direct purchase of products given to the individuals who come into the food pantry. We have about 770 people at the end of last year that are being served on a weekly basis, one service a week, and that represents about a 20% increase year over year. So our budget is being impacted. Last year the budget was about 60,000 this year it's about 80,000. The cost of food and the number of people, the number of individuals increases that considerably. We represent not only Narragansett, but people from South Kingston, we don't turn anyone away until the food's gone. So as much food as we can purchase with the money that we have, we give out. So we have a new program this year that we're also added to last year's events and that is the use of research that's been done by Brown University and Mariam Hospital on diets that are plant-based diets and we're working in conjunction with the people at St. Francis, the CC in Wakefield. They have a kitchen and they cook and we use the cook products and distribute them to the people in our through our pantry on Friday afternoons. That's about it. Unless there's any questions. Yeah, go ahead. Is the showers? Yes. Yeah. Thank you for your service. Oh, you're welcome. I hear a lot of good things about St. Peter's food pantry. So of the 770 people that you serve, how many of those are from another town? About 50% of them are from South Kingston. And are those meals like meals on wheels were you delivered to them? No, they're all, they all come directly to the St. Peter's Church one day a week on Friday afternoon from 3 to 5. Oh, so it's only on Friday that you can pay those meals. Yes. And then, so it looks like you didn't see any money last year. We did not. Have you ever received? We've never asked in the past, but just just getting so almost out of hand that we have to look for any help we can get. That's a lot of people. It is. It's represents over 3,000 visits per year. Yeah, so now do you expect your funding comes from donations? Totally from donations and grants. Yeah, and how those grants gonna dry up, is that, have you been? Grants, I've been writing grants and we're doing very well in the grant area. Yeah, those federal grants are stakeable., all state and all foundation. Yeah. We don't seek any government outside the towns. Yeah. Any government assistance? That's great. Since you are also serving residents of South Kingston, have you ever reached out to their council? We have. OK. We did this year for the first time. Excellent. Did you seek the same amount? Seek the same amount? Yes. Okay. Thank you. Councilor Toriel, do you have any other questions, comments? Nope. You had some more questions about seeking the same amount of funding from South Kingston as well.. Thank you And the next ones you do. Thank you so much for your service Yep, that's fine Thank you Evening rolling away My name is Denise Panicius. I'm the executive director of the Samaritans of Rhode Island. Narragansett has been a long time supporter, and we are grateful. We continue to only ask for $500. It is about a partnership and through that partnership, we're able to raise awareness. I'd also like to take the opportunity to thank your police and fire departments for all they're doing on the bridges. As you know, we're trying very hard to get the barriers. This is probably not the year it's going to happen. Given everything that's going on financially with the Washington Bridge and all of the other issues, but we are not going away and we will continue to advocate for everybody. The next thing I wanted to ask you if you could at some point, including the town manager, we put up a new website. SamaritansRI.org took me four years to write it, but it has been received very well, but it has pages dedicated to all 39 cities and towns. Please look at it. If you see something that I should include, I would be happy to talk about it. It is the only such website that has all 39 cities and towns listed on it. But for us, the diversity of need across the state is huge in what we do. You know, Black Island isn't when socket, when socket's not narragans it and so we needed to make sure that we could both myself, my volunteers in the community, had access to services across the state consistently. So if you see something, please let me know and I'd be happy to, I'd be happy to add to it. What are the bridges out? Sit again. know and I'd be happy to I'd be happy to add to it. What are the bridges have to do with it again? You mentioned the bridges. What is the bridges have to do with your we've been advocating for barriers on the bridges. So for the at least for the last five years to reduce accidents or to prevent people from jumping off the bridge. Oh, I see. Okay. And the barriers are only three and a half feet high. Yes. And so we've been advocating for it, but they had to do engineering studies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Now there's financial issues. So when I say the bridge is, that's what I'm referring to. So we will continue to advocate and hopefully everybody joins us. If not the Washington bridge, what is the next bridge you're looking to target? Say it again. If not the Washington bridge, which is the next bridge you're looking to target? So starting five years ago Senator De Palma of Newport and Joe Solomon from WALK introduced legislation, pre-pandemic I I think, and then onward every year, including this year, they appropriated money to do studies of those bridges. We then also realized with the upcoming Washington bridge issues, they should install them now instead of waiting until something happens. We've been advocating for that. We never hear back. I go to all the hearings. I submit it all the everything I'm supposed to submit. I do not know whether Mr. Lvd has included it in the plans, but if you're spending the money do it now. And one of the things that more recently we advocated for was put up temporary barriers if you can't afford that you do it for construction. Let me just remind everybody during the pandemic 19 people lost their lives to the bridges. Okay, I don't wanna wait till that happens again. We're going through some tough times. I'd like to think temporary barriers could make a difference because everybody in the along the coast knows people I know people and so we're going to continue to advocate we're not going to go anywhere we're going to we're going to fight as long as we possibly can. Okay thank you for the work that you call me if you need me. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Good evening. My name is Bill Morris. I'm the executive director of the Wildlife Rehabilitator's Association of Rhode Island. We do business as the Wildlife Clinic of Rhode Island. And I'd like to thank you for your past support. The town has been a supporter for a while for us. The best way to describe our services were the only emergency veterinary hospital for wildlife in the state. So we do provide services for all 39 cities and towns. Animals, wild animals, come to us in different ways. They can come to us from citizens, bringing them to us. They can come from animal control, bringing the animals to us. Or we have a transport network where people will call us up, saying they're having an injured wild animal in the yard, or some type of issue like that. And we have a transport network that'll go out and get the animals. A big part of what we do is public health. That there are a lot of animals that have diseases that are human transmissible, like avian bird flu and rabies. And so we work very closely with the Department of Health. If somebody is having contact with a wild animal that potentially has disease, we have to work with the Department of Health to make sure that the individual is okay. And so a lot of what we do is lab testing and things like that to see if the animal is diseased in any way. Last year from Narragansett we received 188 animals. We got a total of about 7,000 animals last year. So 188 came from now against it. 11 of them were brought by animal control. So a big part of what we try to do is we try to alleviate some of the stress on animal control. We have actually 225 volunteers. We're open seven days a week and we're extending our hours now to 12 hours a day. So this is a resource that we provide where people can bring the wild animals. So in addition to that, we have started to expand our educational programming. We do host interns from URI and Salve Regina. They are a lot of of interns are studying wildlife biology or pre-vectionary medicine. They will study at our facility. We also are located in Saunders Town and we're building two educational facilities on our site, Nursery and two animal enclosures. So we are starting to do after-school programs. school programs. We just started one at Narragansapir middle school. We were there a couple of weeks ago running an after school program. Girl Scouts come to our clinic pretty regularly. And we also are starting a youth summer program for youth 13 to 17 years old. That's funded by the governor's workforce board. So we're doing our best to educate people on wildlife and biodiversity as well as trying to deal with the wild animals that are injured or orphaned that are in the different cities and towns. Do you take the animals after they've, I guess when somebody's bringing the animal to you and the animal dies maybe on the way, do you take care of the animal when they deposit the animal to you? Yes, so we, just like the local veterinarians, we use final gift which is a company, so all the animals have to be cremated. 177 from 188 from Mary Gantzovata. 6600. So you take them from all over the state? We do, yeah. We're the only wildlife. So we're licensed by both US Fish and Wildlife and the Department of Environmental Management. There's about 188 species of wild animals that are in Rhode Island. And so we're licensed to handle all 188 species. Cool. So I notice that there's, it's just $1,000 difference between last year and this year. Just what would that be? The result of just increasing. Yes, so what we do for all 39 cities and towns is we calculate the number of animals against our total budget and what each animal is costing us and then we ask for 20%. We do get funding from the state to cover one veterinarian. So we're in the it's a legislative grant but we're in the DEM budget and that covers the one veterinarian but we're now running four veterinarians. So our expenses have gone up a hundred thousand dollars between last year and this year. So, okay. Thank you. The amount requested for your municipality, this is proportional. Yes. Based on the number of animals. Correct. Yes, it's proportional. Just data curiosity. What are some of the largest municipalities that you're requesting from? Woolwick brought us one short of 1,000 animals last year. so Wawik is the biggest. Normally, if it's on the coastal areas, where there's a lot of seabirds, that tends to increase up. Like you get up into Boraville, you don't get as much. And a lot of it has to do with, we leave wildlife alone. So if they're in the woods and they're injured or whatever nature does, what it does, But we're dealing with this more when humans are coming into contact with the wild animals. It's in the woods and they're injured or whatever nature does what it does what we're dealing with is more When humans are coming into contact with the wild animals. It's in the yards the dogs are tearing up, you know, nests or trees or cut down or things like that or and a lot of it is animals being hit by cars Are you had quartered up on Ruan or whereabouts are you located? Right next to Paul Massey. Yeah, we're right there. OK. Yeah. How long have you been there? We've been at that location for six years, but our organization is 31 years old. Yeah. We'll kind of outreach to you guys, too, to broadcast the fact that you guys are located there. I've lived in this area for a very long time. Yeah, I've been the executive director for 15 months now. And I'm native to Rhode Island. Before I applied for the job, I had no idea the place existed either. And so it was kind of the best kept secret. So we have been doing a lot of social media monthly newsletters, again, doing a lot of community outreach, like with the Girl Scouts, and going out to schools, and that type of thing to advocate as much as we can relative to the services. But a lot of times the way it happens is people don't know us, but they call animal control. An animal control will say call the wildlife clinic. So kind of round about way, the people that need us get to us. Okay, thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you so much. Good evening. Hi, I'm Veronica Bronska, I'm the President of Narrow of a Preservation Association. Actually, the first thing I want to say is give a plug to the Rhode Island Wildlife Rebuild Haders because they just gave it, I talked to our on pedoclombscate group of, just a couple of weeks ago, at the Narrow Antelibery and it was fabulous and the work they do was great. So, great organization., so never of a preservation association. We are in our 55th year. As you know, near River also known as Pettaclombski Estuary. It covers through three towns. No Kingsounds South Kingsounds and nearer Gansett. For we're starting our 35th year of water quality monitoring. And that's what we're asking for funds for as we have done in the past years. We work with the URI Watershed Watch program, and we provide volunteers. We have about 35 volunteers a year that sample from May through October every two weeks, and they go out and monitor over two weeks. And once in a month they take samples up to the URI WaterShell Watch Lab and that's what the expenses are for because the URI WaterShell Watch Lab, they run the nutrient analysis and the bacteria analysis. They provide training for our volunteers and our volunteers. They do their own testing for dissolved oxygen and take readings for temperature. But the salinity, the pH, the nutrient and the bacteria, sample need to go to the watershed watch office. Also, the URI watershed watch office for the price that we pay per station, they also provide us with the data and some data analysis. And then we also have people working directly with their river that use that data to look at long-term trends. And that's one of the things we're right doing right now. And we're asking for a little bit more money this year because we're working with people from the Graduate School of Oceanography because we have over 30 years of data. We want to be able to look at those