--------- Good morning all. At this time, I will call the audit and finance committee meeting to order. First order of business is approval of the February 3rd, 2026 meeting minutes. Have a second. All in favor say I.
>> I. Motion passes unanimously. Hey, we have several briefings today. Our first is our annual comprehensive financial report and external audit results. We have Dan Baron with Forest Forvis Mesars here to speak.
Dan, welcome. appreciate it. Um, appreciate the opportunity to come and and have a talk about another successful audit. So, um, if you're wanting a exciting presentation, this is probably not going to bore you a little bit. It is a good result. So, first of all, I do want to
acknowledge and thank the your team, your Reggie and and Kate and Christian and and your whole uh management team. They do such a great job. Um, very cooperative. um and working with us always timely um very professional and so um I do want to thank them and
acknowledge them. It's a lot of work putting together your annual comprehensive financial report and not just putting it together but with the results that you have um it's amazing really great results on on the financial side on uh internal controls and and you
know even with your grants. So, we'll kind of walk through that um our results and please don't hesitate to stop me at any point in time if you um have any questions or you know want any clarification on anything. Josh wanted to be here this morning but I told him he couldn't. I really wanted to bring
the person who leads us and guides our engagement team. Kelsey Blacker's with me and I just wanted to acknowledge her as well too. Kelsey is our in charge. She's really I I say she's my boss. She's really the one that works with the engagement team and and doing the audit and working with your management team.
So, Kelsey's with me here today. And as I said, we'll talk through the audit scope and the results and then we'll kind of walk through some of our um future pronouncements and some of our other matters as well, too. I'll leave um time at the end for any questions you may have, but as I said, don't hesitate
to to stop me at any point in time. So, just to remind you, um, you know, to what we do is very different than what Patrice and the city auditors do. Um, we do work hand inand. We work, um, with them to make sure there's no overlap in and what they're doing versus what we're
doing. But really what we do is is, uh, twofold. We do the audit of the financial statements, your annual comprehensive financial report, and issue opinions on those. And so, we have issued uh, clean or unmodified opinions on those. So those are the type of of opinions you want. Um those opinions
also reference the the reports of other auditors. So you do have different components that are audited by other auditors. So we do reference that those are um we do rely on the work of those other auditors. We also do your your federal and your state single audits as well. And those um there's two different
reports that are issued with those. There's a report on internal control over financial reporting um and other matters. Uh and then there's a report on uh inter your internal controls and compliance with your major federal um
and state award programs. So um both of those were issued clean no reportable findings for either of those either on financial reporting or on your major federal programs. the major federal programs that we um
looked at this year that we audited and we go through the uniform guidance. There's a riskbased approach in in identifying which programs to audit. Um all your programs are subject to audit, but we do look at that risk based approach to identify which programs will be selected and we look at your direct
and material requirements. What's what are the requirements of those audits um of those programs and then we look at internal controls as well over those the compliance for those. So this year we had the highway planning and construction um program. We had the coronavirus state and local fiscal
recovery funds program and then the lowinccome um home energy assistance program. And so um and then those are the expenditures that were um audited um that are included in your schedule of expenditures or federal awards. And I think this is the third year in a row where there's no um findings at your
major programs at your at the federal level. So um all clean um reports on on those your state major programs we did two programs we did the routine airport maintenance program and your homeless housing and services program. So those
were the two programs that that we um identified as major and um and also no no findings on on either of those programs. One of the things we look at as well too is we look at the financial statements and and make sure that they're in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. We look at your
policies and and your procedures, your practices to make sure that they're in line with generally accepted accounting principles. Your significant accounting policies are in your note a of your financial statements of your annual comprehensive financial report and that lists um you know your revenue
recognition lists um different types of policies that the city follows and they're all in line with generally accepted accounting principles. Um nothing out of the ordinary there. There was one new um statement that was adopted in the current fiscal year. There's actually two, but the only one
that had any kind of an impact, compensated absences. Statement number 101 um did not have a significant um impact. You were already um accounting for compensated absences. It did um change the disclosures a little bit on that. Um so there was a little bit that
change in the footnotes. Um there there was a requirement to go back and look at your previous um fiscal year to see if there were any material changes and there were not any material changes. So um but that was adopted by the city in the current year. There were no um
unusual policies or methods as I mentioned everything is in line with generally accepted accounting principles and no alternative accounting treatments. some of the areas where where um there's management um judgment where there's estimates involved. Um we do make sure
we spend a significant amount of time in these areas to make sure that the assumptions that that management are is using are are reasonable. U make sure there's no management bias in these estimates. So we do look at these um the the most significant ones deal with your pension liability and your other
post-employment benefit obligations. Um we do look at as well your self-insured liabilities um your compensated abs I mentioned uh previously and then um there's a few other ones of those estimates and um we did not identify any any issues no
management bias or problems with any of those estimates the financial statements um after your statements you do have different disclosures um that this that's required by the accepted accounting principles the most significant ones deal with your pensions and your oped to give the
actuarial acred information um based on your actuial reports um and there's some other um information that's included in disclosures as well too as I mentioned the the quality of the city's accounting principles there's no matters that are reportable there
everything is is in line um and with with governmental uh accepted accounting principles um other communications we did not have any significant issues discuss with management outside of the normal um course of of the audit. You know, as we mentioned, we did have
communications with them on Gazsby 101, but that was really the only only significant thing. And then this year, we also had the um the MedStar transaction that occurred, which it's actually we've been discussing this with management for a year and a half now or more um with that transaction to make sure it was smoothly um transitioned and
reported in the financial statement. So, that was kind of one of the other areas that was that we've been discussing with management. no disagreements with management to report. These are audit adjustments. So, this would tell you if if uh we did have to
um propose any adjustments um to the uh city's financial statements um in order to get them in materially correct. And there were no proposed audit adjustments. So, that's very telling of the the quality of the information that's provided to us. Um there was one minor, we call it a past adjustment, and
it's really just an immaterial um it was o over our scope where we have to disclose it to you, but it's very immaterial. It's really just the difference of the Gazsby 101. Um technically, you're supposed to restate the prior year fund balance and and net
position for any change, but as I mentioned, it's it's an immaterial change and it didn't make any sense to go back and restate prior years. So the current year balance is correct. your your 93025 compensated absences is is correct in accordance with 101. And so that's really the only the only thing
that we identified and another very telling slide uh any audit findings no matters are reportable. So, I think uh all in all um very good clean audit. Um I think you know cooperation was great and and I think uh I was talking to council member
Bllelock earlier and I said he said this is his third year as chair and uh three great audits. So thank you for your your leadership in in guiding and I will say there was so much effort done by Reggie and everyone else in the city
to make that possible. I just uh like to sit here and and thank them for their hard work because they made this happen. >> I'm going to quickly go through some of the future pronouncements. I'm not going to go go in too much detail on them, but just so you have an idea. Um I think it's important for you to know what's
what's out there in the horizon and then I'll just have any any questions you may have. Um there is Gazsby statement number 103. It's just some tweaks uh minor um uh what we call just kind of looking at some of the reporting and and
trying to make it consistent uh practice and then also just kind of improve um some of the reporting. So that'll be implemented next year. I don't think it's going to have any significant effect on on the city. The your your financial statements are y'all already do a really great great job in in what
you do in in them. So I don't think it'll have much of an impact. Um statement number 104 just deals with um disclosures of certain capital assets. The last couple of years you've had leases and and subas your subscriptionbased IT um agreements that have come on and this is just kind of
clarifying how to incorporate all that and put them and disclose all that. All that's already being done by the city. So I don't think this is going to have a significant impact. Then um Gazsby statement number 105 is just disclosure of subsequent events, things that large transactions or unusual items that
happen after year end. The city already looks at that and already discloses anything that that uh that that's happening. So really all three of these that are best practices are already being done by your management team. >> And just um like you like to brag about the city, we like to brag about Forest
Mazar just to kind of give you an idea of who we are. Um I think it's important that you know that you know we do serve 850 plus public sector clients. We are the number three provider of single audits. Um and we do have a a a national and now global uh presence in
the in in public sector. And so you know we've changed a lot in the last three years. I think I've been with the firm for five and a half years now and gone through three name changes. So I think you know we started off as BKD and and went to Forvvis and now we're Forvis Mazar is a international firm. So proud
of that. So with that, I will open it up to any other any questions you may have. >> And thank you very much for the presentation. You know, uh we enjoy some presentations because they're exciting and and gets us all engaged and fun and
we also enjoy some presentations because they're very boring. And this is one we like to be boring. So thank you very much to everybody for making that happen. Thank you. Yeah, drama free, right? >> Okay. Next, we have our internal audit work plan and activities up update. We
have Patrice Randall, the city auditor. And we will now have a brief presentation by Patrice, who will then hand it off to it. >> Good morning. Patrice Randall, city auditor. Our office conducted an artificial intelligence audit and the
purpose was to determine whether the city had a documented AI policy and to look at governance overall. So the city of Fort Worth does have an AI policy that is made available to employees on the internet. Uh based on our test
results, most departments use AI in some form or fashion. Uh some use it for general purposes like drafting memorandum or correspondence. Other departments use it for more specific tasks. Uh two examples would be TPW. They use AI to help um identify the uh
condition of streets. And then you have PD police department that uses a software that helps to translate 911 calls. So in addition to the the written policy, we also found that the city has created committees to help govern our AI
use within the city by all city employees. And with that being said, the IT department is going to come forth and give you information about those committees and what their efforts are, the efforts they have in place now, what they plan to do going forward for AI use in the city of Fort Worth.
And Kevin Gunn is going to come at this moment. Thank you, Patrice. >> Good morning, Chairman Bllelock and council members. Uh, I'm Kevin Gun, IT solutions director, and I appreciate Patrice's uh, performance audit. Found
the favorable results from our governing and AI management activities. So, I wanted to expound on that a little bit with my presentation. Um, you know, there's a lot of hype out there about AI technology and the benefits that could be brought to bear on our business
operations by leveraging AI technologies. And a lot of that is true. It does improve uh our efficiencies and velocity of of business operations. It enhances uh data analysis and management decision- making and improves overall
user experiences in many cases. But with those val uh benefits comes uh some risk. Uh and that's really where governance comes into play to make sure we adopt AI technology that enables those benefits but also mitigates the
risk of uh the technology poses to some of our uh data uh concerns particularly the uncontrolled release uh of our uh sensitive or customer information.
uh the uh I guess bringing bias or uh fairness issues into our management decision making processes due to the way the uh AI models have been trained and also uh
what's been termed hallucinations or basically inaccurate responses uh coming out of AI technologies. Those are primary risks that we're trying to manage as as well as getting a return on the investments that we make in AI technology. So MIT released a study this
past summer saying despite uh 30 to 40 billion uh dollars in investment by enterprises uh fully 95% of those organizations have seen no return on that investment. So uh that is a huge risk and as uh stewards
of taxpayers monies and rateayers monies we want to be responsible ensuring that we're leveraging those funds uh and receiving the greatest return on value for those. So that's why we've taken uh steps to implement additional governance around AI technology. We want to balance
uh the pace of innovation and bring new functionality to the organization with the risk that it poses to us. We also want to make sure that we're being uh responsive to the Texas legislaturator's new bill that they passed, HB149, requiring responsible use of AI and in
local government. And so we want to make sure we're ethical and and uh being secure and maintain accountability in our use of that technology. Also, uh there are tremendous possibilities with this technology uh uh spanning all
of our operations. We wanted to make sure we had some guard rails in place uh to give guidance to our employees for responsible use of this technology and ensuring that we can comply with uh regulatory mandates on our city. And
then also we wanted to uh make sure that we are aligning all AI projects with uh the priorities of our organization and and making sure we are advancing those priorities for the organization. So that's the reason we've implemented more
governance around AI projects. Um those projects are weighed on these four dimensions. How well it handles sensitive and proprietary information, how well it enables the city to comply with those regulatory mandates that have
been placed upon us. Making sure we have a strong cost benefit analysis of those and making sure we are enabling that value to be delivered in our business operations. So we've created uh a committee actually two committees uh that evaluate these
projects before they enter into our standard uh project IT project portfolio process. Uh the first committee the AI request review committee will uh monitor those projects and requests from a technical perspective. So making sure
the proposed project aligns with our city's technology uh implementations and will integrate into those implementations and then uh the second committee the a governance committee will examine those projects from a policy and management
perspective. Uh and once uh the they have been reviewed and received approval then they will flow into our standard IT project portfolio management process. Before we leave this, how do you all how did you pick the members for the
committee and which departments? >> Yeah, absolutely. Um, we we um actually have a lot of interest uh in AI technology and uh a lot of projects are underway for AI technology. So that's really the source of our membership. We
went out to the departments and asked for one those who are interested in participating or those who are already pursuing AI pilot projects and that's how we made up the membership. Uh the departments represented are broad swath across the city, public safety, police
and fire uh operating departments like uh transportation, public works, uh parks and recreation, libraries um and as well as IT department. We have broad representation across across many of our operations for the membership.