long term trends in a way that's very user friendly. And we do present to the Naree-Anse harbor management commission in December. And we're working with them on that they were they got a preview of that and we'll be talking to them again. So we're asking for $2,600 this year and again it's because prices are going up from water to white, but also we're looking at the long term trends now that we have such a long time. Any questions? I'm familiar with your operation. I don't have any questions actually. Well, I actually went to, I don't know if it was the annual meeting that I attended at Metatuxet earlier. Just a couple weeks ago. Yes. That was navigating the narrow. So that's like the kickoff of our season where we have people who got from the town. Yeah, here we are there. So I thought that was a very insightful, really amazing presentation that you all put together. And I was really amazed by how much work that you do with such a small amount allocated. It's all donations. It sounds like. And you're all very dedicated at your service and really appreciative of the education that you're providing this community. And we're going to do everything that we can to support you and your initiative and ensure that we have a healthy narrow river for many, many, or all forever, hopefully. Yeah, thanks. Having grown up on narrow river, I am very familiar with the work that you guys do. I'm surprised to see the increase be so little given the kind of backup at the mouth of the river at the moment. Are you seeking any additional fundraising opportunities or what's that looking like to try and fundraise for 2020-Sex? Yeah, I can't wait for the both of the river. That's one of the things, like last year, because of the change in the configuration. We did some extra sampling of watershed watch just for bacteria to, I mean, we're DM and department of health will actually test to see whether it's fine for fishing and swimming, shell fishing and swimming. But we did our own testing through the URI Water Shea Watch as a first step, and everything was actually fine for swimming, but we did that at our own expense. We've had some additional expenses of our own that we've had. And we do have North Kingston, South Kingston, and Neary Answered all contributed to the Uri Watershire-Watch program because we have stations in all three towns. Equivalent amounts for questions. North Kingston is a little bit less because we have less stations up there. And you know we're happy to work with the town. who knows what's going on at the mouth. It's so important to be aware of that. Thank you. Just a real quick question. Do you know when the narrower cleanup is scheduled? Oh, yeah. And I just made third. Oh, is it May 3rd? OK. Yeah. Thank you. I just put a flyer over there. And it's me. It's break bridge at nine o'clock. Well, I'll make a quick pitch to anyone listening. It sounds like a really tremendous opportunity to learn about Narraver, but also participate in this amazing learning opportunity and give back to the community as well by contributing just two hours of your time on Saturday, May 3rd by participating in the narrow river clean up and we meet at Sprig Bridge, it sounds like. Yeah, and that's great because we need volunteers because we clean up the whole watershed. So we start there, you get your map and for where you're going to go and then you spread out through the whole watershed. I mean, I do. It's a clear everything up once and get ready for the summer season. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. You all come very well prepared. You just write at one right after the other. This is great. Good evening. Good evening. So forgive me. I'm going to be reading here. Oh just please stay your name. Yeah. My name is Erica Westbrook. I'm here on behalf of the William G4 and your VFW post 916 and its auxiliary. We would like to express our gratitude for the support that we've received in the past. The grant money is that we have received in the past. Have allowed us to assist local veterans around all of Washington County with food insecurity, paying home heating oil, minor home repairs, creation and stocking of the mini library, the Mickey pantry and the Pluto pet pantry. We've also been able to cook for and feed many of our local unhoused veterans in and around Washington County as well as providing basic needs items. Over the last year we have supported the Rhode Island National Guard with their annual Carnival for Heroes which is a back to school event and the holiday for Heroes which is their annual Christmas event. We provide manpower to help man the events and food. We also offer veteran service officer sessions every month. Each session usually has about 10 local veterans or their family members getting some advice and assistance with claims, questions for benefits, services that the veterans have earned. I don't have numbers by county for the state, but I know that the VFW service office, serve for the state of Rhode Island has been able to recoup 33 million during the fiscal year of 2024 through September 31st or 30th, excuse me, he put 31st in the letter. Anyway, last year we adopted 10 families, including single parents and Narragansett, with holiday gifts and foods for their for Christmas dinners, for Thanksgiving dinners. We also adopt for Easter a lot of the major holidays. So yeah, we're just I, mainly with the VFW and the auxiliary. Our mission is to provide support for active duty military veterans and their families, however, because we're so active in the community itself. I mean, we open up, you know, we open up our assistance to all community members. We don't just limit it. We do have several upcoming events and activities that will celebrate the VFW National Day of Service, which typically it's promoted as like a national day, but we usually participate in events and activities throughout the entire month of April and May, ending with our Memorial Day Parade and Services over in South Kingston. I do have a copy of those events here that I'll leave with you this evening. And honestly, like as a Marine Corps vet myself, I would like to extend my personal thank you for the past support and the continued support that allows us to assist our Rhode Island military. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you for your tremendous service. I'll let Councillor Durkin kick us off. Do you have an office? Do you guys work out of a building or? We do. We have our VFW post located on High Street over in South King's Town. And our monthly service officer sessions are held in our post. But we also are able to, if you know of a local veteran or a family member that has questions about their benefits or needs to file a service claim, you can always call the post. And we can, like I personally, I do service claims, so I will come out and meet with them wherever they're at. But you guys at the parade we were in, we walked in Memorial Day, was that you guys at the park over there. Correct. Okay. Correct. Okay. Correct. Well, thank you for your service. Thank you. Yeah. Councilor Torrell, did you have any comments or questions? Thank you for your service and thank you for the work that you do. Excellent. Thank you so much. Anyone else? Please come forward. Good evening. My name is Jessica Goslin. I'm the director of St. Elizabeth Adult Day Centers and I I'm here to request funding again for our South Kingston Adult Day Center on Post Road. First, I want to sincerely thank you for your support in the past. It's allowed us to provide care to a number of residents of Narragans and I'm proud to say that those numbers are growing exponentially. As you know, there's a lot of need for care and the vast majority of folks with dementia and other disabling conditions, they're provided at home. So this service is invaluable to those folks. As you may know, we're part of St. Elizabeth community, so we're also a resource as we have a full continuum of care. So we are able to help folks navigate the healthcare system. Our adult day centers offer secure and nurturing environment where participants receive personalized care to meet their own needs. This includes nursing care, personal care, showers, assistance with feeding, toileting. They also have the opportunity to engage in a lot of stimulating activities throughout the day to help them to sustain their highest level of function for as long as possible. Our mission is to really help people age in place and to avoid and hopefully at least delay the need for long-term care. So, and as you know, those facilities are closing rapidly. Many of them are in receivership. There's not a lot of resources for these folks, so care at home and this service and respite for their families is very important. So I want again, thank you so much for the continued support. I'm, as I said, I'm very happy to report that we've had a 70% increase in the number of folks from Narragansett that we've been serving since the last request and since opening in 2021, taking over for the town of that facility, 22% of the folks we serve are from Narragansett and actually currently I'm serving just under 30% of our active families right now. We serve folks from all the various incomes, low and moderate income and we're always doing outreach at a number of events and agencies to get the word out about what we do. And the funding helps us to support the key positions in our adult day centers, nursing, CNAs, activity assistance and activity directors, as well as case management. Because again, one of the most important things now is helping families navigate the healthcare system. My father became ill this year. I work in the field and I struggled and I've worked in this field for my entire career and it was a struggle for me. So it's very difficult for folks. So that's our emphasis. That's what we do. And again, so I'm humbly requesting the funding same as last year to support our key positions and to help us to continue our mission and to serve the folks of Narragansett. Excellent, thank you so much and for all of the incredible services that you provide. Just a quick question. You mentioned the percentages of service. Do you have a number for Narragansett? Yeah, well since we reopened in 2021 we've had 138 admissions. 30 of those are from Narragansett and again I have 10 active Narragansett participants at this time of the 36 that we're serving at this time. As you know obviously this turnover as folks need other levels of care or pass on so it's a constant turnover and there's always a need to get the word out about what we do but yeah. Excellent. Councillor Duncan, do you have any? Where are you located? We're on 283 Post Road right near Tuckertown Road in South Kingston. Right off of Route 1 there. And then like how do you get paid? Do you get paid like through Medicare or? Medicare does not pay. Medicaid is a payer. We have private pay rates. The Veterans Administration is a payer. Care breaks, a diocese also provides care assistance for payment for adult day. And other than that, it's private pay rates. So, but again, all the care that we provide because we get the support of municipalities and the grants and the funding that we do, we're able to keep our costs very low. We provide all of the services I just mentioned for under $100 a day, even at our private pay rates. And if you look at what it costs for home care, it's two to three times that. So we provide an awful lot of care at a very good value. So Thank you very welcome Counselor to our other any comments questions. I believe you said you took this over from the town Yes, South Kingston was running the organization up until COVID and once COVID hit They weren't really able to sustain it didn't make sense for them So they put it out for an RFP we were selected and we opened it in September of 2021 Thank you for the explanation It's a not profit. Yes, yes, we're a nonprofit. Are you requesting the same amount from something? Yes. Well, no, excuse me, not from South Kingston. No, we get the building in kind from them. So we didn't request some funding, but the building is and the city's and the city's and the city's and the city's and the city's and the city's and the city's and the city's I'm going to go to the next slide. Anyone else? Good evening. My name is Dr. Robert O'Neill and I'm with the Narragansett Historical Society. And I'm not sure if you receive the emails that I forwarded to you, but basically there are two pieces. The first one was the demolition contract with George Sermon that the town had arranged for and budgeted for approximately $27,000 around four years ago. The reason for the contract and the demolition was that what we now refer to as the windmill building on Clark Road had been unutilized by the town and was in significant disrepair. Around that time, the Narragansett Historical Society was in flux as to where we might be located. Unfortunately, the Narragansett Historical Society was actually located in Wakefield, which obviously not terribly appropriate. Long story short, with the encouragement of Shirley Eastham and Keith Lescarbo, we approached the town and arranged with the town that we would have a 25-year contract dollar a year and renewable for another 25 years and as a result of that contract and lease we would then rehabilitate the building. Pretty recently your controller I also sent that piece of information the value for that building that was going to be demolished is now $867,000. So that's a good return on the dollar a year investment. And we appreciate the fact that the town has in the past been generously willing to support us with a grant of $6,000 a year. But in addition to that, given our construction and restoration rehabilitation, the last two years, the town had actually arranged for an additional $6,000 that was being applied towards the restoration. So what we're hoping this year is we'd love to go ahead and have all of the money that was going to be spent on demolishing, but if we could have one more $6,000, that will finish the building and we will not be requesting any additional money from the town. And again, we're hoping that given the wonderful investment, the town has made so far that you'll seriously consider, as I say, giving us one more additional $6,000. So just to be clear, the request is for a total of $ 6,000, not an additional 6,000 on top of the 6,000 being requested. So it's 1,600. No, just to clarify, as the town prior to and separate from our restoration had been generously funding us $6,000 towards our annual