>> Kevin, which IM is seated on the governance committee? >> Uh, it's ACM Djordano, I'm sorry. >> That's right. Or >> testing you on her name. >> I
had uh DeJouro pizza last night. Not enough coffee this morning. I'm sorry. ACMG or do is the AC. >> Uh all right. So one of the first decisions the committees undertook is what's going to be the city's AI
platform for building uh these types of solutions. Uh they we have examined a lot of those and and the committee has determined that Microsoft copilot is going to be the best platform for the city for a variety of reasons.
Um most of all it does uh live in our own uh government cloud. So it is isolated and separate from uh the public cloud which is great for data pro privacy and security and ensuring
that uh all those things that we are concerned about uh from a perspect city's government's perspective are protected within our AI platform. So, Microsoft Copilot enables those. Also, we can limit the ability of people
to access that information to just those who have a City of Fort Worth uh computing account. Also, it enables our regulatory compliance in much the same way that we have for all of our other office productivity suite and uh SharePoint and uh one drive and those
sorts of things. enable us to do eiscocovery across those things, respond to public information act requests and establish uh uh digital uh rights on those things to control who can access when they can access and how
they access that information. So it's great from that perspective and it's already integrated with all those things that we use on a daily basis to get our work done. uh from a licensing perspective, C-Pilot's already built into that office productivity suite as well. So there's
no additional charge for leveraging that technology. Uh whereas some of the other offerings that are out there and and some that are currently used in the city do require additional licensing. So to get the same value that we get from C-pilot, we would have to uh spend
hundreds of thousands of dollars with these other providers. uh and so copilot seemed to be the logical choice from that perspective. And then it has all the same capabilities that the other AI tools have. Uh we have the AI assistants
and agents that we can build uh to improve and automate a lot of workflows. We have the conversational AIS uh the chats that you're very familiar with and using those publicly available tools and also multip multimmodal capabilities
which means we can uh uh use AI technology against uh text against documents against uh audio recordings against video uh so all those things can be processed by copilot AI so it enables
all those business capabilities that we are interested in using and comes that way out of the box. It also doesn't limit us uh by using co-pilot. Uh their AI foundry has all of the models uh that are out there commercially available
built in. So if we need to use one of those other models, we have access to it. Uh but also still within that framework that copilot brings to the table. So uh this decision was made uh very recently
uh and uh we've been co-piloting uh piloting co-pilot uh with employees since uh late last year. Uh this government's process has made the uh recommendation to management and management agrees that co-pilot should be our platform going forward. So, uh,
beginning this month, we're going to start messaging that out to the organization, uh, letting them know that they have other tools that they've been using that they'll need to migrate those into the co-pilot ecosystem. We'll be aiding and assisting them with that if they need that help. And then, uh, phased approach
over time, we'll, uh, restrict access to those other tools from within the city's corporate network. Um, with all that said though, I I do uh want to echo what Patrice found in her performance audit that we are uh leveraging this technology to a great
extent, piloting lots of efforts. We see the value in this technology and want to incorporate it into things we're doing as a business to deliver city services and uh we're excited about the possibilities. So uh with that, I will be happy to answer any other questions
you may have. Council mention this, >> I just wanted to confirm we're not already spending money on licenses for these other um AI app software. >> Um many of those are using the free versions that are available online personal.
>> Yeah. So uh you know like chat GBT have if you go there you can use it for free. Uh so mo most of that use is is using the free versions. There are some licenses for like Grammarly that are being uh purchased by city employees. Uh
and those are the ones that we're going to be phasing out over the next few months. >> So that's their personal accounts though we're not paying any of these licenses through Fort Worth. >> Uh some of those grammarly are licensed currently. >> How much money are we saving there?
>> Um it's not a lot. You know, it's $30 a month I believe. I don't remember exactly but uh and it's just a handful of licenses so it's not a lot of money but um uh we we are going to be migrating away from this. >> Thank you.
>> Yeah, >> that's what my question was related to. Is there going to be um any prohibition of using the other services now that it's established that co-pilot is the preferred use? >> Yes. Uh that's what I was indicating. We
are going to be restricting access to those other uh providers uh in a phased approach over time. >> Yeah, sure. >> Right. Here. So, over the next few months uh and into the summer, we're going to be start restricting access to
those. >> But to be clear, you've also indicated that those tools can be accessible through co-pilot if needed. Yeah, the models that we have for uh Gemini, OpenAI, those are accessible uh through the Microsoft Copilot platform. Uh so we
can still create agents and develop workflows around those models, just not going through their uh web interfaces. Yes, >> I guess a question I would have as as we're entering this brave new world of AI, uh I I love that we're putting a
governance model in place so we understand what's actually happening and what we're doing. I think that's very important and commend you and the rest of the city for for moving forward in that direction. Uh what I would ask uh and there may be
there may not be have have we started putting together any uh ethical training or use of AI uh to teach uh to teach our employees uh how it can help them in their jobs? Yeah, absolutely good
question and and we have uh partnered with the Fort Worth lab uh for uh skills development for our workforce. I think that is an extremely important uh part of the program uh because it is different than how we have worked in the
past and and there is a skill to interacting with AI models and getting good responses out of it. So the forest lab is developing uh training for how to
prompt AI and get good valuable accurate responses out of it. Uh as we mature our program, we're going to start giving training about how to create agents and what agents are and how they enhance your work and can take a lot of that uh
repetitive task oriented work off your plate so that you can focus on higher value uh strategic thinking and uh that will be both kind of in-person uh training and online recorded training
that you could take at your own basis. We we have incorporated that into the program and we're excited about the possibilities. >> Fantastic. Any other questions, >> Kevin? Thank you very much for the presentation. Appreciate it. >> Thank you.
>> So, that gets us to I guess item D, review of monthly financial report for fiscal month four. We have Kate Perry, the controller and assistant finance director, and Christy Lemon, our assistant financial director,
presenting. >> Good morning. Christy Lemon, assistant director in the Fort Worth lab. Just have a couple of highlights for you this morning on the monthly financial report. So, this is the first projection of FY26. So, we are going to do monthly projections going forward. Just
highlight a couple of things for you. So, um I'll give you page numbers as we go. On page five, we'll look at revenues. So, couple of highlights here. Um when we received the certified values for property tax as we were developing the
budget last year, we had a a business that misreported their business property um by nearly $500 million. So they put a couple of extra zeros in there and so when they received their tax bill of
course they corrected that. Um and so that was equivalent to about $2.5 million in city property tax revenue. So you see a reduction in property tax revenue there. Um for sales tax we're projecting that to be even with our budget. So a couple of things happening
there. We did have an audit adjustment that was pretty sizable but we are seeing good growth in property tax. So, as we go throughout the year, we'll be monitoring that and perhaps making an adjustment. We're also hopeful we'll see a property tax I mean a sales tax bump from um the World Cup. So, waiting to
see what that brings us. Um in other tax, we're seeing lower growth in electrical franchise fee payments and so um that's largely due to weather. So, we see fluctuation in that across the years. So revenue overall is
expected to be down a little less than $4 million from what we budgeted. Um and then for expenditures, I'll go through the general fund departments in just a moment, but we are expecting or projecting to be over budget and salary and benefits by quite a bit. Um if you
will turn to page eight, we can look at the general fund departments. So the the key drivers for that are um are really police and fire overtime in the fire department. They're projecting to be over budget due to a
few different types of overtime. So some of it's due to vacancies and backfilling those vacancies. Some of it is due to deployments and we will receive reimbursement for those deployments and so some of that will be offset. Um and then they're also projecting higher than
budgeted costs for fleet so for repairs to apparatus. Um so the Fort Worth lab will be working with fire department over the next few months to bring their projections in line with budget and they have been directed to do that um by the city manager's office. So we'll be working through that together. We also
are seeing an overage uh in the police department. So a lot of that is also due to overtime has to do again with vacancies and then filling some of those spots on on overtime basis. Um they're also seeing some contractual some larger than budgeted contractual increases just
for various items across the board. So again, we're going to be working with them to bring the projections in line with budget over the next few months. Um and then there are a couple of other variances. The parks department is expecting to be a little bit over budget. Um that's primarily due to
summer employment of part-time employees. So, when we raised the minimum wage, um, we didn't budget for the part- timerrs as we should have. So, we'll correct that throughout the year. So, these are early estimates and they're projected through the end of the fiscal year.
Um, in terms of all all of the other funds, I'll just highlight a couple of things and then Kate's going to come up and talk about the health fund. Um, so almost all funds are projecting to either contribute to fund balance or net position. Um the municipal parking fund is projecting to use a little bit of um
net position $33,000. And then we do have the overage in health fund that we've been talking about over the past several months. Um retirey health fund is also projecting a short uh a small shortfall. So if you'll
move to page 21, I think Kate's going to come and talk about the health fund for a moment. Yes. Sure. Yes. Yeah. So, for example, the city secretary, we had a long-term employee
who retired. Their budget is so small that when you have a payout like that, it does impact their budget. And so, we're going to transfer some dollars to them from non-EP departmental. We do hold a contingency there for situations like that. So, especially in small departments, you could see one personnel
action really impact their budget and we'll make sure we work with them to to resolve those issues over the year. Um, economic development is is projected to be a little bit over. They have three overage positions that have been approved by the city manager's office.
So, um, kind of, you know, in those small budgets, you'll see that impact. So, okay, any other questions before I turn it over to Kate? Thank you. >> Good morning, Kate Perry, financial management services assistant director.
And I'm actually going to take us back to I go the correct direction. I'm gonna take us back to page five because we made a change here and I just kind of wanted to walk through it and explain what we did and why we did it. So, if you'll notice toward the middle of the page, you have a a line item called
budgeted use of fund balance. And we added this because if you remember at the end of the fiscal year 25, we always set aside some committed fund balance and assigned fund balance for different areas, capital projects, um set aside some interest for potential
projects that we we don't know are going to come to fruition yet, that kind of thing. And so when we looked at this first um presentation for the fiscal year, there was a very large additional use of fund balance. And what we wanted to do was break out what part of that was actually planned. So that's what
you're seeing in that budgeted use of fund balance line item. And because it sort of operates like revenue, but it's really just a budgeted item, that's why it's not sitting with the revenues. And if you'll go to page seven, you then see a breakdown of what exactly that planned
use is. And you'll see there's a couple different M andC's, one of which was the closing M andC for fiscal year 25. And you'll see the anticipated usage of those particular funds. And so we we plan on continuing that
throughout the fiscal year so that we have a a good visualization of what we have planned to use of the fund balance and what additional use or contribution we are going to expect per the projections that we see from the departments every month. Okay.
And next I will move to the fund balance. >> Sure. >> I'm sorry. Would you repeat that? >> It was approved by council. Yes, ma'am. >> It's not.
>> Okay. >> Okay. >> Okay. So, when we also added this little piece which is is just um kind of a roll forward of the general fund fund balance and you'll see that those two projected um line items are are broken out. So,
Based on the projections that we're seeing from all the departments, we are looking at what the fund balance is, what it's expected to be, and what the differences are, which again are replicated from that first schedule. And now we will go to the health fund. Um I know Kristen is going to come up
and and do a presentation um because they are working with consultants on a long-term plan for the health fund. Our concern is really uh fiscal year 26. We have already made a contribution from the general fund and other funds about
$6.7 million into this fund. Our concern is that at the end of the year with the projections that we see, we may be looking at a negative net position and we cannot have a negative net position. So just um putting it out there that there may be another adjustment to this
fund of six to 7 million just to keep it from going negative. So that that's going to be a potential transfer of interest income. Um we're looking at other sources potentially. And so just that's just what we're looking at at this point on that fund.
So any questions? >> Thank you. >> Thank you very much. Appreciate it. Next on our agenda, we have the city health fund performance update. Kristen Smith, human resources director. Joanne Hilton, assistant human resources
director and Hub International. Hey, >> yeah. Um, you wouldn't necessarily see that yet. We haven't actually proposed it. >> Okay. >> Um but yeah, the anticipation is that we would need to potentially use some interest income potentially. >> Okay. >> And then we're looking at some other
resolutions, if you will. But as Kate indicated, FY26 is really the concern as it relates to the health. >> Okay. >> Please. >> Morning. Kristen Smith, human resources director. Uh, as mentioned, we have been
working actually for sever several months u starting uh in December with a one-time engagement uh to do a comprehensive review of both the health fund um financing mechanisms as well as our plan and program designs. You have
the full comprehensive report in the binder in front of you. Um but our consultants are here and they are going to give a highle overview focused just on the financials. Uh and then I'll come back up and talk through some cost-saving measures that we are focusing on for the short term and then
for the longer term. One of the key elements of this um consulting engagement is a multi-year strategic plan. uh given our position with the health fund uh we do anticipate that it will take us you know at least two to three years to have a healthy fund as
well as u meet our fund balance u reserve requirements. So um with that I'll ask hub to come up and give a quick overview. >> Good morning honorable committee and council. I appreciate uh the opportunity to come out and present. I have Andrew Wager here. My name is Brent Wager and
also Heath Hagood in the back that has helped us through this project over the last three months. Today we're going to give a little bit of information about hub, just an introduction to who we are and what we specialize in. And then Andrew is going to walk you through the overview of the project, the review of the budget in
detail, a contribution analysis, and finally some strategic recommendations, some preliminary recommendations as we move forward. So a quick commercial about hub. Um I'm a senior vice president with Hub International. I started our public sector practice just about 20 years ago.
Um Hub is a national uh broker and consultant. We're the fifth largest in in the country. What makes us unique is that we have a significant amount of public sector experience. Um, we have over 500 public sector clients, many who are large and self-funded like you are, and we walk them through three to five
year strategic plans to ensure that their budgets are sound and have appropriate reserves to prepare for the future. Um, we have just about over two million clients and 20,000 employees across the country, but we're locate located here in um, Dallas and Fort
Worth. It's important to note the public sector clients that we do have are large and self-insured as well. and many around um the area. So, we're able to provide best practices and benchmarking against those uh clients. And these are just a few of
those uh on this on this page. And um when we're looking at the plan, we're ensuring that not only um are you competitive in this nature, but competitive fiscally uh moving forward um and adopting best practices others do um across the state.
So, with that said, I'm going to pass it over to Andrew and he's going to walk you through um the presentation from here. Thank you. >> Good morning. Uh my name is Andrew Wager. I'm one of our assistant vice presidents at Hub International. I appreciate the time this morning. Um what I'll be going through today is an overview of our key findings, really
focusing on the budget, uh plan designs, looking at some budget, uh I'm sorry, benchmarking as well as best practices. Then finally providing recommendations to develop long and short-term goals with your employee benefits program. So looking at this slide, I'm going to really focus on the financial piece
first. Um inu uh 2025 uh the per capita healthcare spend through November was up uh ended about $18,88 about a 20% increase compared to the previous year. Um looking at the medical claims per capita that increased by about 12%. Um that's above medical trend
last year of about 8%. Pharmacy utilization that was a big cost driver to the city of Fort Worth last year was about a 34.6% increase. Uh, a lot of that was driven due to GLP-1 weight loss medications. On top of that, being a self-funded employer, you do purchase reinsurance or
stop-loss protection. Those premiums increased by 95.7% compared to the previous year. That was due to ongoing large claimment risk liability and also your loss ratio exceeding 100%. We'll get into some more of those uh details as we work through
the presentation, but something to highlight is looking at the city of Fort Worth's active funding rates uh which sits about $15,382 per capita. That is sitting slightly above um the our benchmarks, about 2.8% above. And then finally, looking at the
opportunity when we're evaluating short and long-term strategic planning initiatives, our key recommendations are going to focus on renegotiation of contracts, looking at a possible RFP, gradual normalization of your plan designs, as well as looking at cost sharing. Um, we would need to look at
the budget as well, very close, maybe a budget recalibration, as well as new vendor programs to combat that rising healthc care spend. So, what we're going to look at next is looking at a budget review. Understand there's a lot of numbers on this page. This information
was provided to Hub International from the city of Fort Worth. Um, anything from fiscal year 2021 actual all the way to fiscal year 26 budget in white that was provided to to hub. Anything in blue are projections that Hub International put together for the city of Fort Worth.
So, working back to the lefth hand side of the page, you will see fiscal year 2021 actual. You'll see the beginning fund balance. The total revenues about $69 million in that particular column. The total revenues available for that particular was for that year was $109
million. And then we look at expenses, your salary and benefits, operations and management. And then your total expenditure sitting at $64.4 million. The one of the most important numbers here to look at is your ending fund balance. For fiscal year 2021, it
was sitting at $45 million. that was a very healthy reserve for that particular year. If you work across the page going all the all the way to fiscal year 26 budget, you will see that the reserve has um decreased significantly during that time. The budget that the city
provided us for fiscal year 26 is sitting about $9 million $8.9 million for that year. So about an 80% decrease during that time period and a lot of that is due to um increased expenses um on the health plan. What hub did um is
we provided the city our own internal projections for fiscal year 26. That's highlighted in the hub projected uh row or column. You could see that in that red uh row going to the top of the page. We left your revenues sitting at that $95 million, but we ran our own
actuarial claims projection where the city was budgeting expenses of $106 million for this fiscal year. our internal projections, which is looking about 24 months worth of claims data, medical trend, pharmacy trend, we're actually budgeting closer to $115
million worth of expenses. Um, if that if those numbers do uh land where we anticipate they will, you will see that fund balance is from $8.9 million down to $123,000. Another key finding on this page is if
you look at the fiscal year 26 budget provided by the city of Fort Worth, you'll see your total revenues again at that $95 million. Your total expenditures were 106 million. So the city was actually budgeting at a deficit for this current fiscal year. Something that we did in our projections is we did
a long-term projection, a three-year projection just to just factor in where the reserve would be if there were no sort of premium adjustments or new revenue coming to the city of Fort Worth. And as you can see, that number drops dramatically by fiscal year 2029.
So, what this is telling us is that there does need to be a recal a recalibration of the budget, looking at the funding rates. On top of that, looking at new plan design options to cut into expenses for future plan years. We do show this in a chart as well,
looking at fiscal year 21 all the way to our projections. So, we show it by expenditures, revenues, your ending fund balance, the required reserve. You do have a a reserve policy in place. It's sitting at 25% of expenses. And then
lastly is showing your loss ratio. To find that loss ratio, all you're doing is taking your total expenditures divided by your revenues gives you that percentage. Anything that's in red over 100% that means that um we're over budget for that particular year. So, we just wanted to show you uh a graph here
what that looks like over the next next three or four years. um our active budget observations um many things I've already highlighted before but again the fund balance during this period has decreased from $45 million to 9 million that's about an 80%
decline. We did note as well that the city does have a proprietary fund reserve policy in place. Based on our findings uh for fiscal year 26, the target minimum reserve level is set at $25.1 million, which is 120 days cash on hand or 25% of expenses, which is best
practice. Um on top of that, um you know, for fiscal year 26, the budgeted fund balance is at $9 million, which is sitting below the target reserve levels that we mentioned before. If revenues are not adjusted, the fund balance will approach a negative fund balance in fiscal year 27.
And then it is recommended to that the city does establish a three-year benefit strategy by one increasing funding rates, modifying plan design, and implementing cost containment solutions. And there are some recommendations in this presentation we'll talk through here momentarily. Um there is a separate budget for
retirees. Um we will say that um looking at the data the operations and management did perform well in fiscal year 25 resulting in a 12.5% decrease compared to fiscal year 2024. Um but over that period the the uh the
fund balance has fluctuated. Um it has decreased from 7.3 million to 6.9 million. That's about a 5% decline over a six-year period. and same recommendations will also be looking at uh funding rates, modifying plan designs and cost containment solutions.
We did also uh look closely at the medical contributions. Um we did benchmark this compared to like entities. Um the city currently contributes 79% of total healthcare premium for active employees. Um while the public sector is sitting around 84%.