activities, which include lectures and historical walks and different things. But these last two years, this would be the third year. What we're requesting is, and we have received the last two years, is an additional $6,000 beyond the annual budgeting for the building and for the historical society. Excellent. Thank you for clarifying that. Councillor Dirk, do you have any questions? Comments? So, Dr., where does the 27,000 is that you're just trying to remind us about that? Well, yeah, because the thought being that since the town was willing to go ahead and spend $27,000 to demolish a building, and they now have a building which is there so that in fact release it. That's worth $867,000. We think that we've been good shepherds. And we're just hoping that we can recapture some of the money that was going to go to demolition to finish the building and the property. Which is $6,000. You still need to finish it. Yes. OK. Now again. And we will come before you with no further requests to change the building, restore the building. We now have happily found a number of donors who've given us enough money that we should be able to take care of any of those other expenses. Excellent. I can make a comment. I just drive down a clock road almost every day of my life. And I've watched a derelict building that I used to go to when I was in high school. And there wasn't good things going on there, really. And it just, it wasn't actually, it wasn't really bad things. It was fun, fun things. And so, I don't know who's seen the inside since they've spent all this time, but they got a lot of donations. Like how many donations did you actually get? 750,000 or something? Well, yes, it's slightly over $750,000. It has been donated primarily by members of the community South County in general. And you're talking about hundreds of people who've been willing to support the programs we have and the fact that we now have a home for purposes of display as well as well we want to make sure we invite you we're going to actually have an open house ribbon cutting here on May 31st June 1st as a rain date so we look forward to yes, there's been a very, very substantial support by the community and it really is we're just delighted and he is to say but yes, it's it's over $750,000 that members of the community have donated to the restoration rehabilitation and we're just so delighted that at the time that the sun was disappearing, we have a lot of wonderful pictures. The cranes were there putting the actual windmill up, which is not a functional windmill, but in 1935, that same windmill, somebody chose to build a tower and put a windmill on what was really basically a private home at that time. Yeah, well, what's your next project? I don't know as worn out as we are with this project. I think our focus is obviously on maintaining our programs, our lectures, as I say, our historical tours. I'm not sure how many of you, a year ago, were on Boone Street. What we did is that we had an open house and that included things like the train station and the church and also the Boone Street Cottage which is really one of the original Guilrdate structures. And those are the events that we've programmed we're looking forward next year probably doing central because not a lot of people know that Jefferson Davis daughter lives on there and Jackie Kennedy lived on there and so we're hoping to have projects like that subsequently. Thank you so much for all you help. Councillor Toria, are there any questions? Yes, just one last question. I didn't get the clarification that you gave to President Menzies just regarding the amount requested for fiscal year 2025. Is it 6,000 or and an additional 6,000 or is it 6,000 flat? No, it's 6,000 is been what the town has generously given us over the years as support from these various programs. This would be an additional 6,000 that would allow us to finish the project we're down to some relatively smaller projects. And we promise we won't come before you again to ask for more. Thank you. Thank you. An additional 6,000 just 6,000, so 12,000 here. No, 12,000 was last year, 6,000 going for 25. Yes, thank you, Christine. It's 6,000 has written in the line items and then an additional 6,000. Oh, I see. Yeah, right now we have 6,000 budget and then the request came in for an additional. So, yeah, that will be on night three with anyone to back and then he won't mention anything about the $27 Thank you Because you have that contract with George Serbian is that it was gonna be gone Instead you've got $867,000 worth of value excellent good deal. Thank you so much. Thank you. Anyone else? Good evening Hello. Hi. Hello. My name is Lisa Bernetti. I'm the founder of a new nonprofit organization called Universe Juice. I think you guys got the Yes, so what we do is we reunite survivors such as myself with their first responders. Stams from, as I said, I'm a survivor myself of a drunk driver. I was hit by a drunk driver. And I had the opportunity to meet the paramedic and nurse from my med flight to Rhode Island Hospital and during that meeting realized that it wasn't just healing for me but it was healing for them as well. And as they put it, meeting me and seeing how well I was doing at that time, refill their cup to be able to continue doing what they are doing, what they do on a daily basis and saving lives. And after that meeting, I started doing some research on first responders and how they are impacted. And I also started looking into see if there was any programs out there that reunited people with their first responders and I didn't find anything. So I decided to start the nonprofit. And the nurse and paramedic have been with me since day one and putting this together. We launched in August of 24. When I did a thank you breakfast for my first responders from South Kounds, South Kingston and Charl this together. We launched in August of 24 when I did a thank you breakfast for my first responders from South Kingston and Charlestown. And then we just recently had our first official reunion, which also happened to be in South Kingston. And as part of that, we, which is kind of an aside, but because of the accident that was involved with this particular reunion, we also launched a public safety campaign called Moira's Mission to collect donations for fire extinguishers that were donated to South Kingston Fire Districts so they could hand them out to the public. So that was our very first official reunion and we're working on another one and might be another one coming in the pipeline, which if the one that has been brought to my attention does come through it, does involve Narragansett. So right at this point, like I said, we're brand new. We just launched. So I'm up until this point. I have been funding the nonprofit myself. And it's time for me to start raising some funds. So that's why I put my request in anticipation of questions. We are also having a fundraiser coming up. I 22nd at Kenny Bungalow. So hopefully we can start bringing some donations in. So it's not out of park pocket anymore. May 22nd from 6 to 9 at Kenny Bungalow. And so, yeah, so at this point, looking for to start bringing some funds and to help get the word out, I do have a board of nine people, including myself, and they are an active board, but for the most part, I'm a one-man show or one woman show. And it's volunteer, obviously. I've been paying to do it. So at this point, I wanna get the word out. For beyond just South County, we've gotten some great news coverage, but we wanna get the word out there, because I feel as though, all I know talking with different people for first responders, they don't get a lot of closure. And I've been told that this will help with closure and just kind of help with shine a light. So hopefully we can kind of help people not go down a dark path. Well, I just want to commend you. It's very courageous what you're doing. It takes a lot to bounce back. I can't even fathom the experience of having to go through an incident like that and to see how you've bounced back and persevered and to have that motivation to take that traumatic experience and turn it into something positive like this. I think it's, really amazing to see and I think, you know, we can all learn a lot from this about how, you know, about ways in which we can give back to our community as well. And I do know that I believe you just had your first major event within the last couple of weeks, I think. March 13th. March 13th? Yes. We were all three networks, which was awesome. And it looks like it was a tremendous success, based on the photos that I saw and the feedback that I had received. So just really appreciate the mission here and being able to reunite victims with the people who are provided their care, I think is really a tremendous message and appreciate you bringing this forward. And I wish you all the best of luck on the success. And I'll be adding May, what was it, May 22nd? May 22nd to my calendar. Councilor Tory, all day. Thank you for the work that you're doing. Are you planning on doing any other types of public safety campaigns similar to the fire extinguishers or what's in your pipeline? Well, the Fire extinguisher campaign, the intention of that is to make it an annual campaign and also expand it across the state. We want to start with towns in South County before we continue elsewhere. But that we want that to be ongoing. And the daughters of the woman who was killed in that particular accident are involved with that. And so it will depend on what the reunion is. We have one that we're working on right now with somebody who had a widowmaker, heart attack and survived. So we're trying to reunite him with his care team from landmark medical center, but it was 13 years ago. So we're having, takes a little time to get the, get the records because they're not digital anymore. But we're hoping with something like that to be able to put this bin on it of twofold. One is for heart health awareness. And then the other piece of it is the importance of local community hospitals. Because in this particular situation, if he had to come into Providence, he probably would not have survived. Or he was told he would not have survived if he had to go into Providence, so the local hospitals. So we're kind of hoping we might be able to put those two kind of spins on it. But depending on what comes up, we will work with people to try to continue to give it back in different ways. I've also gotten involved with Mad Red Island, and we'll start doing some more things with them and hopefully with traffic safety. Obviously, I've become an advocate of drug driving. Against drug driving, you have not forward drug driving. Is it changed my life life dramatically and I'm one of the lucky ones who survived. That's wonderful. Thank you. Thank you so much for being here. Thank you. How are you? Good evening everyone. Thank you. Anything? Peg Ferdet from the Narragansett Chamber of Commerce. I think we can all agree there's a lot of great stuff going on in the community. It's amazing. And the sponsorships that everyone tends to get just really adds to it. The community just steps forward, it seems. Hopefully we're considered part of that grouping of people as well. The Chamber of Commerce really has two rules and I want to make sure everyone knew that. It's the Chamber of Commerce, of course, but also we run the Welcome Center in our great digs in the bottom floor of the towers. We are great stewards of the place. We love it. We love the way it looks even with its oddities. And we always know when there's a great wedding up the stairs because we have sand all over everything in the next morning. So the money that we get from you really helps us run the Welcome Center. So they're not two separate businesses, but in a way they really are. And so we are open now on Saturdays. We've been open since I took over. We opened on Saturdays in the height of the season, because that's when our people are out and about, our tourists come in and so on. We not only service the tourists, but also the locals at this point. We do run an artisan gift shop if you will that supports mostly people who don't have brick and mortar stores and again, now locals are starting to come in and realize the value that we have in there. So that's what happens during the week. And we get people in from every state in the union. And last year we had something like 27 countries that came through, people from 27 different countries. We see on average about 20 to 25,000 people who walk through the door to the Welcome Center. So we like to think of ourselves as your marketing arm. We try to, you know, certainly support the businesses, support the community, create the image that we want for the town about our charm and our culture and our family friendly and all those things that we want people to think about Narragansett. So we really emphasize that with everyone who comes in. So it's a happy place in many, many ways because when people come to see us there on're on vacation or they're walking or whatever the case might be, we give the dogs the water, etc., etc. So that's the function that we put the money that you give us towards. This year we're pretty excited in that it is the chambers and that location. It's our 100th anniversary this year. So we will be holding centennial events if you will to celebrate that and of course want the whole community involved in any way they can. With all of the folks that have been getting up, it's kind of interesting in that we have tried to support every single one of these nonprofits-profits, fellow non-profits that have come before you tonight. We can't do much, but whatever monies we do raise from our family friendly events, we then parlay that back over to whomever we can help. Whether it's $200 here or $500 there or we help people advertise. So a couple of folks may not know like the individual that just spoke that we can, we put out a monthly newsletter and we try to get the word out for other fellow nonprofits about what's going on. So anyway, think of us as your marketing arm. We are. We're proud of the town. We love where we live. We want others to love it as much as we do and we try to make it a welcoming place. Excellent. And thank you so much for the incredible service that the Chamber provides and congratulations on 100 years. Very, very exciting. If anyone from the public is looking to find out more information on those events, where would they go? Right to our website. It's being re-borked right now. But we list all