Uh this means that the Fort Worth is paying approximately $300 to $600 more annually per coverage per tier uh compared to peers uh and other organizations. The key finding on this page though is based up our actual calculations and looking at the funding rates they are
not set appropriately uh to adequately fund the employee health expenses. So that's looking at a rate study uh this upcoming year and making sure that revenues are uh funding those expenses appropriately. Um and then also uh we just put here at
the bottom that the city's funding 93% of the employee uh only premium um and 74% for dependent which is in line with benchmarks today. We also looked at your retiree population as well. There's two buckets. You have your pre-65 retirees as well as
your post65 retirees. Uh the city currently employs a riskadjusted premium rates for retirees which um offsets or eliminates OPED liability but this is sitting about 50 to 55% higher than the active rates and the city has implemented four distinct rate structures that are differentiated based
on retirees years of service and then the post 65 retirees they are offered a Medicare advantage program under a fully insured arrangement. We did look at utilization observations to see what were those key trends of why the expenses have been increasing year-over-year. Um, and what it comes
down to is the average cost of inatient uh or admission uh patient uh cost has increased. Medical admissions per 1000 are about 25% above the benchmark. Um, something else that we analyzed was emergency room utilization has increased
dramatically as well. ER visits per 1000 are 9% above the benchmark. Uh more notably, ER cost per ER visit is 68% higher. The city does have access to other lowerc cost facilities like the um centers u through Texas health resources
also urgent care and primary care. So try to steer employees through communication and then also imaging utilization has been significantly elevated during this time uh really around CT scans. uh looking at per 1000 um average 34% above the benchmark which
is about 47% higher on on average cost. So that's really looking at heavily concentrated hospital and ER setting utilization. And then when we look at the key findings on your pharmacy traditional non-specy drugs has been the primary
cost driver. This is center around GLP-1 medications. This is Wgoi, Zeppelo, Ompic. is treating uh pre-diabetes diabetes as well as weight loss management. Um when we look at WGOI and Zepbound alone, those are GLP-1 medications for weight loss. For a
six-month period, it was over $5 million in spend. If we looked at a full 12 months worth of utilization, it was close to $12 million in spend for weight loss medication on the plan. So looking at strategic recommendations as we move forward, what HUB has done is
put together a three-year strategic plan uh with primary objectives for fiscal year 27 all the way to fiscal year 2029. Primary objectives for fiscal year 27 is stopping the reserve depletion and controlling the risk. Next year would be bending the cost curve and rebuilding the reserves and then achieving
long-term financial and plan sustainability by year three. We do break this up into different buckets by government and oversight. So having uh oversight from management to HR finance ensuring that the plan is uh funding or
is funded appropriately and really looking at utilization month over month. We then look at health plan risk management. So this is looking at an RFP strategy for TPA services or pharmacy benefit manager also high claimment monitoring as well. And then looking at
audits in the future and then finally looking at plan design and contributions. Um we did I said like I said before benchmark your benefits against like entities very competitive. However there are some gaps within the plan that we could address to um save on on those expenses. A lot of those are
modest changes around deductibles co-ay changes uh weight loss modifications and then looking at certain bolt-on programs to address highcost conditions for things like muscle skeletal and cancer. We do focus then on reserve building strategy and again this is just working
towards uh making sure that revenues are funding expenses and then building that reserve level up to that minimum 25% over a three-year period. And then finally is looking at your compliance communications. Uh something that we did during this audit was a full compliance audit just to make sure that you're
meeting all rules and regulations part of the affordable healthcare act. Something that we show here is a a similar page to what we showed earlier in the presentation, but what you'll see in the hub projected uh side of things is when you get to fiscal year 2027,
all we did in that red uh row is we matched the revenue to expenses. So, what you'll see in fiscal year 27, there's $126 million worth of revenues needed to fund those expenses. Um that's
outlined below. That's about a 33% increase in additional um additional funds needed. Um we again budgeted out for three years. So you can see that year-over-year what that projection will look like. On top of that, at the bottom of the page in the orange, we looked at
the fund balance requirements. So by year three, that 30 that 25% mark that we mentioned before is about $38 million that you're needing in that reserve to meet your your requirements. So what that means is some some of our groups to uh to replenish the reserve, you do that
maybe in one to two years. It could be a three to five year strategy. We would work with staff on how to replenish that reserve over the next three to five years. Some things that the city could look at to cut into increased spend year one opportunities is some slight deductible
changes for the in network. We have plan features proposed conservative projected savings and then the impact level. Um, so again, deductible changes. We could also look at a weight loss change. As I mentioned before, the city is covering weight loss. That was over $12 million worth worth of expenses. Um, if we were
to make changes to weight loss medications, for example, would save the plan about $8.4 million. We also looked at some targeted programs around lantern surgical care, that's around mandatory joint and spine uh coverage, and then msk muscularkeeletal around uh physical therapy as well as um
doing a dependent audit at plan year end. It does show a projected savings of about $15.5 million. However, the city did make some plan design changes around the weight loss medications one of 2026. So really the projected savings with these plan designs being made is about
$13.8 million. Can >> I ask a question? >> Lastly, what we have put together for the city one moment. >> Yes. I'm sorry. Councilwoman Hill has a question. >> Just thank you. Thank you. Uh chair just for so that I can understand um I see
the proposed changes. Can you like what is the difference in that change? I know that you have here on the impact level >> on the side, but like what is the current deductible now? Um when you say covered at 100% membershare cost, what is what does that mean in layman's terms? >> So 100% member cost share that that
would fall all onto the member. They would pick up 100% of that premium cost today. Today there is um some support by the city to cover that drug under this arrangement. The member is going to pay 100% of the cost of that medication. But what is what is that percentage now? Do you know?
>> Um I would need to evaluate. It's different by different drugs, different tiers, but um usually there's a set co-pay for those medications. Um but this, to give you an example, for a weight loss medication such as Zepbound, it can be upwards of $1,200 for a 30-day
supply. So the member would be paying that $1,200 instead for that medication instead of that set co-pay. And then um for the mandatory for joint and spine like what is what does that mean exactly? >> So under lantern surgical care uh it is
a voluntary benefit today. Um it's a high proficient network of specialists um and surgeons here locally in the area. Um they have a highly discounted rate low surgical avoidance rate in the future. Um today members can go there
voluntarily today. In the future, we can could make that benefit mandatory that members have to go to the specialized network. However, it could be somewhat disruptive for members because it is not in the broad blue cross blue shield network. It'd be a much smaller restrictive network. However, it could
provide the the city additional savings. >> Yes, ma'am. >> I had a quick question about the weight loss medicines. I thought I heard you say that some of those were prescribed for like diabetes. Okay. In a case like
that, if if it's uh prescribed medication for another disease, would we cover it or would we go back to the making the employee pay for that? >> Great question. I do want to in very specific layman's terms, I'm very careful about how these things are
communicated because they obviously impact members. And so when we're looking at cost-saving measures specifically around weight loss, we are targeting um those weight loss medications that don't have other co-orbidities, right? And so if you are,
you know, if the benefit of anic is that you're managing your diabetes, but you also may lose weight like that's how those medications were originally intended. But city of Fort Worth is one of the few employers in this metroplex that actually cover at a very high level
these medications purely for weight loss. Uh and so that's considered more cosmetic instead of um needing needing that for u medicinal purposes. And then as far as the um the other uh areas that Andrew mentioned, so lantern uh ATI for
physical therapy um similar to the emergency room use um you know we have you know you have access to primary care doctors, you have access to our clinics, you have access to urgent care, all of those are at reduced and negotiated rates. And so being able to educate
employees and redirect them uh to the same services but at a reduced cost where the city is not incurring you know 60 or 70% more for those treatments. That would be the approach. Redirection. >> Thank you for that explanation. Uh I want to point out that these are
strictly proposals. These are not adopted. >> Absolutely. And uh maybe after the presentation is finished, you can come back uh for a moment and explain what the ongoing process to evaluate those things like.
>> And actually, I'll I'll jump to that. We're we're um pretty close to the end. Um and again, you have the full comprehensive report. So um just efforts to date even though um you know the numbers we have work to do on um both right sizing the the um the approach to
funding the expenses uh and rebuilding our reserve. We are in a slightly better position as Kate shared because of the allocations that have already come in this fiscal year. Um we have had ongoing communications with city management as well as the departments. Um because you know many of these changes they will
take time to materialize. It's not a, you know, easy onoff um with some of these, uh, plan and program designs. Um, but we do have to be, you know, very aggressive and have a a very strict approach in how we um, address this
strategically. Um, but keeping in mind um, what the member uh, impacts will be and making sure that there is ramp up time um, to be able to address that so people, you know, do not lose access to care and have a chance to to recalibrate where they get those services.
um some of the short range goals that we are already starting to have conversations about these are more best practices and making sure that you know some of the expenses around administration uh of our plans and programs are in place. Uh so for example
the dependent audit making sure that the members that we have on our plan are actually eligible even though we do uh confirm eligibility at enrollment. Making a dependent audit an ongoing process. Um dependents uh especially
spouses tend to drive plan cost. And so having a very aggressive dependent audit process and having that be consistent is is a best practice. And so an example of what that could save us an anticipated cost could be as much as 850,000.
We won't know until we start that process, but it is a shorter term opportunity um to start to manage expenses. Uh also looking at utilization for our health centers, uh our wellness programs and some of our uh condition management partners. We have a lot of
options for people. Um so you know making sure that we are redirecting uh and um providing um condition management and and cost reduction programs that are actually tied to what's driving cost on our on our plans.
And then more mid-range goals, you know, over the next fiscal year. Again, coming up with a strategy around weight loss. Uh and again, this is specifically targeting the weight loss category that is considered cosmetic and not tied to other medical conditions. Uh and then
looking at some of the redirection services if you have you know neck or back or uh hip issues having kind of preferred vendors uh that have pre-negotiated rates that help to reduce the impact of some of those more chronic or longer term conditions uh on the
plan. So it will take a lot of education uh for our members, a lot of outreach um but we are looking uh at what those strategies look like but none of these are implemented to date but we are you know aggressively working to develop the plans um both on the program and plan
design area as well as the funding uh right sizing that needs to happen so that we are are not under underfunding based on the expenses that are hitting the plan. I I I know that we're over time and I don't want to um belabor the point, but
I just wanted to make sure moving forward um that I personally maybe just speak for myself have a better understanding like I saw some recommendations in here with regards to how um our premiums compare to industry to the standards to other like um
organizations. And so maybe just having a better understanding of how that's all being considered with regards to the recommendations just that that that link. Um >> absolutely. >> Um there's some presumptions there that we are charging higher premiums in some
areas as compared to our counterparts, but yet we're recommending a lot of cuts that will be impacting our members. So somehow just seeing that that bridging that so that that understanding for the just layman's terms and how people can
see how that's being considered and measured. >> Absolutely. >> Thank you. >> Any other questions? >> Thank you very much. This is an important topic. We care about our uh city employees. We want to make sure the health plan is solvent and and that
everyone is taken care of. So, I'm I'm very thankful that this effort has been done to to to start the path to get us back on target. U look forward to that conversation continuing and and I think
I can safely speak for everybody here that uh we would like a future update on the progress of this. >> Absolutely. And just want to thank our hub team as well. They've been a great partner uh and looking forward to coming back with some additional strategic recommendations.
>> Thank you very much. >> Okay. Uh with that, I will call the meeting adjourned. Part: 2
One. It is 10:16. We're gonna go ahead and call the public safety committee meeting to order. First item of business is the approval of the February. Do I have a motion? Alright. All in favor is aye. Any opposed? Alright. Passes. Alright. Next is a written report, from UNT Safercare Texas. This is submitted by Neighborhood Services. This is a question, about what they were doing. Do we have any, questions from the committee on that? Okay. Moving right along. Next, we have a hope team and partner updates, and deputy chief Wheeler and commander Stewart from the Fort Worth Police Department are here to give that update.
Good morning. So how do we get this? I can see it on my screen. Do you guys? Okay. There we go. Alright. So good morning, everybody. I think I know everyone here. My name is Buck Wheeler. I serve as a deputy chief over the Community Alliance Command. Wanted to give you guys an update on what we're doing in Lancaster Corridor, specifically, specifically along, Presidio, Cyprus area. So as we go through this, I'll probably touch on a few things. A couple times, Commander Stewart will come up and give some stats and data for
what we're doing PD wise. But just an overall synopsis, really, what we're trying to do out there is, there's a lot of resources in that corridor. As a result of that, we have a large portion of our homeless population that stay in that area. As a result of that unhoused population, we have things that stem from that illegal camping, narcotics, that leads to some violent crime. Also, it's a very vulnerable population. They are often targets for people coming into the area, whether that'd be for narcotic sales or prostitution. So the highly congested area, it leads to a lot of those things.
We we wanna really focus on making that as safe as we can for those people that need the resources and the folks and resources or the people that work down there as well. So just geographically, you can see there's a high concentration, whether it be medical, MHMR, employment services, various shelters. And you can see that is, that is the Lancaster Corridor. Very concentrated. That's what brings those folks in. So a lot of resources down there. Then those are also, partners that we work with on a almost daily basis. So some of the violations that we are focusing on are things like illegal camping,
obstructing the roadways, the sidewalks, littering. Obviously, there's, stored vehicles and parking issues, narcotics sales, and use the prostitution. And I mentioned it before, even though those initial offenses, they may seem relatively minor, that sets the stage for the violent offenses that we see when we have these kind of situations build up. So the goal is really, really simple. Public safety. Promote public safety in that corridor. We wanna reduce the violent crime, enhance the safety of everyone working down there and living in that area, especially, I mentioned it before, those folks, that unhoused population, the
folks that actually need the resources. And we wanna reduce the fear and danger that for not just the folks that work there or the people that legitimately need the help. If they don't feel safe going down there to to use those resources, it's gonna be a much more, I guess, bigger challenge to break that cycle. So public safety, that is the goal. The strategies, proactively address the criminal behavior and disturbances that we see, remove the illegal camps, disperse the groups that are obstructing the roadways and sidewalks. So pretty general strategies.
Resources. We have pulled a lot of folks and teams together on this. Obviously, our hope, police team, central division, environmental services. When I say central division, you'll see it on there. We're just we're talking about patrol, our bike teams, our MPOs, homeless strategies, some of the our local stakeholders in that area. The schedule, I'll just touch on a few things here. The HOPE MPOs and patrol team, we have coming together on this project, we have found some efficiencies that we can make. In general, our teams are working together.
We're identifying as as many schedule gaps as we can and finding ways to to to fill them either short term or long term. Our hope team has recently changed their schedule to seven days. So we now have Monday through Sunday hope teams out there. This allows them to better address, some of those issues, and, also, it allows some of those folks to still break off and handle the needs in the of homeless situations throughout the city. Our MPOs and our central division, they are actually working to fill some of those
gaps that we have. We have an overtime detail detail that we've been doing for the current initiative for those evening hours. So bike patrol, I just mentioned it. They're they're picking up a lot of stuff on the evenings and weekends. Same thing, really focused on the corridor, those issues I mentioned before. We have the overtime detail that's been running through January. We anticipate that running, through the end of this weekend, March 7. Strategies, the this is some of the little bit more details on it. We wanna real simple, nothing complicated. Enforce these laws and ordinances that lead to the overall crime reduction and promote the
safety. Really focus on the illegal camps, clearing out the sidewalks, the roadways, removing the illegal parked vehicles. Those vehicles have a tendency to lead to other crimes and issues, narcotics, prostitution, so we wanna get those vehicles out of there. Direct individuals to resources that, again, that really need the help. We wanna make sure they have access to that and accurately tracking and documenting all this. So I wanna I wanna say this. Commander Steward might mention it also. This is not about if you're homeless, you gotta get out of here.
This is about if you're homeless, we wanna make sure that the behaviors and conduct are lawful, and you're using the resources, and we're helping you get to those resources. So I say that because I know, displacement is a is a piece of this. So we're making sure that we're addressing that as well. Strategy oh, follow-up additional information. Talked about commander Stewart's role. One of the things that he has been doing is compiling everything that we've done, which he's gonna go over that in just a minute. A lot of the a lot of the numbers there. We are sending in daily worksheets, from the day before. The HOPE team, we've been partnering, worked very closely with environmental services.
They are also sending their stats and information in, for commander Stewart to compile. Some additional stuff, we are gonna be doing sort of an after action. We we talk about this almost every week, with our teams. While the initiative may be short term, we are finding some ways to make this lasting, and we're also working we're seeing it happen is we anticipate and hope that the shift in culture down there sets the tone. So when these issues arise, if they do later, we'll be in a better position to address them and knock them out instead of things, getting to the point where
it it becomes more of a concern. So, again, the goal of the initiative is not only to change the current behaviors, but to change the expectation of what is and what is not acceptable in that corridor, moving forward from this point. So I'm gonna turn it over to commander Stewart. Any questions I can answer before I go? Just on this top part right now. We have a few. Carlos? Yep. Thank you, sir. Chief Wheeler, thank you, you know, for that, presentation. And, I know that, a lot of eyes have been on this. Right? Probably a few of us have gotten inquiries. I know I have, you know, from the public and also from stakeholders on the
East Lancaster Corridor. Some, you know, were concerned that it was, not the best attention that the corridor was getting given all their years' work, you know, trying to improve, you know, the corridor for businesses and residents alike. I know that I've answered that. I've talked to, you know, a few know, on your command staff about how to properly respond. So, you touched on what I was curious about, know about the short term, you know, efforts. I'd like to see and and maybe, commander Stewart, you can talk about this. You know, we hope that some of these things we did are lasting in nature.
I'd like to get maybe some examples of of what that is that you're referring to. Okay. One example, just some of the efficiencies that by us coming together, we found that there were some silos that we broke down. We made the communication and the how the information flows much more efficient between central division, our and our HOPE team. By spreading out the HOPE team throughout the week, it allows us to address a lot of those issues. And most everybody probably knows this. Historically, if they go in and do camp cleanups, they would often come back really,
really quick. And then over the weekend, hope it wasn't working there more of a Monday through Friday, we would see it build up a lot during the weekend. So we anticipate by doing this and we're seeing it happen, it gives us much more sustainable effort in terms of having some presence down there over the weekend. One of the other things that we found is the My Fort Worth app. We went in there with some help, and we created some different priorities in there. So it helps us better address those My Fort Worth app calls. And we also created a system when, and which we're using right now, where the
MPOs from the other divisions, if we need their help, we can get them on a rotation base just coming down there to help so we can have our hope team go knock out this stuff out citywide if that starts to build up. So we found some departmental efficiencies. Long term, we would like we put a needs assessment of personnel package. We would like to see where that goes. Big picture, if we and I know we need officers everywhere. Big picture, if we can if we'd increase that later down the road, that would be a long term goal. Mister chair, if I may just one other follow-up question.
Have we seen any improvements on, maybe performance with the maintenance agreements with TxDOT as far as the overpass is concerned where, folks tend to gather, you know, their overnight? Yes. So it's and and if environmental services I don't know if they're gonna be here talking. What I can say is all the efforts that we've done, we have got a great system, between our environmental services, our hope team, even central. Communication lines are really, really good. So we're getting a lot of how we work together is is flowing even better
than what it was before. So a lot of improvements here. Doctor Hall? First and foremost, I just wanna say I appreciate the efforts that, are being expended and and the, I guess, the different opportunities for us to partner. I guess my question is about the ripple effect, the implications of so much targeted focus in the Lancaster area and how that may just be displacing our unhoused neighbors into other portions of the city. What does that response look like, to kind of, I don't know, strike a balance, if you will?
Sure. Great question. So here's what we found, and commander Stew will probably touch on a little bit more. We haven't seen that much displacement. What we have found is by the the focused effort on the corridor, a lot of those calls, the first couple weeks we're building up, and I go back to my four with that, but that's where a lot of them come in. So what we have done is the MPOs from other divisions are coming over to help with that presence in the corridor. And our hope teams that they they know a lot of where the camps are. They work very closely with the unhoused population.
They got a lot of, relationships built throughout the city with some of those folks. So the MPOs are coming in to help, and we're sending our HOPE officers out throughout the city to knock those down. So I don't wanna give you a hard number because I don't know the exact number off the top of my head. That first week or two, we saw a pretty dramatic increase in the My Fort Worth app And, what we did when we had the MPOs come over to relieve the HOPE units so they can go out throughout the city, we saw those numbers get down to about normal, and fluctuate just right around where it's normally been.
So we have that in place now. Our hope long term is to kinda get back to where it's more sustainable, more of a maintenance. If Lancaster needs that attention again, we have something in place where we can bring in some MPOs, but we haven't seen as much displacement as we expected. So we're we're able to address it with the partners or our MPOs from other divisions coming out and helping us out. And just from my my own understanding, when we when you say displacement, are what is your definition of displacement? Having a those camps and some of the issues that we see in the corridor
have dramatically reduced there Mhmm. And increased somewhere else. Okay. Go ahead. Some feelings about this. I'm gonna push back on that displacement a little bit because the areas adjacent to the Lancaster Quarter that are in District 9, I have personally seen an uptick in the homeless population. For example, I'm on Magnolia pretty frequently. I have a really good understanding of what the general homeless population looks like on
any given Friday night, Sunday night, Wednesday night. And as I walk down that street, I felt like I was walking over homeless people. It was a very clear uptick in the number of homeless people. And, likewise, with the community crossroads, facility that's right there on Hemphill. I'm accustomed to seeing a certain, you know, number of people hanging around there. That seems to have exploded. I'm seeing and I'm getting more complaints in the West 7th area that, so it
it I I'm be interested to see those numbers because it certainly does not feel that way as I move about District 9 that we're not displacing people. I've seen an uptick in areas that we have been working really hard to see that, that decrease in. So, I just I can't I can't say that it doesn't feel like we're displacing people around the city. I'm also really interested in the identified violations. I understand the reasoning that small crimes begat bigger crimes, but are we criminalizing homelessness
in the way that we're policing down there? The narcotics, the prostitution, the violent offenses, you know, those are definitely crimes that we need to go out after. But obstructing sidewalks, littering, I looked at some of the citations, and it seems like, you know, they don't have a front license plate, but they have a rear. Are we are we making it harder for our homeless population to exist and potentially get help in the future? So two things. One, thank you for your feedback. The as far as the citations and the numbers, commander Stewart's gonna get into that,
and specifically about the the the traffic violations. So I'm gonna let him do that in just a minute. Did you wanna respond to him? Yeah. Just real quick and just wanted to cover just one issue with regards to not only is this a homeless, you know, strategy, you know, quite frankly, community community safe in that area for the homeless individuals that are trying to find services. But in addition to that, what's overlaying over this is, as you all know, we're undertaking a a crime plan with the criminologists that have come down, and they divided the city of Fort Worth in about 95,000 microgrids.