of the websites, all of the events and not just ours, by the way. We try to gather in whatever anybody else has going on. So the Historical Society, their open house is on there. So again, we look at ourselves as really the conduit for everything going on in the town. With parks and rec, we link to them. We link to you guys. So we link to South County tourism. So we try to make it a one-stop shop for folks who are looking for what's going on in Oregon. So whether we're running it or not, we try to service the conduit for that. I think that's tremendous. And I would also echo the pitch to everyone who's here tonight to reach out to the Chamber of Commerce because they can assist with getting your messaging out there and provide that very much needed exposure to help support all of your various missions. I also noticed that there's a $5,000 decrease or am I right? So what is that? Well, you know, you all have worked really well with us when we needed help. You were there for us during COVID and during hurricanes where all kinds of things got canceled, it seemed. We, the weather guards, God said, not been very, very good to us. So we had an okay year last year. We managed our money well. Our events came off okay. So I didn't feel we needed as much from you that we could sustain that on our run. So, you know, I never want to take advantage of anything. We are so appreciative like everyone else here tonight is. It's not a given and it's a gift when you do help us out. So, appreciate it. Thank you. Does anyone have comments? I don't know if you know, Peg, but the economic development board has been recreated. So it'd be nice maybe if you stopped by at one of our meetings and just kinda, you know. Tell them what's going on. Yeah, yeah. I sat on that board for eight years, so I do. Yeah, yeah. And we do have just so you know, we do have one of our board members is sitting on the EDC, which is great. Roosel. Nick. Tassuzah. Nick. Nick. Nick. Yeah. Right. Alan Yick is his backup and I'm the backup. So we have like four or five really talented people there. It's very exciting to be listening to them and so come by and check us out., yeah. So, let's keep an eye on it. Any opportunities we get for sure. Councilor Elliott. Thank you very much and congratulations on 100 years. Thank you. Hope to see you guys and everything. Great to see you. Anyone else? Already. Well, I have to say just a very heartfelt thank you to everyone who came out tonight to explain all of the various appropriations that you're seeking. And just a summary for the general public that the fiscal year 2024-2025 has approved was $210,811. The proposed requested for fiscal year 2025-2026 is $207,215, which is of course less than last year. Christine, is there anything else that you would like to address before we move forward? Just on the appropriations, I guess, and then we can get into where we go with the departments just so you know, and everybody's aware that the 600,000, the 6,000, sorry, has not budgeted yet, the additional 600. So the Historical Society only has 6,000, not 12,000. And then St. Peter's community and the universe's, universe juice, they are not budgeted yet because they came in after. So that would be another 7,000, so 13. So on top of the two and a seven. I'll top that. Yeah. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thank to come up and speak. Correct. Awesome. Thank you. And I'll let you take us forward. Just so you know too. So it's the next page. Just flip that one over to go to the Human Resources' next on the back of this. And then after that, then we go back to the front. Just for now. So human resources is the last. Is the last page. There is there is there one one 60. Awesome. I just want to make a couple of statements. I just want to remind everybody that as we go through the department budgets, the town manager already reduced the capital improvement budget by over $3 million. He reduced the operating budget by about $333,000. He combined two positions and then cut some local funding. The state aid revenue is still in a projection. I don't have the final numbers yet. Medical and dental benefits, they were projected. They now came in, so it's a slight increase. Health went up about 2% and dental went up about quarter percent. So that's gonna change for the public hearing. And right now as the budget stands, we have 2 million point to eight and unassigned fund balance used to balance the budget as it stands right now. And without with that, oh, and I can say too that I want to remind you that the salary and benefits basically have been done through finance and our all based off contractual obligations So that with all that patty you're right My budget's very easy. It's a that's what they all say So one person department my when you look at my salary all my benefits on the on thePage are split with the town managers. My allocation is 50% human resources, 50% town manager budget. Aside from that, almost my entire budget is level-funded with the exception of there was a large decrease in the professional meetings and a slight increase in the professional development. So I don't know if you have any questions. Just to clarify in question, it is this last page correct. Very last. So I'm sorry, would you mind just repeating the level of funding except for what? So I reduced, significantly reduced the professional meetings, but line budget, and then slightly increased the professional development. Reduced professional meetings. Meetings, it increased the development. So I found that I didn't spend as much money on the meetings as I needed to, but I would like to continue with my certifications and development, because as you know, human resource laws change annually. Mm-hmm. Excellent. Councilor Torelli, any questions? Councilor Durkin, any questions or comments? No, I think you wear a lot of hats. Yes. We appreciate your service. Thank you. Thank you so much. Okay, now you can go back to the front of the book. Now we will go in order. So next up is Wayne Pimentel for Building Inspection and Rental Registration. Excellent. Good evening. Good evening. I think mine's even easier. Pretty much level-funded the budget with the exception of just minimal inflationary increases. with the exception of just minimal inflationary increases. I'll basically leave it to you if you have any questions on the Billing Department budget. Inflationary increases specifically targeting what? Just general printing supplies, professional meetings, licenses, dues, that sort of thing. Just basic increases that we've incurred for those things. I believe it worked out to be 3%. Thank you. And it do. I don't know. I mean, those talk last year, you're going to hire like 10 people. That's not it. There's still a part time zoning position in there, but the other ones until we really figure out what's going on with short term rental. We'd have to revisit the budget. So you're hiring one more person. Half time. Half time. Yes. So that's a part time position. Yes, part time position. And there's two in rental registration, but they haven't been filled waiting to see what happens with the short term. Sorry, they budgeted for and they're just like- They're budgeted for. And going into the upcoming year, they're also budgeted for as well. Okay. Thank you. Sorry, do you have any other questions? I think way more excited. And this is just general building inspections. Yeah, it's that whole department. Yeah. Yeah, they break out building and then we'll do rental next. Uh-huh. Councilor Torrell, any questions on this? I can make up pretty much everything, but what's 50304? COPR agreement. Copy it. It's a copy of maintenance agreement. That was on jeopardy last night. General ledger's ugly. That was also the agreement for the plotter printer that we share with the planning department. They didn't have any type of agreement on the with that unit so we share them with that because we use that for scanning all of our documents. I do have a question. I was reading that state. Mr. Derricken for the folks at home could use could use them like we're dialing the whole. The whole building. The whole building, magazine there, it says how they're demanding everybody to have electronic bill implements, which I know we have. Yes. But are we lacking anything else to make the departments, are we lacking anything else that would make the departments more efficient, make it easier for people to get there, you know, whatever get that business done. I mean, we've come a long way with electronic permitting. We've also introduced rental registration electronically over the last few years zoning certificates They're also going to be doing all the planning zoning Applications are going to be online as well. So We've made pretty good strides in getting everything on electronically in Moving things along as quickly as possibly can eliminate paper altogether. Yeah, we can eliminate paper unfortunately Okay, and then onto the rental Sure rental registration as we talked about there are some positions in there as well some anticipated revenue, but until we really find out what's going to go on with that ordinance. But they are budgeted right now other than that minimal increases in that in that budget. I think the main thing that we constantly deal with is that there's the 350,000 and contracted services and 80,000 that's budgeted with the looking at the potential. Yeah, that's third-party services. Third-party services for short-term rental changes, if there are any. And again, with the two positions. So just as an aside, the unassigned fund balance on the first row, it's $96,854. As it stands right now, he doesn't have that. So we're going to reduce that $350 by $100,000. I think he will have fund balance at the end of 25, but according to the audit right now, he doesn't have anything that's unassigned if that makes any sense. Does that make any sense? As soon as it gets assigned. It's a... It's a... Yes, that's right. It's assigned for this year's fund balance, the 36,971. So that's how we're gonna fix that. So you'll see that change for the public area. We also had a delay in some of our short term rental revenue. We hold off on that because of the ordinance. So anybody that had a short term rental ordinance, we basically told them not to submit until we knew that the ordinance was going to be adopted. Because those fees were a lot different than the regular rental registration. Once the court order on the stay of that ordinance was done, we then reached out to all those short-term rental properties and told them that they would now need to submit their rental registration like they normally did. did. So we're now kind of playing catch up with a lot of those. Some of them are kind of delaying because some of them are just summer rentals. So technically they don't have to register until they start renting this summer. So that is built into this budget as well as there's a somewhat of a deficit in some of the revenue we typically collect. So's not sure what I was gonna ask. The revenue that you're collecting now, that doesn't impact this previous fiscal year. It is the one that we're now currently budgeting for. Okay, thank you. Councillor Dirk, you have any other questions? Councillor Thoreald. Excellent. Thank you so much. You're very welcome. Appreciate it. Thanks. Okay. Next, we have the library and Patty. Kristi and I just have a question. Oh, yes. Just a clarifying question for anyone who might be following along at home or in the audience or at least us. If I'm looking at the budget as proposed here, which line tells us the total and the difference year over year? Aside from rental registration. Yeah, like if we're looking at the library budget. The library budget would be the last. Hold on. I'll lick my fingers. It where it says, oh no, because they have their own revenue too. So let's not look at the library. You have to figure that one out. But the department ones, if we go back to building inspection on page two there, you'll see it's 5.8% right at the end. It's a total general building inspection. If you go all the way over to the right it says 5.8. On the, towards the end. On page two. On page two, it's set, yeah it's like you have at the end of the report it says grand total then up above that is total revenue, total expense. And it goes up to total general fund. Then it goes up one more to total general build inspection. Now, next page. I see. Yep. Yep. Thank you. For anybody that has their own revenue sources, like rent or registration in the library. They have to have a zero based budget so it's not going to show the increase. You just kind of have to figure it out. Appreciate it. Thank you. Sorry. Thanks. Leaving. How are you? Thank you for having us. Oh, thank you for being here. Sorry. can you hear me now? I just wanted to share a few non-boring statistics with you. The library opened over a year ago when it's new location if you can believe it's been a year. We've had a 1022 new patron since we opened and that's registered library card holders in Narragansett. And during the year we've opened 52 weeks out of the year which added up to 2,941 hours which breaks down to about 59 hours weekly that we provide access to the library. We introduce new services with our new building. We have the makerspace which offers the 3D printing workshops, sewing classes free, and then we also added free streaming service for movies and e-books. And we also our business center, which allows patrons to fax, scan, copy, print, and send documents via email with just a click of a button. There are additional meeting spaces now in our new square footage, which provides five rooms that the community organizations can reserve, students use them, and visitors who are coming in for a weekend or something sometimes just needs a space to do some work. We average about a hundred room rentals a month. We have a software program that manages the reservations and also keeps us statistics and such. Circulation figures show adults borrowed 71,462 physical items while children and a young adults combine borrowed 59,593 physical items. This budget was prepared in order not to only maintain these services, but to adapt to the needs of the residents and this ever-changing world around us. The library plans to increase the number of programs, activities, and events offered. And there are many things, as you all know, prices have gone up, including professional services, and those are the presenters and events and special programs that the library