These grids are no bigger than a football two football fields. To be a violent crime grid in the city of Fort Worth, you have to have led the city of Fort Worth in incidents of aggravated assault, aggravated robbery, or incidents of murder. When you run that data, the number one grid in the city of Fort Worth is one of those locations. The number 10 in on that list is another one of those locations. When you add simple assault to that, one of them lowers to number two in the entire city and one of them rises to number five. So I just wanna have the context from a perspective that not only are we
trying to assist, you know, our homeless community to ensure that the area they're they're getting they're they're going to is safe, but actually to reduce true violent crime that's that's occurring in the city by using data and working with the criminologists. I I did wanna just throw that piece of information out that as we discuss the issues around homelessness and what we're doing out there, we actually are trying to do our very best to impact violent crime in the city as well. Yeah. And let me be clear. I definitely think we needed some efforts in the Lancaster Corridor. As I spent the evening doing the point in time count this past February, urging
people to seek shelter ahead of the extreme cold, many of them expressed fears and concerns about it not being safe. And so I wanna make sure that we are making it safe for the residents and the neighborhoods there, but also the people that need the services. So it it's not to say that I don't think we need to do anything down there. I'm really concerned in the way that we're doing that, that we're criminalizing. We're writing people citations for obstructing roadways or obstructing sidewalks or littering. And we historically know that when we write those types of citations for homeless people,
they go into warrants, and those are the types of things that keep them from from gaining employment or housing in the future. And so are we are we exasperating our problem in six months or a year? I'll let commander Stewart deal with that one and we'll Yeah. Just let me respond to just that. Later in the presentation, we provided some information about what's happening when if a homeless person has received a citation. So if we can maybe get to that portion, it might help answer some of
those questions. That works. Good morning. I'm commander Stewart, for central division. So I hope I can clarify some of this stuff and answer your questions. If we get to some of the data, you can actually see how we've got here and what we've done. And you can see that we've messaged this from the very beginning. This is not gonna be a displacement, initiative. We're not looking to move anybody out. We're looking to make it safer. And when I say that, I wanna give it the appearance of being safer, and I wanna reduce crime. I wanna I want the folks that have to live in this area to be
able to access the resources that are there and then the folks that are helping them to be able to get to work. So okay. So as you can see, we started this initiative January 23, and we've done our stats to February 17. So here's our citations. We've done the first column is actually gonna show our activity. So we've removed 265 illegal camps. And, basically, those are large tents and, you know, makeshift camp areas that are over sidewalks or or obstructing the roadway.
We've issued 735 warnings to 74 citations. So we're we're one citation for every 10 warnings. So we're not coming in there heavy handed. We're not trying to just write tickets, to address this issue. We're also giving warnings. We're also linking people to resources. Some of the arrests we've made, we've made some significant felony arrests. So while interacting with some of these deals, we've taken the criminal element out of that area.
So if we're able to take somebody that's wanted for aggravated assault off the street, it greatly reduces the risk to the community that is out there for violent crime. We broke the citations up into two different groups. There was the time frame that we had that cold weather event. There was 12 citations written. One of them was written on that Monday when it started thawing out, and the rest were written on that Tuesday. Now you'll look at these citations, you'll start going, well, there's a lot of vehicle citations and not as many illegal camping. Well, the reason that is is because we found that a lot of narcotics sales
is coming in from vehicles. Prostitution, narcotics sales, it's from vehicles that are coming into that area taking advantage of the unhoused population. So if we can get them stopped, if we can get them arrested, we've taken that dealer off the streets, and we've increased the success there. So here's the total citations that we've done. Prohibited camping is the number one citation that we've issued. But as you can see, we've had activity in all different areas. And, again, 07/1935 warnings to 74 citations.
So this graph will show the increase in proactivity in the area. As you can see, January, we were not going out there and calling out on calls and and creating activity, And we've steadily been doing that since. This shows our success in the reduction of significant violent crime. This is what initially caught our attention. October and November, if you could see, violent crime was way up. By January, February, we have almost eliminated serious violent crime.
There still is some minor assaults, but then again, we're we're in the area a lot, so people are reporting minor assaults, which could be pulling hair, could be poking somebody as minor as that. So based on two hundred and eighty nine eight hour shifts that we worked out there, a 139 of them were hope units. And again, we've mixed together. There's been MPOs, officers, bike officers, everybody working together. This is a breakdown of how much approximately we've spent monetarily out there for the
officers, just salary and benefits. As you can see, it shows you the HOPE breakdown, officer breakdown, and then total cost at the very bottom, a $157,000. These are the pictures for environmental services. So the biggest takeaway of this whole thing is that there's people that weren't talking to get to each other that are now working together. So we're working with environmental services. We're working with homeless strategies. We're working with hope. Everybody's on the same page. Community courts. Everybody's on the same page with the same mission.
And you can see the results right here. This is what it looked like before and then afterwards. Here's the total expenses for the estimated expenses. Sorry. Are you going? Yeah. I'm happy to take over. Okay. So, Wendy Turpin, environmental services. I just wanna talk about some of the things that we're doing with the HOPE team and the police officers down there, to address, what we can address down there in that corridor. One of the things that they've talked about is expanding the HOPE crew over the weekend, and what that has allowed us to do is expand the Upspire crews.
So we now have two, five person Upspire crews, and they work down there seven days a week. So you can imagine, previously, we would stop on a Friday, and then everything would come in on a Saturday and Sunday, and it looked just like we had never cleaned it, over the weekend. And then Monday, it was always a real long haul cleaning up. But now, with some adjustments, we have two Upspire crews Monday through Friday and another one, that's Thursday through Monday. Just in the last two weeks that the police officers were talking about, we've had
92 camps cleaned up and 18,000 tons of debris removed. And it is, one of those aspects where one end of the street we're cleaning up tents and debris and litter and personal hygiene items and at the other end of the corridor people are giving out tents, personal hygiene items, blankets, etcetera, etcetera. So it is, a constant upkeep there. We've worked with homeless strategies and the HOPE team to come up with a redirection plan. And it's a four step process that I'm just gonna, give you a brief overview
of what that is. We are coordinating with our partners at the Union Gospel Mission, the Presbyterian Night Shelter, and Todd James of Cutting Edge to encourage street feeding in three different areas of that corridor to try to get them off of the rights of way, off the sidewalks, and into those three areas. And I have a map of that area so you can see how we're addressing all aspects of the corridor, and I'll show you that in just a second. We are currently serving 2,500 meals, down there every single day, through lunch, breakfast, and
and dinner. So the fact that we really don't need that kind of street feeding down there, but we know that that's in the hearts of our residents and visitors. And so we want to encourage that they can do that, but only in three areas of that corridor. We've also revamped our website with homeless strategies. They have added to the panhandling website that you guys are aware of, information about how to donate, how to volunteer, and how to street feed safely and productively. So our website, is up and it has a lot more details that it previously
didn't have. We're also working with, our Union Gospel Mission and the Presbyterian Night Shelter in communications. This is, on the right hand side is a little brief sign that we are gonna be purchasing and putting out there to encourage people to give differently, and provide charity differently in the area. We will also have business cards that our, hope team and our environmental services staff will be able to provide to people to encourage them to give in other ways. And then lastly, we have worked with our law department and the police department, and
all of us are very aware of the enforcement actions that we can provide, out there to ensure that people are not giving on the right of way, that they're giving safe foods rather than, excuse me, things that would cause illness. This is the map of the charity areas. You can see we've got one on the East End, the West End, and in the middle. So hopefully, we'll be able to address all of the street feeding across the way. So we're gonna work with our charity groups and meet with them one on one, talk to them into encouraging to use those three spaces to provide foods, and we
will provide you examples of the signage, when we get those made up. And I'm gonna turn it over to Tara who's gonna talk about the outreach that's happening down there. Hi. Tara Perez, homeless strategies with the city manager's office. So as part of efforts to direct more resources to East Lancaster, part of that is our city funded outreach. So outreach, tripled from two outreach workers to six funded outreach workers on October 1, and they're working in target areas.
As you can tell from the force first quarter, there's already been a lot of presence in East Lancaster Historic Southside. But one change we made at the February is we now have one team of two that is dedicated solely to this East Lancaster Historic Southside area. Good morning. I'm Judge Houston. Thank you for giving me the opportunity to present here on our community court program. I hope I'll be able to answer some of your questions regarding what happens to site what happens to these citations once they're issued. Our community court program began in 2008 as part of the Directions Home, strategy to
address chronic homelessness. Typically involves, two parts of the docket, one in which you come in, get enrolled, meet with us regarding, what the needs are, and then a compliance docket to ensure that everything is done prior to citation dismissal. This community court is open to, unhoused individuals as well as individuals living in the shelters. It is citywide. It's not limited to the East Lancaster Corridor area, although many of our people do come from that location. Our goal is to remove the financial impediments that homelessness may cause. We understand that handing a citation to somebody and expecting them to pay it when
they're experiencing homelessness may not seem the most, kind thing to be doing, but it is a way to get them into our program so we can meaningful meaningfully help them. One of the ways in which we help go out into the community is that we actually hold our community court programs at True Worth, removing the inability of people to come into our courthouse, find transportation. We go out into the we go out into the community. We, sit in True Worth and actually hold our court documents there one time a month. We work directly with the caseworkers at Presbyterian Night Shelter, Catholic Charities, UGM.
We've been in contact with all of them. We use a referral basis. They reach out to us when they have somebody they believe would be eligible for our community court program and would benefit from that. The way the community court works is that they are referred to us by the caseworkers. The caseworkers also provide us with suggestions about what we can do to help them. Now we include all citations whether they've had a judgment on them or they do not have a judgment on them. We include all citations as eligible to be able to be dismissed or the fines waived upon completion of the program. We work with the city attorney's office, the prosecutors who also appear at True Worth
to sit down with the defendant and figure out a meaningful plan for what we can do to help them get on a path out of homelessness. Usually, our orders include things like getting an ID, applying for jobs, getting on a list for housing, getting, on medical assistance. If they are MHMR, we work with MHMR to keep them in their programs with MHMR. We also partner with the veterans program at Tarrant County so that people who are participating in that program are also eligible to participate in our community core program as
well. We find ways to provide, life skill courses and meaningful opportunities for people to work towards moving out of homelessness rather than just slapping them with a fine. Upon successful completion of all of the requirements, then the fines are are waived. Or if there's a no judgment on it, the case is dismissed and does not impact their criminal record. For the last five years, you can see we've had over 5,000 cases that were set. We were able to successfully close 3,644 of them through this process, and then about 1,700 of them were closed through the admin close process.
Typically, that happens when a case goes completely stale. The case is more than seven years old. It's been more than two years since we've had contact with them. I'd like to end on a positive note. I think sometimes it feels overwhelming to sit up here and address this issue, so I'd like to tell you the story of two people within the last quarter of last year who were able to successfully complete our community court program. Now mister g was a very charismatic individual who came to our court with some traffic tickets. He was experiencing homelessness, and he had a young child with serious health conditions.
He worked through our program. A lot of times, the ninety days that we initially give for compliance may not be enough. His was extended to six months to get him his ID, to get him applying for jobs, to get him, on medical care, what he needed for his son. At one point in time during this program, his son was at JPS. He walked over two hours to attend his court hearing to make sure that he was able to be there and address his citations. Last October, he finished the program, and his citations were waived and closed, and he successfully moved on out of the program. Additionally, I'd like to store tell you the story of miss B.
She was a, a young woman who had been experiencing homelessness since she was a teenager. She came to our court with several citations. And through the program, she was able to get those citations dismissed and ultimately receive an offer for a position as a offer for a position as a PE teacher for Crowley ISD and is doing very well. So while it doesn't seem like it's, it doesn't seem like it's always, an insurmountable problem, there are there are people that we are helping with this, and we are trying to do our best to remove those financial barriers. So I'm happy to answer any questions you have about our community court.
So, actually, I I do. That was great information because when we really need that piece of it because one of the biggest complaints I hear, especially from our officers on the front lines who are trying to enforce some of these issues, is they may be arrested on a warrant. They're taken downtown. All their stuff, all their belongings have to go with them. They're deemed to be indigent, then they go right out back the backdoor and they're right back to it. So, it was great to hear the good stories there. To me, it seems like those are almost the exception. If they don't complete these programs or if they're just like, nah, fam.