offers. Our funding sources are pretty much the state of Rhode Island through a grant and aid program. We, of course, get the state, I'm in the town funding and we do have some funding through OSL which our consortium buys us equipment sometimes or licenses however that changes from year to year so we have found some things are not included any longer in our membership for the OSL. So if you wanna just take a look at the budget that we put together, I'd like to thank my board for being here, because they helped me put the budget together. And what we have here is the revenue for the library, which comes from, as I said, the state and the town basically. But there's some line items that show you that we do collect some fees and fines. The library went fine free for books, magazines, and audio books about three years ago, just as we came out of COVID. And that really helps the circulation, and it helps get the the items back because people don't feel so pressured into having to pay the fines. And so then the other we have interest revenue which is from our fund balance. We have donations that we receive. In the past we received more donations than you see here, but because of the library project and because of the friends of the library, a lot of the donations were directed towards that library project. So now we are anticipating that some of the donations will come back to the library. And those are just small donations thanking us for the using a room for a speaker series like the Pettis Glomps group for our winter series that they spoke at with the other organizations as well. So we get some donations, but as I said, the most of it is from the town and the state. The state bases their state aid on level funding or what you spent the year before. It's kind of a little complicated formula. Even I have to do it for 30 something years, don't quite understand it, but they certainly do help us a lot. And then as you probably know with the library, a lot of the services we offer are based on staffing. So the staff, as we have 17 people, sick of them are full time and 12 of, yeah, counting me it's 18, sorry. And the rest are part time and they range from circulation, pages that help shelf books and we also rely on some volunteers that come and help us. So as you know, those kind of things help insurance pension. Those are kind of not controllable. Christine tells me what they are. So we put those in. So our professional service line, a lot of times people don't quite understand what that is. And that is for our presenters, our speakers, the range of prices you get somebody who'll do a program for $50, which is like a watercolor class or something. But then we get some speakers that charge $400 because they have a lot more supplies to bring in or whatever. So the professional service line includes a lot of the programming that we offer. It also includes internet services such as having the web redesign and the Facebook page. Those kind of things. That's what we call professional services. And again, we have the usual fire protection general insurance. If you see the Klan ops, it still has the old name in it. It's OSL. That's our consortium that does the membership, which includes quite a bit of technology services. They help us with our wireless internet services, which we provide for inside and outside. OSL also provides us with people counter and they manage that so we can track the visitors and such. So that membership fee is again set by OSL. And if we just go through the rest, that's the general operations of a building, heating, electricity, water. And right now we do not have payments towards the new building. We haven't switched them over from the old building. Some of the figures in this budget may change once we switch over the bills to the new building. If you understand, does that make sense? For example, I learned the fire protection. If you see in the years past, we paid $500. I just recently had some of the fire extinguishers serviced and we only had like five in the old building and now we have 14 fire extinguishers. So it's a little more expensive than $500. So as we grow into the building, we'll start to learn more about its expenses. But overall, our increase is not very much. We do have some equipment that we continually replace just to keep it up to date, the computers, the printers, those kinds of things. And then the library books, of course, we do maintain the collection of about 62,000 print items. And that's how we purchase our materials is using the, it says library books, but it's really any materials that we have to buy. And it nowadays includes databases as well. And then we have the capital budget. If you have that, I'm not sure what page yours is on. All right, after. So with the capital budget, you would think we don't have. You would think we wouldn't need too much capital, but when we were building the project, of course, expenses went up higher as it took longer to get this project off the ground. So they did do some cutting and the cameras right now, we don't have enough cameras to cover the building. And so there are blind spots, so to speak. The parking lot has some blind spots. So we are putting in a request to add 11 cameras to the library. And it also includes another monitoring section. And that cost through the company that we had bid for the system. Sinat, it's about $30,000 for adding all those cameras. Can I ask a question? Are you done? Sorry, I don't want to rush you. I'm done. Well, first of all, I really appreciate the very thorough presentation and the collaboration from the board who is very patiently behind you and it's great to see the support from the community and the library board and it's great to see you guys back. In regards to the cameras, is there any talk of like shared expenses with like the liquor store also being right there? I'm not sure where the location of these cameras would be. Yeah. So where the liquor store is because their main building faces out to the left of ours. So cameras are out that parking lot area. Our parking lot area in the front is where it doesn't catch the ends. We've talked in a lot of times with people who gave us the bid and they recommended these types of cameras to stay consistent with what we have. And so therefore we really couldn't change anything. It was just really adding to the system that we have. Excellent. Well, really appreciate the tremendous services that the library provides. I know I've said it before already at previous town council meetings. I echo the importance of the library as an institution and the services that the library provides to the town and airgantza. You build a community around your schools and the library. So very passionate, interest of mine and looking forward to working collaboratively with the town to figure out ways that we can support the library's mission. In regards to the decline in state aid, how do we anticipate making up for that? And obviously there's budgeting for future years to come. How do we anticipate making up for that? And obviously there's, you know, budgeting for future years to come. How do we, you know, any recommendations on what we can do on the town side? I know you work your magic really well, Christine. I'm just wondering if the library board has any additional insight on ways in which we can help to plan. Well, very often, Champlain Foundations has donated a great deal of money. They helped with the library project. But in the past, we requested from them new carpeting, new capital improvement projects. And they are very supportive of libraries. However, just like everybody they're cutting back on what they do offer. For example, they paid for the licenses for all our computers the past five years and we just got word today actually yesterday that we're going to be on our own to pay for those licenses. So it is a new world out there, as you all know. We're going to be looking at different ways to get money. We do have the friends that help us a lot. They're the ones who raised a lot of money for the project, and they continue to do fundraising through book sales, hopefully a jewelry sale, things like that. So we're always looking for grants, we're always looking for foundations. And we do get a lot of support from the community as well. I just, as I was walking up the door, I got a nice little card from a lady who said she just was so happy with her services for the library and she donated $100 for it. that was wonderful. I mean, I think people love us, and they'll support us. Excellent. And would you mind just for the public to just provide with the general figure of the percentage of increase or level funding that the library board is put together. So again, the funding that we get from the town combined with the state, we go through the budget and try to do the best we can. There's a lot of unforeseen figures in our budget this year because we don't know what the building is gonna do. I don't have a percentage increase. About $20,000 is the total. And a lot of that is based on the wages and the things that you really can't control. Out of our control. Yeah. I remember on the school committee side how that was often a big question asked, but when you look at the overall percentage of the budget, it really is a big percentage of the overall operating budget. So. Yeah. And with the library, that's what people need is the people that help you find the information and access the information. And without librarians, sometimes you can't find it. Yeah. And you guys actually buy new books. I thought it was just donations. So this is great. No, we do buy new books. Oh. What happens is we do accept donations. We have a free cart that we put books on that we can't use in our collection, because we either already have them or they're not in great condition. And we also keep books for a book sale that we sell books. But we do buy new books because we have to keep up with the demand, so to speak, of people who want to read the popular ones and book clubs. Whatever's trending. Yeah, that's trending. And that's one thing, the e-books is very popular, even as popular as that is the e-audio books. Because as you might know, if you bought a new car in the past few years, there's no longer audio books, CD players in the cars. So people are very upset about that. And they like to listen to their books. So we started by in playaways, which is a single book on a little MP3 player type thing that you can listen to in your car with an adapter. So we're always trying to buy new things to help with people's choices in reading because again they're the ones asking for the materials and we try to you know meet the need and the excellent. Thank you Councillor Durk and any questions? I still have VHS. We don't need my boat. I have no antique store to get VHS. What's a VHS, Jim? No. Get him. Come up for an 8-drop. Well, we do have VHS conversion equipment that you can bring any home videos for you. You can convert them into a DVD, if you'd like, but that's about the last of the VHS. So, um, the, um, I don't know what happens with the liquor store. Do you guys get the income from the liquor store or is that not? That's all town. That's the town. Yeah. The wall. Town. Okay. So the town owns the whole building basically. Right. And so where we share the building. Right. Okay. Yeah. I mean, since we've been, you know, running for office and all that stuff, we spent a lot time there and we had some meetings there. It's just nice to go in and see something that's vibrant. And, you know, I kind of worried that it wasn't going to be too busy sometimes, you know. But, you know, it seems like there's a lot of people enjoying it. Yeah. Like I did say, the meeting rooms are very popular. Very popular. I must get into fist fight sometimes about who gets to use what room. Yeah, that's exciting. But I have always said in the past year, I noticed that the library is being used as it was designed. There's people everywhere sitting there reading the newspaper, using the makerspace. The children's room, oh my gosh, that's never empty. They're always in there. So it's just great to see it being used like we planned. Yeah, it seemed like it was well designed, well thought out. Anything else? Question of my end, just regarding Libby, is there what's the yearly associated cost with buying into that program? Slash, is there an associated cost? That's part of our membership, the line item that says, CLEAN. Yep, OSL. OSL. OK. So our membership includes a certain amount of books. And we share that system wide. There's 22,000 books right now that we share system wide for everyone. They're very expensive to buy and the consortium, not only our consortium, but across the country. They're trying to figure out basis, sustain the Libby platform because the books are so expensive and the publishers control the prices. They control how many times we can access a book. So certain books we, when we buy a copy, which could be anywhere from $2,5 to $250, they may say you can only use that book 25 times. And when you use it 25 times, you have to buy another copy. So if you have a James Patterson book that everybody wants to read, then the lists are long, the whole lists are long, but we can't just keep buying additional copies because it's just not sustainable. So it's a big problem across the country, but a lot of the library associations, ALA, for example, are working on ways to work with the publishers. They've introduced new legislation. It's been shot down a few times with they keep going back. So again, it's something I think is here to stay. We just have to learn how to manage it in a way that we can afford it. But right now, because of the consortium, it's not that absorbent for us. We share the cost. OK, that's good to hear. And that's a little disappointing to hear about the platform as it exists. I use it pretty much daily weekly. We do. And it is excellent. It's just too bad. Bo loopla. A loopla? A loopla is a streaming service that libraries have, that stream ebooks and movies. Because Libby doesn't do movies or not much. Are these public domain books? Are these public domain books? Or are there any publisher books? There can be self-published books as well. They supposedly have a selection committee that picks for the quality of books. But they do offer a lot, and it's a free service that we offer. OK. Through OSL? No, that's on our own. OSL did not offer that as a consortium, but most libraries around the state now have it. We were one of the last ones to join. Gotcha. What particular line item would that apply to? Just wondering. The cost of it? Of hoopla. Yeah. Yeah, that would go under, as I said, library material line item. Or library books, line 5606. That's kind of a catch-all for me. I'm highlighting as I go. Thank you. Thank you. So just one final sound, but again, to the community as I did at the previous council meetings. If you have not had the opportunity to get down to the library, check it out. Very friendly welcoming group to introduce you and show you around. I also can give a sound bite as well to just how busy it is there. I did have a room booked for a meeting. I do like to talk. So I was respectfully kicked out of the room when somebody else had it booked directly after me. So it is a very active library, and that was really wonderful to see, and I was very impressed with everything and the services provided. So again, thank you for being here and for the support of the library board behind you. Looking forward to continuing these conversations. Yes, and be great. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. All right. All right. Next is the town manager's budget. You're going to talk about that one or? Yours is the most difficult, right Jim? Yeah, it's 1.1%. Councillor Dirkian made the point to reference that that's a majority of coffee, right? Yeah, probably. Yes, it is pretty straightforward. The office contains just two people, would be myself and Patty and her job is split between HR and this position. So see some minor changes there, but mostly the increases were simply wages, pension contributions, medical contributions, this regular inflationary. That's why I only went up 1.1%. There's been no major changes in it at all. Any questions for the town manager or? Nope. Oh, excellent. Appreciate it. Thank you, Jim. Next is the town council budget. And I believe that's gonna be padded. Oh, welcome back. Yes. This budget might have been easier than the last budget I just presented. It is aside from wages, the biggest increases were due to legal and an increase in licenses and dues. Legal we increased conservatively due to all the litigation that we were having or still having. Not as much, but it still was higher than we had previously budgeted. What additional light senses are we going to move on? So the licensing for that particular line, sorry, my cheat sheet. So we pay out of that the Rhode Island League of cities and towns annual membership. They haven't really increased their dues in a while and we do anticipate that there's going to be an increased slate increase. We've already been notified there's going to be a slight increase this year in our dues and for that. So I did increase that and then we also pay the Rhode Islands. City and town managers, I think annual Jews out of that for both having those services that we utilize quite often with them. Thank you. You're welcome. Any other questions? Excellent. Good with this portion. Thank you. I'm not going anywhere yet. This one is the next budget. Sorry. Is town solicitor. There is one line item for that. And that was increased due to the contract contracts that were just recently enacted with the appointment of the new solicitor and assistant solicitors. Excellent. Any questions, comments? Nope. Excellent. Thank you so much. Next is the police department. All right. The captain, Regus. And if you go even though it's really not page 10, but you'll see on page 10, if you go a little bit, I just wanted to bring this up to you. You'll see a total for all of his budgets, keep going to page 10 there. It's down towards the bottom. It's only a 4.3% increase out of all his separate budgets, which is he'll go through them, I'm sure. So overall, 4.3%. Thank you. OK. And then he can start on his, what, $1,500? And $0,000, $0,500. Those are the dispatches. So you have it. Good evening, gentlemen. Just a brief breakdown of the parliament. A fully staffed of the parliament is 43 sworn officers. Currently right now we are six officers down due to retirement and prior resignations. My goal is to hire one lateral transfer which is a police officer from the other department in May of this year and to send a library recruits to the Missville Training Academy, which begins in August of 2025, and they will graduate in December of 2025. That will bring the Department up to fully staff, which it has not been in quite some time. The Department is broken down to several divisions, the Patrol Division, Detective Division, Prosecution Division, Community Police, School Resource and Canine. We also have several special clean units to include the Bureau of Criminal Identification, Firearms Division, Warrant Service Team, Accentory Construction, Dron Unit, Gang Intel Unit, Training, Accreditation, Administrative Services, Crisis and Prevention, Hustle's Degotiation, Peer Support, and along with many others. We have three officers assigned to each school, sorry, with three officers, one to each school. The school department currently pays half the salary of the officer in the elementary school and half the salary of the officer in the middle school. We have two canines, both which were paid for fully by grants, canine Napoleon and canine tech, nine civilian dispatchers which dispatch all of police, fire and rescue calls, one full-time ACO, one part-time ACO, and three full-time administrative staff which consists of an administrative assistant, a prostitution clerk, and an IT manager. There's three part-time staff, a records clerk, and two maintenance custodians, and one part-time hopper master. And as Christine said, if we get into first, the police dispatch, 150 zero, I don't think you will see any major increases. Now, if I'm looking at it, it's a decrease. It's a decrease of almost 3.5 percent of questions here. Whoops. And like I said, those dispatched you dispatched all police, all fire, and all medical calls. Thank you. Next section, the down-on officer. One question that usually arises is 501-03 temporary wages. That is the wages that we pay the community service officers, which be the young men and women who wish to park and ticket throughout the summer. If I'm reading that correctly, that's level-funded. Is that correct? No increases on that. Or am I looking at a wrong column? It's actually down 1.7% as well. I don't see that here. Oh, I don't know what's feedback is. Yeah, there is feedback. Yeah. The, uh, uh, overall, yes. Yeah, overall, I knew that. I just, for the line item 50 103, the, that was the CSO is correct. That's correct. So that's the same as the year. Okay. Thank you. If it was on to the next section, you please admin. Yep. One increase you will see is 50113, which is health and wellness. And the reason for that would be, is I believe it's 500 hours contractually for health and wellness for myself and the two captains. OK. Yep. That makes sense. Thank you. In 50129, obviously tuition reimbursement tuition through college as obviously going up. How much tuition reimbursement to provide is that I see the total. Is that for, because I mean that can pay for like one individual, is that many? It depends how many people request. Okay, so there are some officers that would go for their batches degree. There are some officers that would go for a master's degree. The next increase in 50201 professional services that is basically testing per contract with promotions, part of the testing process is a written test which we have done through graduands. And with the amount of proportions that have come up already or will be coming up, obviously that is something that for new recruits. The biggest increase you think you may. development training, the biggest increase you may see there is 50320 PC software. The state pretty much as a whole is going to a new computer automated dispatch system. The system we have now is antiquated and basically cannot grow anymore. There are silver phases of this currently right now, the state police and several other police departments are going through phase one. Narragans police department is scheduled to go into phase two. I believe right now for the current system, we use IMC, the total is 21,000 for this new system the yearly cost is going to be 54,000. If this is a state dispatch system why is the state helping and paying for this? It is not mandatory, but the problem is, is every, almost every department will be switching to it. And it will allow dispatch systems to talk system, the system, basically if you don't switch to the new system, you're maybe left in the dark. Okay. Will this be a yearly sustained 44k? Or is this one time upgrade? The yearly cost for the system is 54,000. The price is a little low right now because by the time we get to use the system, we're totally gonna be halfway through the year. Okay. Going a little further down uniforms, obviously with the increase in new officers. A little further down, 505-07, build a repair, something we cannot control as the building is getting older. Office equipment and equipment for officers that is 506-09 vests for the new officers. And again, you can see general police patrol. It's a 6.5% increase, but that is mainly due to, again, salaries and benefits and the contribution required for police pension, that one went up. While it went down overall, the police percentage went up for next year. And that's pretty much it. That's all that's there. It's salary and benefits. And how many total officers hired were hired this past year and going into next year? next year. I assume it's the same figure. Correct? How do we, we're hired? Or not just... I'm not sure if we're going to the next year. We're hired. We're hired this past year and going into next year. I assume it's the same figure. Correct. We're hired. Or just total in general. Do we have going forward? Like I said, the plan is to hire a total of six this year. The same count. No new positions. No new positions. Thank you. The next section covers investigations. It will increase there. That's salary. Yeah. Yeah. All right. It's in a more control, which consists of one full time and one part time, nothing really there. The one number that sometimes comes in the question, 50201, which is for professional services, which is the money we pay to the pound in South Kingston. This goes to South King's town. Correct. It's interesting. You interact with the wildlife, the re-evalent rehabilitation. Often times we do, yes, sir. Okay. the wildlife, the re-evalid, the rehabilitation. Often times we do, yes, sir. Yeah. OK. And the last page again is the harbor master, which you can also see there's a tight budget. So overall, 4.3% difference. Yes, that's for the operating. And now he'll have his capital that he can go over. Excellent. So if we go into capital vehicle replacement, there was a request of 50,000 and 25,000 which we provided through state and federal forks your money. That money would be used to buy two administrative vehicles which would be unmarked, no lights, no sirens, no computers. Those are vehicles that would be used for the administrative staff, detectives, et cetera. The next page, mobile data terminals, obviously, we won't be buying any marked vehicles, so therefore there will be no need for any data terminals inside the vehicles. The body on my there is a reimbursement there. On any of the zeroed ones you can just skip over them. Thank you, sir. The next section will be the tasers. Tazers have a shelf life. They must be replaced. Some cover certain amount of tasers for another five-year period. We are attempting to work on a grant for that. That is not guaranteed as of this point. Just a question. How frequently are we using the tasers? I would probably say they are drawn half a dozen times a year. And I would probably say used probably two to three. What's the life expectancy on this? Oh, looks like every year. Nevermind. It's about every five years. Oh. That's much of the five years. Okay. Thank you. No, no, if you'd like to volunteer, no, no, no, I'm good. And the last thing would be the HVAC that was already approved. Any questions, Councillor's, story all day or dorkin? Nope. No. Well, the only question I have is, you know, the system sometimes is seeing where, you know, you drive by and you're speeding and you try to tick it and it's handled kind of electronically. Has that ever been looked at in It's a bug there against us. It has not. We do have speed cameras, but they do not record and they do not produce tickets. Right. I don't know. I just think of point two, bro. I always think that I speed myself and find myself driving me fast, I will look into cost on that. Thank you sir Calcitorial there No questions. Thank you for the very detailed and thorough explanation Yes, thank you. It's really really well organized budget and Appreciate the collaboration and the continued support and services that you provide the town and air Gansett We're really grateful for your service. Thank you. My part assessor Chief Collarion left me in good hands and to I've sat down with Christine and James several times and they were pleasure to work with and I'm glad I've worked up. Excellent. Thank you so much. Thank you. Thank you. Next up is the fire department. Chief is this the last for tonight last but certainly not all right excellent thank you no this is great I'm as part of the negotiating committee so I know just how thorough and well prepared this budget is, so good evening, Chief. Great to see you. Appreciate it. Okay, good evening. All set? Good evening. All right. I did put a few slides together. I'll go through them rather quickly. Hopefully it won't take too much time. I know it's the last one in the bunch here. But I put this together just to kind of give you a little bit of insight and really to just show some of the work that our firefighters do day in and day out and where the money goes basically. As long as I get this work in right. Oh. Is it to give me instructions. So some of the services that we provide to the town. Quite a bit. And it's outlined pretty much in your summary right there. Which it does. So there's a whole list of them right right there I won't go through them through them all but your sheet outlines outlines them Just how we're structured right now keep in mind as of right now. There's 44 members within the department We have two administrative Officers or positions right now 20 line officers and 25 fighters with one non-fire fighter administrative positions. So altogether there's 44 members within the department that includes myself. Fire Chief up top we have administrative assistant which is Judy Christopher who does a tremendous job for us day in and day out and also our administrative captain who oversees basically the whole operations division and we have our administrative captain who serves as a fire prevention officer slash fire marshal. He oversees all the inspections of the fire investigations and our fire alarm system as well. We have three fire stations. We're separated out into four platoons or shifts. There's a number of lieutenants in a number of firefighters at each of those three stations. So it's just that and a nutshell there. So just real quickly how we laid out for our staffing. If you remember back some of you might remember back in 1990, 1991 we added 16 firefighters within a year span of each other that period. I happen to be one of them going back to 1991. We opened up two fire stations, one in the north, one in the south and renovated those stations and here we are today. Since then we really did not add any firefighters until the Safer Grant Award, which was awarded to us in September of 2021. We hired eight additional firefighters through that award in January of 2022. It was just under $3 million that paid wages and salaries and benefits until February 1 of 2025. The operational budget now, it supports those 40 line firefighters, eight of which were a hired originally under this grant. 10 firefighters per shifts in four administrative positions. So 44 all together. The CBA with the firefighters recently with local 1589 is good through January 30th of 2028. Alex, you're familiar with that. You're on the negotiation team with those along with Donna. So you have the inside track on what went down there. Minimum staffing right now is eight firefighters on duty with two firefighters as floaters. So we're budgeted for 10. There's an eight person minimum. It two of them serve as floaters, meaning they're additional firefighters to fill in when people are out. So it increases to 10 firefighters per shift, 24-7, a more all day through labor day. So that's the result of the most recent negotiations that we went through. Our fire department, we're pretty proud of this. We've worked hard to achieve ISO classification rating of three. There's just about 10% of the fire department's country wide who have that rating. The insurance services offices rates our fire departments basically scores against industry standards. They have a tool for that. And when they add up all the points and everything, we come out with a classification of three. So a lower number is the better. A higher number is not so good. So we're a three. We're working on becoming a two. We're just a few points away from really achieving that. So we feel pretty confident given the additional firefighters that came on additional eight firefighters that were added, some of the additional training we've been doing. The upgrades will have to our new CAD system that Chief Reakus just mentioned along with additional other things will likely improve our ISO reading to it too. So we're working on that. Most of what we do, EMS work about two thirds on average and that's pretty much matched up against the national what's going on throughout the country as well. So about two thirds of our business is EMS. If we get into the Fire Department operating budget, it's really comprises, much of it is comprised of personnel, wages, benefits. And then the others are the energies, the goods and services, and the maintenance that comes along with all the contracts and things, you know, maintenance contract, service contracts, and things. So, for this FY2526 budget breakdown, the total general fire, there's your number 8.8.5 million. That's inclusive of all the, mostly the wages, the benefits, all that as included in the General fire section. That as it stands right now is going up a 15% increase, Chris can kind of get into the weeds of that as well, some more, and that's basically because of the additional firefighters, additional increases, the wages, what we've settled on, all of the whole compensation package related to wages, benefits, Medicare, Social Security, workers comp, all those things that go on. So that's all inclusive in there. The total non-fire fighter, much smaller, it's 105,000, and that's basically just one position that's funded in there. That's been adjusted according to the increase in wages and benefits as well. That one position, although a non-fire fighter position is in the union, that's the administrative assistant duties position. So that takes it into account the adjustment on those wages as well. Total fire prevention, a busy fire prevention division, 23,000, the fire prevention, wages and benefits is inclusive in the total general fire section of the budget. So what you see there for the 23,000 is what is needed in fire prevention to run that division with maintenance and all the other things that are needed in that. And then totally MA, I also serve as the EMA Director for the town that falls under the fire department's overall budget. Not a very big budget. It's just under $35,000 and much of that budget is inclusive of the wages, part time wages. We do hire a part time person who helps us with a lot of our planning aspects. She's been doing a great job. Much of that has been also supplemented by AMPG grant that I apply for over a year. So 50% of those wages that we expense are generally covered through that EMPG grant as well. So the grant total there you have it, about 8.6 million as it stands right now. And again, much of it is consumed by really non-discretionary personnel spending, about 94% of it is consumed by that. The other is really some discretionary, and I call operating types of expenses, some of which I go through in the contract with you. The capital budget, I'll just kind of go through it quickly just in a little quick summary here. I did submit for seven projects overall. Three of them had either gotten cut or postponed or pulled off until another year. The first one which is the radio equipment replacement project we did. did secure large grant funding a couple of years ago which replaced all of our radios, portable radios, mobile radios. So that has helped to offset the expenses that might have been incurred to supplement that project. So that was postponed and put off the vehicle replacement program we were looking to Complete a two-year replacement project on a pumper This would have been the second year funding, but we have postponed that project and that project has been put off as well And then some of the other is EMS equipment is still on the table. The fire station three storage and renovation project that we're looking at. You're aware of our being a large project that's going on the south end for the complete renovation project of our south end fire station. We were also looking to do some upgrades to our North End Fire Station as well. That has been put off postponed. And then the others are smaller capital requests for continuation of our AAD replacement program, equipment replacement for our Fire LOM receiving dispatch center, so the equipment that goes support all of our fire alarm receiving boxes that are out in the community come into the dispatch center and fire station and this goes towards sustaining that program. Equipment replacement program for fire suppression division 50,, and that's for really a lot of the equipment that is needed on the trucks to support all of our apparatus needs and requirements for that program as well. So those are kind of the capital requests in a bunch. And just to give you a quick update on the Station Two renovation project, that is ongoing that was originally a capital request a few years back. It had been in the works for quite a few years. We were able to secure some funding for this renovation and upgrades to this fire station. This is what it used to look like. packed in there with fire apparatus, small station, with the size of the trucks getting bigger and longer. I barely fit in that station. That's the back wall of station right there. So there it is right now. So that whole back wall of station is all coming down. There's an expansion to go outward, expand that apparatus bay area. It'll still remain two days, but it'll provide some more additional room to the rear of that station, which is over here right now. And I don't have any new pictures of the project. I did try to upload them, but I'm trying to keep it short. If you do want any of them, by all means reach out to me and be glad to send them your way or you can stop by and visit the project. But all this interior is getting redone. It's completely, it's been gutted right now. This is all gutted. It's going to be a brand new fire station essentially. This is what rendition of what it will look like. So you can see up in that back the top photo in the back area, that is all new as well. That's the expansion that's going out there. You'll have upwards of five additional bunk areas for fire personnel, as well as new kitchen bathrooms, everything completely segregated. A new meeting space on the right of that top photo will be a small little meeting and training room as well. New exterior doors, windows, everything. So overall a a a two million dollar project funded through American Rescue Plan Act funds or opera funds. Local town, the share initial share was just about a million dollars, which was going to only cover phase one of this project. But I was able to secure some additional opera funds through the governor's public safety infrastructure grant program which was just about another million dollars or just under a million dollars so to be able to fund phase two and three so we put all that together we had an available opera funding just under two million dollars we went out to bid it was awarded in November of24 for just about $1.8 million. And it's currently under construction and due to be completed sometime hopefully by the end of this year. I hope we can move in. So that was kind of where we're at with the fightup on in a nutshell, just to give you a little bit of a layout. Let's go on. On that summary sheet with the sheet I gave you, if you have any questions by all means you can reach out to me. I just give that. It's kind of a snapshot of what we do day in and day out. This is a 2024 highlight summary, so it's what we did last year. We do, on average, somewhere in the neighborhood of 3600 calls per year. That's total calls, inclusive of all our service, other service calls. Marine Rescue, it's a program we're really proud of and have been, we've been building and working on that since 2014 when I became fire chief and that program has grown quite a bit. We have a fire rescue boat that is docked right down in the port as well as a rescue swimmer program where we deploy rescue swimmers off of our shoreline should we need them. The other thing is concurrent calls, 25% of what we do, really on average, involves a concurrent call, meaning one call is happening. Another call comes in for service, usually an emergency call. And that happens on average about 25% of the time. So we track all of that activity. Kind of an interesting note, the most popular month, surprisingly enough, continues to be the month of July. No figure in there against it, right? The busiest day of the week, Fridays, and for some reason it seems to be 11 o'clock, 11 a.m. So that kind of seems to be the point on the data that we all have been coming out with. The response times, we set a standard, you know, just right now about 81.5% of the time we can get to an EMS or fire call within six minutes. We have an internal standard of 90% within six minutes. We're working to get better at that. And we've got some measures in place to help improve that. As far as fires, I laid out the number of fires that we have in the response time with mutual aid. And we're all the mutual aid calls are going. On average, we are providing more Mutual Aid to our surrounding communities than we are receiving. Still, and that has always been the trend here to year. So that's the highlights in a summary kind of snapshot. If we want to go through the operating budget, the first page is wages and benefits. Again, I went down there. Most of the increases, well, really all the increases are due to the wages, benefits, pension, social security, Medicaid, contributions, all of that contractual, especially given the recent contract negotiations and the budgeting of the additional firefighters. If you keep going down that page, and just, you know, if there's any questions on any of these numbers, by all means, just fire them away. There was one new line added within that first page. It's the 50115, Chris, that was the clothing allowance and that was one of of the contractual requirements. As of this 2526 with the new agreement that was signed with the firefighters that clothing allowance will be going up to 800 per firefighter times 42 plus the 400 plus 50% for the So that number would need to be adjusted to the 34,000. From what we have right there at 258. And that's because of the recent contractual agreement that was signed. Why is the percent change saved zero on that? It's a new line item. Oh, that's it. Yeah. OK. Thank you. You would think it would say 100%. Yeah. Thank you. The next page is if we go to, contractual services, the top one in 50202, modest increase, that goes towards our wellness, wellness fitness program, which was a slight, slight increase in that area to support all of our firefighter occupational health and safety programs that we have with in the department. And the cost of maintaining the only equipment, we have gym set up at three of the different fire stations that are used quite a bit. So there's maintenance and updates required with that equipment as well. So that was up slightly to $500. Item number, well, account number 50300, you'll see it says general expenses. That generally is consumed by the fire prevention division. So what we've done, you'll see a reduction in 80, 85%. We've actually moved 3,000 of those funds over to fire prevention. Much of those funds are consumed by the activities in fire prevention for renewing of licenses and fees and other general expenses that incurred within the fire prevention. So we moved it over to that. The same thing with 50311 license and dues. We've moved 2000 over to fire prevention. So to maintain the licenses and dues requirements for the fire marshal and all of the other inspectors that are working within the fire division as well. the, for this reduction in that one, PC software