I'm good. I don't wanna have any part of that. What are we doing to hold those people actually accountable? Because I'm sure it's gonna be frustrating for those putting in the work like this to see others just revolving doors. So what are we doing to actually hold them accountable? Absolutely. So I am also the jail judge I work for to midnight at the jail, and I have also heard those complaints multiple times. I am part of the enforcement group that has worked for the last year to try to help with that enforcement, and so I've heard those complaints directly from them. There are, limitations that we have to hold somebody in custody. Most of these citations, the ones that go through the community court, are the low
level offenses. They're the class c misdemeanors. There's a couple of things that we do at the jail. One, I try to encourage them to join the community court program as well. State law now requires that if they have served any time after they receive the citation, they are eligible for credit for time served, which can look like we are dismissing the tickets and they're done and out the door. They're still having convictions, but we're bound by state law to follow that rule. If they have been through the process, they have warrants, they have failed to make a meaningful effort to complete any kind of community service, payment plan, do anything on
their case, then we can commit people. What that means is that we transport people to North Richland Hills with where we have a contract, and they can sit out some of their citations. As far as indigency being granted at the jail, it is extremely rare. In order to be eligible for indigency, you have to be below the poverty level, and you have to be unwilling to unable to complete community service. Typically, what this means is that we hope we held a indigency hearing where they have to bring with them their proof of their indigence. If they're on Social Security disability, we take that into consideration.
And also a letter from their doctor stating that they are unable to physically complete community service. So I can assure you, we're not just handing out indigency closing cases willy nilly at the jail. There's a whole process that they have to, go through in order to to meet that requirement. Awesome. Thank you. Any questions? I wanna go back to the citations, thank you so much, that we're issuing. And, and just my curiosity is I see that we're giving a ton of warnings, and I appreciate that. What, and specifically to camping, the tickets we issued to camping, what what's that determination
between giving them a warning and then actually giving them a citation? What what tips that scale? Because I imagine as part of that 700 and something, a lot of those are camping warnings. Correct? Yes. Yeah. I think there was 28 if I ever remember. Right. So out of the 800 folks that we saw coming in that offense, 28 were cited. Are Are are they just I I don't know the particulars of each each one, but sometimes I mean, on a day to day basis, we go out there.
We have a great relationship with the citizens. So we'll give them warning. We'll say, hey. You can't camp here. They pack up their things. They move along. There's no problem. Occasionally, we have someone that says no. Gotcha. I'm not going to. So we try to reason with them, work things out. Our next level is we're gonna issue a citation. You know? So it's just a progression. It doesn't happen every time. It's not necessarily this person or that person. It's just the circumstances that lead us. So it's most likely just uncooperative individuals that were Yes. Yes. If they if they're cooperative, there will not be any citation issued.
If they're cooperative, there's no problems at all. We go around. We environmental services cleans things up. We help them get to the resource centers they need to get to, get them connected with everything, and move on. Can we talk about the cleanup specifically? What are we doing with their stuff? I mean, are we are we giving them the opportunity to to leave before we start taking their things? Because I've had several, people two different people reach out to me with concerns about us taking you know, doing a cleanup before giving them a warning, and so we're essentially taking all their items and throwing them away.
No. We have procedures in place. So we give everybody warnings. Even throughout the entire city, we give everybody two hours to try to clean up their stuff, get out of there before we do anything. So it's ever since the Hope Unit was created, we were able to put these processes in place that, you know, the warnings happen first, then we see if they they go along with being the law. And then from there, we'll move on to enforcement and other things. Any questions? Real quick on that. On the on the cleanup piece, told to clean up all their stuff. We see how much we spend every year on our taxpayers are spending on cleanup.
If they're just like, alright. I pack up all my stuff. I'm gonna leave, but I'm gonna leave all this trash behind. We'd like to track them back down and be like, hey. You need to come back, pick up the rest of your crap, or we're gonna get citation for littering. Is I mean, what are we doing about that? Because it seems like we're spending a lot of money to clean up after people who cleaning up after themselves. You're you're absolutely right, and that is what's happening. And usually, when there is especially the the depending on the size of the camp, if it's a larger camp, there's a lot of stuff left behind. The tough part is, how do we show if there's six people over there and there was probably 10 before that, how do we know who left that stuff there?
So we do use environmental services that go in and we clean up everything. And, you know, we're providing that service for the citizens so they can have a clean city, and, we don't just leave trash sitting around everywhere. Okay. Maybe that's something we can explore going forward is, you know, if there is a large camp and whether that's holding everyone accountable for it and shared responsibility, but seems like we're spending more and more money every year cleaning up after then after they take their belongings and move along. So, yeah, thank you very much for that. Yeah. Was that the The other question? So that's that's everything. So just couple for me.
One thing I'd like for us to explore is especially in those those areas where we, you know, we have drug dealers who are taking advantage of the situation, and they're keeping those from getting help they need because they're enabling them. I'd like to know if there's anything we can do at the city level to have, I guess, more strict, I I I don't wanna say enforcement. I mean, maybe state law type bill that's holding us back. But those hot spot areas, you know, like like a construction zone speeding, there's workers present, fines are doubled. Is there anything we could do at the city level to make those the repercussions
even worse for narcotic cells or prostitution in areas that the city deems as hot spots? I don't know if that's something we can explore or that's state law. I we've been pretty successful in what we're doing and the police work we're doing there. So the good thing about getting getting a lot of the clutter out of the area, it's allowed us to really see things better. So we've identified two different locations that narcotics is investigating right now, that we've kind of traced cars back that were going back and forth from the, near Southside neighborhood. And shortly after we started this, there was a major arrest.
There was a guy that was providing most of the narcotics to the homeless area. And I think they got him, like, don't quote me, but it was a large amount of narcotics, and he's probably gonna be in jail for a long time. So we're not you gotta look at it as the big picture. We're we're we're we're addressing crime and public safety. This area was unsafe. This area had a lot of crime, and we have to think about what we can do and what resources we can pull together to address this crime issue. I think we've we're addressing it well.
We're having success. We are gonna have to look at a long term process, and that might require more resources or us to rework the process that we have right now. But we're seeing success. The numbers don't lie. So I hope that answered your question. Yes. Thank you. Oh, go ahead. Doctor Hall. I just wanted to say, that I appreciate the update, and, I guess, the effort to, like, systematize this this this initiative and the opportunities to partner with our nonprofit partners.
The data is really good, and it's definitely a need. So I do appreciate that. Moving forward, I would I would just love to be able to see maybe down the road, and I know that you can't do this all in one day, that this is a really big undertaking, just to see what that impact does look like, as we push out into the greater city. I know to, you know, councilwoman Beck's, point, there are some visible changes within D 6, and I can't without knowing or having any type of real data, I can't
say that it is because of the efforts that are happening in Lancaster. But, I know as you fix one problem, there's gonna be other things to remediate other places and just would like to have an opportunity to hear or see how we are managing that, more formally down the road. And I know that you may not be there now, but just something, food for thought, if you will. Well, I think one thing we could do is provide, a look at the camping complaints. I think that's a good marker. So we can look at how many camping complaints there were before this, how many
we're having right now. If they've increased in certain areas such as Magnolia or anything like that or West 7th, then we could say, okay. We have an issue. All those areas are in the same area that I'm over, so I have a vested interest in not moving people around. It's not solving any issues for me. So all of my MPOs in the area are very aware of this. They're supposed to report any increase they see. We have not seen an uptick in camping complaints. We have seen just small anecdotal stories. We have seen where some of the vehicles that we that were illegally parked there
are now parking in other places. So, officer Marquez, the the MPO in that area, does an amazing job. He's already identified them. He's already working on them. So we're trying to address all those issues and the maybe the negative impact that happens from our activity and try to reduce that as much as possible. I I didn't want it to be lost that, that there was appreciation for the efforts and that it's it's duly noted, appreciated, and I know that it's a really big task. So thank you so much for for all the work.
Chief Garcia, do you have something to add? Yeah. I was just gonna call the council member. One of the one of the dynamics with regards to being part of the crime plan and being tracked by the criminologists is that that data will be tracked. The criminologists do track displacement quite a bit with regards how it pertains to how crime moves around in different parts of the city. That's part of the plan. In addition to that, moving down the road, I mean, this grid work is as we're starting off and what we're doing now really is just the first part of the crime plan. Eventually, what this area would become is it's right for an area that's called PNI, which is a criminological strategy with regards to the fact that the police then become
just a cog in the wheel, and it really is an all hands on deck city services attempt to really get that area better. Again, what we're doing, we're the Tylenol, we're the Advil to reduce the fever. No. We're not a cure to the illness. And so it'll be an all hands on deck approach that I've had conversations with criminologists already from this is a perfect location to really go on with that whole hands on deck mentality that we're currently doing now, but then truly put, science and data behind it. Any questions at all regarding that? Okay. Just a couple of thoughts that I'd like for us to, go over in the
next update on this is I know what we're doing down down there is to make things safer, and allow those who actually want the resources to get the resources. But for those who just outright refuse, again, you know, not criminalizing homelessness, but if they're gonna be a a hurdle, what are we doing about those, those folks? And then early in the presentation, we we saw, you know, education on what is and is not acceptable. I'd like to hear more about what is acceptable and what we're accepting as a city. And the last thing is I would really like us to look at the, the
naming of the HOPE team as well. I think it's, I don't wanna say disingenuous, but I think it's the the e part is what gives me pause, like, the the enforcement. You know, whenever we have four police officers going out there, they have hope on their shoulder. And at this point, it's past the point of their, you know, accepting resources, and they're just they're like, nope. I'm just gonna keep doing what I'm doing, camping out here at this, this commercial location, doing whatever I want. And then now we have a hope team going there to enforce. I just think it makes things a lot more difficult for them trying to go
in there, like, alright. Tried. Now you don't want to. Here's a citation. Here's they're gonna arrest you for warrants. And so I certainly you know, I heard Dallas is, like, the hot whatever that is, the hot team. Certainly don't wanna go that way. I don't know what cool acronyms you can come up with. I'd just like to see if we can explore something else there. Any last questions or thoughts? Alright. Thank you. Alright. The, next item is the fire department EMS staffing and schedule changes, and chief Hill is here to give that presentation. Yep. We just wanted to to make sure that, the committee was aware of some changes
that we've that will be forthcoming. You may hear about them and that before we implemented them, we wanted to share with the committee. Good morning, committee members. I am interim fire chief Raymond Hill. I'm going to give a EMS EMS shift update, for transition to our EMS single row staffing from a twenty four from a twelve hour shift to a twenty four hour shift. So the driving factor of our change in the schedule, a lot of it is due to our attrition rate.