and 50320. Chief Rico said mentioned all of the requirements that are involved with PC software, one of which is our computer-rated dispatch systems, record management systems, the fire, the fire computer-rated dispatch system is incorporated with the police, police public safety dispatch systems. So they do the dispatching there, but we also have additional record management requirements. So we have a separate record management requirement that we maintain in addition to all the other programs, EMS programs, fire prevention programs, scheduling programs, training programs that are done online. So this has become more and more software maintenance applications requirements that have been needed for our department. So that goes to maintain those. There's on average there's been a slight increase in the overall costs of all of those maintenance programs anywhere from 4% to 5% the maintenance costs have going up. Uniforms, uniforms, five zero, three three zero, that has been adjusted to account for the increase in the firefighters. You know, we've had additional firefighters in the requirements that goes along with securing the uniforms, cleaning of the uniform services, damage turnout gear, replacement of gear as well, and the cleaning services that go along with cleaning of the gear. I'm on to the next page unless there's any questions with any of those accounts. Actually, quick question. Chief. Yes. 50402, chemicals and gases. Is this for fire suppressant chemicals or? No, that's all goes towards our oxygen cylinders and our other gases that are needed. So it's basically comprised of all of our oxygen cylinders that we need to maintain on all of our trucks. OK. Thanks. There's the the the the the the the the the thement Repair Account. So 505.06, that goes towards all of our maintenance contracts that require, required of all of our equipment. Our radio maintenance contracts, all of the larger equipment on the vehicles, the trucks, the EMS carts, stretchers, the all of the monitors, cardiac defibrillators, all of those things that require service contracts, as well as pump testing, ear cleaning services, and compressor services, the compressor we have that fills our SAPO2 bottles. So all those systems environment and the environment and the environment and the environment and the environment and the environment and the environment and the environment and the environment and the environment and the require maintenance. maintain three fire stations. Granted, station two is going to be a brand new station, hopefully, but it will still require maintenance of the station along with the other two stations. So this account goes towards maintaining all of the electrical plumbing, all the structural maintenance needs, as well as some of the cleaning within those buildings, as, the supply is an equipment and things like that. So that pretty much completes the general fire operating. So overall, a 15% increase but again, contributed to personnel wages, benefits, all of those things that come along with the continuous contractual items. The next portion of the budget is for the fire non-union firefighter. And that's one position. Even, excuse me, non-fire fighter. It is a union position still. So that's adjusted for the expected increases in the wages, salaries and benefits as well. Yes. General fire for EMA. There is a modest increase again adjusted for a slight increase in the wages. So we've adjusted the part time wage scale for this position slightly. That's going up around 3% as well. And again, All the other line items associated with it are not going up. It's just the part time wages and the Social Security contribution, Medicaid contributions that go along with it, even though it's a part time position. General fire prevention. The license is in dues. It's one of the new accounts that was set up again $3,000 moved into that account from the general fire admin section, the professional development, $2,000 professional development, and the operating supply at $5,000, $3,000 was moved from general over to this line item, and the $2,000 was moved over as well for the Professional development So other than that no increases Everything stayed the same in that budget So So all said and done, it's about 8.6 million at about a 14.8% increase really contributed from wages, benefits, salary section, really not much has been additionally added in the operating budget only other than what we had to adjust for the increase in a lot if my questions to the end are comments. Okay. Thank you. And then just to get into the capital, I know I touched upon the capital again previously. So just to look at the capital, if there were, I mean, I could go through the capital again, but I know I had touched on it previously in the presentation. if there are any questions regarding the capital. Again, seven projects submitted. previously in this in the presentation but if there are any questions regarding the capital again seven projects submitted three deferred I guess you could say both boned and smaller projects for the other four. Excellent. Really appreciate the very thorough presentation and I don't want to interrupt if you have anything more to ask. Oh, no, I mean, I could go on. No, I never know. I'm getting the eyeball over there. No, that's right. No, I really appreciate, you know, I actually had the privilege of being one of the two town council members to negotiate with the firefighters and work collaboratively with you in the town. Learned a lot about the incredible services that the firefighters provide our town. And seeing this wonderful summary sheet that you provided us, illustrations are always friendly with this crowd, especially after reviewing all these other budgets. Seeing that we're nationally in the top 10%, you know, it's just really rewarding and amazing achievement and should be celebrated as often as possible. Also, I echo that, you know, Narragansett, I thought it was very interesting. When I found out that Narragansett also provides aid and support to our neighboring towns, South Kingstown and North Kingstown, and really just commend the incredible service that you are all providing. And also the marine rescue, I thought it was very interesting. Can you just give a sound bite as to, do we station people at particular locations, is that with the Harbor Master, is how do people, or how do the firefighters respond to a marine incident? Yeah, they're not staged right at the boat by means. Majority of the personnel will respond from our South End Fire Station. Some additional from the center of town or elsewhere. We work very well with the hover master and along with the Coast Guard, which are stationed down in there. We do a lot of training and response work with them. We're a member of the Narragansett Bay Marine Task Force. So this is a task force that's set up. It's basically kind of a mutual aid system set up set up on the water. So, you know, don't forget a lot of Narragansett's jurisdictional districts or boundaries are on water, not just land. So we control and respond to those water events as well. So we have a re-operation program that trains boat operators to the coxen level, much like the Coast Guard, get trained. And we work collaboratively with them. So a lot of work goes into that. We just had two individuals go through a boat operator search and rescue program, which is an accredited program that was offered. So we have two additional coxins that are able to respond. So we're doing more and more water emergencies like that. And we also not just our boat operators, but we also have water rescue operators who work off of a Jetsky Rescue Board platform that we trailer and launch rate from, well, we're a few different locations, but predominantly Monahean's stock, Pier 5, where we launch from there as well. And we are able to monitor and affect rescues from the Navar River, the mouth of the river, all the way up along our rocky coastline on that Bayside, especially right to the lighthouse, pretty quickly from that area. We've had some great success stories. We've had some great rescues, and it's a program that we have devoted a lot of time in training to. And it's become one of our preeminent programs, really. And we market it quite a bit as well. When I go out and look for new recruits, new firefighters, one of the things I ask them is why, and they're against it. Nowadays, firefighter, a candidate could work on work in any community really because the pool is kind of shrinking And one of the things they bring up is they are interested in numbering operations program. It's become kind of a marketing Operational tool for us. So I'm proud of it. I'm proud of the the men and women who devote a lot of time into the program. It's come a long way. Excellent. And then very happy again, throughout the negotiations that we were able to retain the aid firefighters. And in regards to the Capitol, I know that we said we pushed them back. Are we looking at just pushing those that were not going to be in 2025, 2026 to the following year? Is that how I'm looking at this? I just want to make sure I'm. Well, hopefully. Yes. So the vehicle replacement program. Yes. So far. We'll revisit that. And we'll revisit the fire station three storage renovation project, given what's going on at the South End station and the investment there. It just made sense to kind of take another look at that down the road as well. But priorities really lie in not only our people, but our facilities and upgrading our facilities. We're doing that in the south end now, which is great. All federal money. We're lucky to have that. But we need to do it up north and out of the station as well. Alex and Shudton, none of those are off the table just for this year. None of them have been eliminated. It's just this fiscal year. We can't do it. Thank you for you for clarifying that. And again, really appreciate and thank the fire department for their incredible service to the town in Oregon. We really do have the best police and fire in all of New England. I'd say the whole country, but I'm biased. So really appreciated the collaboration between the town and the firefighters and looking forward to building on that relationship moving forward. So I'll turn the floor over to Councillor Durk, and if you have any questions or comments. I agree. I agree, Alex, with most of the things you said, and I think the chief does a great job job and I'm proud of our men in service and women and I think we're lucky to have all you guys so keep up the good work. All right, thank you Councillor Tarioli. I am very glad that we were able to get the negotiations finalized and this does for us. So thank you, dogs. Thank you, Donna, for the work. But thank you, Chief and the firefighters that came to the table to work with us to make this happen. When would you like to begin working on the North End Station? I guess, or I guess a more point to question, how long until we need to do it. At what point will it be absolutely necessary to begin on renovations? Well, if you have to ask me, it's necessary now. We need to make improvements, because again, both these, the North and South and the Fire Stations were renovated and opened up at the same time really that 91 92 time frame that's a long time ago. Station three has did undergo an expansion of the apparatus Bay area that we added a third Bay onto that, but we really did not do much for upgrades interior to living conditions, bathrooms, things like that. Other than to segregate some of the bunk rooms when we started to hire additional female firefighters. So sooner than later, we'll revisit again when we start to plan the next capital budget requests. We did put it off, I think, until 27, 28. I would have it on my capital project plan. Is there enough requisite land there to actually expand the station if you'd be? I know the bus, Christopher. There's behind the station, behind the station to the left. There's room that goes back to the woods line of the Christopher Faroe playground for the addition of a storage building. We did revisit that number of years ago. The storage building would be for really spare apparatus to free up some space within our existing station one headquarters and other fire stations because we need spare apparatus. And then as far as living quarters, there's really is not a lot of room to go out anywhere for expansion of living quarters, but we could visit the possibility of going upwards, building above it, and at the very least renovating the interior living quarters and meeting spaces anyway. Okay. Cool. Thank you for that. And then I would just also like to shout out the Rescue Swing Swimmers program. I used to life card and I wish I could collaborate and more with that. I know the program was in its infancy when I was guarding, but yeah, big shout out to that program there. Is there any collaboration between, you know, the town beach, you know, surf rescue or Scarborough surf rescue in the Rescue swimmer program or you segregated? No, we work very well together. In fact, we do trainings together. There's a great core of, as you know, lifeguards there that have been around for decades, some of them. And we work collaboratively together to train. We communicate well together. They're on our Ritzkahn communications channel as well, so they have videos with them communicate with us. We train a lot together. We do some kind of command and control types of situations together as well. So yeah, it's been a it's been, it's been a good, a good communications with them. Great to hear. Having the Joe Vinci connection can't hurt either. No, yeah, Joe, Joe's been terrific to work with. I thought he'd be hanging up his swim trunks by now, but I guess not, he's still still going. He's gonna die in those Anything else Excellent thank you chief your time. All right. Thank you for your time. Thank you I appreciate you know give me a few minutes to kind of present this I always look forward to you know Just show them some of the work that we do really great. It should be celebrated appreciate all the efforts. If there's any way that we could get this presentation forwarded, if it hasn't already been done so already, to the whole town council for those that may not be in attendance. Thank you. OK. Thank you. All right, Christine, what's left? That's it for tonight. Oh, tonight. boy, time flies when we're having fun here. So just as a reminder to the public, we will be back here tomorrow evening at 6 p.m. for workshop number two. So have a great evening everyone.