Attrition rate right now is 16%. Traditionally, in the fire department, our tradition our attrition rate is 5%. Within the EMS industry, we're doing a little better. The EMS industry attrition rate is between twenty and thirty percent. We've had 55 separations since last April. We're losing about seven to eight single role providers per month. The average tenure is two years, and the average age is 27. So So if you look at the bar graph at the very bottom of this slide, you will see that the majority of our EMS providers are leaving for dual
role positions in other agencies. And if you'll look further, to my right, to your left, you'll see that pay is really, not a major contributing factor for us losing our single role providers. So what we have done, just based on the survey between the four forty and we've also done a a survey between our EMS supervisors, the four forty had 68%, of our single role members that were in favor of the schedule change. Our individual poll was, like, 87% of our providers were in favor of the twenty
four forty eight schedule change. So we're going to implement a pilot program starting Saturday. So here's our current operational status. We have a total of 360 out of the 449 that Fitch recommends that we have to operate our system. We have units at 35 stations right now. They're in our twelve hour shifts. They work three twelve hour shifts one week, and then they'll work four twelve hour shifts the next week, and they have a built in four hours of overtime. So we have units assigned to 35 stations, twenty four hours around the clock, and
then we have peak demand units. We try to staff those from five to 10 peak demand units. Our EMS side, they're receiving five hundred and five hundred and fifty calls per day. Our peak demand is between 7AM and 7PM, and we need a minimum of 280 employees to operate our system daily. So if you look at the staff staffing snapshot on our current operational status, we have 297 employees available today. Out of our total operation staff of 360, we have 14 employees on leave.
We hire 25 to 30 people on overtime every day. And of that 30 people, we have to force hire 10 people daily, which a lot of our single role providers come over from MedStar, and they're not accustomed to being force hired. So that is a problem for, a problem for them. Peak demand units, we're trying to schedule up to seven between seven a and seven p, and we have four crews per station. I mentioned earlier, we have the 35 stations and two deployment centers at Altamir and
our North Deployment Center. The shift pattern I described earlier, twelve hour shifts with two, twelve hour shifts with three days one week, four days the next week. So the key operational challenges. Right now, we have a total of 89 vacancies. Now we started off the Fitch recommendation. We were already before we even started, we were a 100 vacancies short of the four forty nine. So we still have 89 vacancies open. We currently have 39 single row providers in training.
We just graduated a class of 35, I believe. So we're starting to close that gap. Challenge we're having with overtime dependency, like I said, we're hiring 30 single role providers overtime every day. We're force hiring at least 10 of those. High unit hour utilization. Ideally, we want unit hour utilization, just to explain it, that is the actual amount of time that the ambulance unit is is working, patient assessment, transporting, turnover at the hospital. So, ideally, we want that to be a point five o, which is they're only
actually at work half the time doing their shift. Right now, with the staffing shortages, we're creeping up to 60% of the time, and that's really unhealthy and it's not good for patient care. Inability to meet peak demand. Fitch recommends that we have 65 units on the street. We'll well short of that. Once we transition to the twenty four forty eight, we will be able to put 55 units out on the street during peak demand. And the structural staffing gap, you'll look at, the chart again, we're we're at 89
openings, and I believe we lost two Friday. So that's that's probably up to 91 openings at this point. So if you look at the schedule model and and some of the driving factors of why we've decided to make the change, we're going from a twelve hour shift length to twenty four hours. The current model will hit 35 stations with our twenty four forty eight. We'll actually have units at 45 stations, which will also improve our advanced life support coverage. So we'll have units at all of our 45 stations. And we'll also have, using our peak units, some of the high demand areas, we'll
have peak units staged alongside the station the units assigned to the stations. The changeovers per day, the the changeover at a typical station, you have to change over twice because they have two shifts per station. So right now, it's just one shift, which is the same schedule that our firefighters work, the dual role firefighters. So the advantages of the twenty four forty eight model, the 45 stations will have ALS coverage all throughout the city, a lower unit hour utilization. We have improved surge capacity just in case we have a tornado or storm.
We'll have additional units already on duty as opposed to the 35 we'll have at night after our peak areas. The reduced forced overtime, we'll have a pool of 12 paramedics to fill in for leave time, sick time, and things of that sort. So that will cut down on the force hire. The increased ALS truck density, we'll be able to have ALS units staged around the city and at the stations, which is a lot more efficient than we have right now, and then increased operational reliability. So, again, to our target staffing, we want to be at 449 to operate the
system as designed. Current head count is 358. We lost two Friday, then available today is 295. So the benefits of the twenty four forty eight, you get more days off per month as to working the twelve hour shifts. You have an improved work life balance, so people instead of people being forced hired, they can plan on having that actual two days off, and they'll have more notice before they're required to come in for forced hour overtime.
It's, like, easier commute manage commute management. And then as I mentioned earlier, the shift desirability, 87% of the employees would like to work, of our single role employees, want to work that twenty four forty eight. And this and, again, this is a ninety day trial, and we have a we have a, a SharePoint. So all of our providers can can provide feedback for what's working, what's not working. And after the ninety days, we'll evaluate that and see if this is something that
we can continue. So planning for growth. Fitch said that our system will we can anticipate a growth rate of 9.1%, which is compounded. So once we get to 449, just a number of calls that we get, our population, our system will grow at a rate of 9.1% compounded every year. So the 2448 creates a scalable way that we can manage that, just like fire stations. If we open a new fire station, we we'd know how many people we'll need
for that station, and we know how many relief personnel we'll need. And that'll work the same way for our medic units. And this change again, this change positions our system for growth, so we can anticipate based on the compounded annual growth rate, the number of single row providers will need above and beyond the 449 that we have right now that we're trying to get right now. So this is our call density. If you look at the map, on your right, it shows you all the, the the stations.
The red is the call density area. And once we have our units assigned to each station, we'll have our peak demand units, which will double at double up at the busier stations, and we'll have coverage for those areas. And then the map on my right, on your left, that shows you where all of our fire stations are located, including some of the stations of our member cities. The station capture analysis, this is a chart from Fitch, and it shows that if we staff these non particular stations, that we can respond to every area in the
city 90% of the time within eight minutes and thirty seconds. So are there any questions? I'm sure there will be quite a few. Yeah. I back. Sure. I think my first question is, do we have the capacity in our fire stations to support EMS on the twenty four hour shift? I know many of our fire stations are not equipped to, adequately house both male and female firefighters. We know that our, EMS team is much more diverse in that regard.
So my cons my concern is, are our fire stations equipped to do this, and have we thought through do they get the same level of service that our current firefighters get? Are they getting a cot? Are they getting a bed? You know, are they stuck sleeping on a couch or a recliner when our firefighters, you know, get a bed or or, you know, are we setting up a a dual standard? So this has actually been in the works for the past sixty days. So I've had our logistics team work working on partitions and beds, and, obviously, there
are there are some supply chain issues with the beds. We've partnered with the four forty, and they volunteered to help us out with some of the beds until we actually get our delivery of beds for our single row people. We also have cots, and we do have a set aside in our budget for any unanticipated needs that we may have. I don't Is it a supply chain issue for the beds or just a city bureaucracy issue? Honestly. I think we all know the answer to that one. Yeah. I mean Yeah. Thank you for saving me, sir. Thank you. We can go buy some beds right now. Yes. So it's certainly an issue that we I think it's absolute absolutely ridiculous we're asking
the four forty to take responsibility the city should have for city employees, period. So I don't know how that gets resolved, William. But if it's a city bureaucracy going out to buy beds that are less than $20,000 to for these firefighters and EMS workers, we should be able to do that. Yeah. It's a it's not a it's not a money issue Yes. For sure. It's a bureaucracy issue. And so we'll we'll discuss with procurement what else what other options we might have. But I I think that the the beds have been ordered. Oh, yeah. We should have the beds in about sixty days. But in the meantime You're gonna have you're gonna have people sleeping on hot surfaces.
Off at sixty days for beds. That's the problem. I mean, we we can go buy some beds right now. This isn't directed to you. I I think, like, we're all on the same page. I'm pretty sure. Absolutely ridiculous. So I don't know what we need to do at the city level. If it's a ninety day experiment and we've got sixty days before the beds come in. Right? So we've got hypothetically, we're buying beds for for thirty days. I think we know that this probably isn't an experiment. So the question is, do we have the capacity to wait until we're we're ready and able to provide this level of service for our AMSPS.
We need to break down. Moving this this this month next week, I want it. Saturday. Oh, Saturday. Yes, sir. But we will address the issue with the pay. I guess We'll work with procurement. I guess for me that also opens the question of with this different structure, with regards to just beds, it's a really big deal. What other resources or items do we not have or or deficient that may preclude us from being successful with this model? I mean I mean and I'm not and I'm moving beyond beds. I'm I don't I don't pretend to know the work that you do or all
of the items that you need, but I would imagine if you're now having more manpower to do more work, that it seems like there would be more supplies and needs to to support that work. And just wondering, do you have everything that you need in order to do it effectively? Well, actually, we started assigning our EMS units to fire stations in November. So we already have 35 fire stations that are fully equipped. So we're just basically adding 10 more stations to that. And, again, once we receive all of our partitions and our bids and, I know
you didn't ask this question and it may come up, but just based on the force hour overtime, the regular overtime, onboarding of new employees, Basically, the cost base balance out. K. Councilwoman Beck? Yeah. I sorry. I just wanna put a bow in this because I feel like our we're not being concerned if our you're not hearing our concern. If we don't have partitions up, are we asking male and females to sleep in the same room until those partitions get there? Because if we've got a sixty day lead time and we start on Saturday, that's
sixty days that we open up, ourselves to some pretty significant liability here at the city. So as part of our fatigue policy, we do realize we have some stations that are not completely accommodating, so we do swap crews. So if we have a crew, let's say, downtown and the station is smaller, we will swap them during the night shift to go up to a station up north, let's say, Station 41, for example, large station, plenty of bedrooms. So we do have the capacity to swap crews based on the number of runs
that they've made. And if we need some privacy, we can move crews around to different stations. So they're not actually completely tied to one station. They will be expected to move as needed. So, chief, on that real quick, if I could just follow-up. So say if we have a, say, female firefighter at one station and they may not have the resources there, their adequate housing, they would then go to a different station to get their rest. Yes, sir. It's just a matter of just swapping the ambulance. So it's that is I I don't know what the answer is, but I don't
think that's it. Because especially if they live in Fort Worth, hell, just go home at that point. Just get sleep in your own bed. Yeah. If you gotta go somewhere different, then you like, I I wanna be clear. Clarify because I don't think that's what he said. He's saying I thought that's what he said. Said. They'll be The the peak demand units, all of our units move around the city based on the demand. So there is not they are not like fire trucks where they stay in one area. Right. All of our units move around the different parts of the city. And if we have a unit, let's say, downtown, and they make 20 runs in
the first twelve hours, based on our fatigue policy, we would move them up north to a slower area of town anyway, regardless of what the sleeping arrangements were. Can we walk through this practically speaking? So EMS will now work in a very similar way that our firefighters work in Yes, ma'am. Right? We don't control when someone has a heart attack just like we can't control when someone has a fire. So they've, and, again, I'm not a firefighter. I've never spent a twenty four hour shift, with the firefighters, but my guess is it's a, you know, you get it while you can kind of thing, and you
sleep when you can. And if that means you take a nap, you know, you get a call at 01:00 and you take a nap at 02:00 instead of just, you know, cuddle it in bed at at, you know, 10PM or whatever. We're not doing that for our EMS. It sounds like they're out running, and then we say, okay. Now it's time for you to go sleep instead of you can rest. You you have the ability to rest when you know, in those down times. And and, again, I wanna go back to what happens to our female firefighters, because maybe I'm understanding it incorrectly, but now we're saying, well, you're gonna be out of
this station until it's time for you to sleep, and then you need to go to a different station. And, again, I go back to morale and quality of life that we're doing an extreme disservice to really any of our EMS peoples. But I think this is gonna have the most negative impact and most difficult on our female paramedics. Yes, ma'am. So what are we gonna do? Yeah. And and on that too, I I really wanna make sure that as we explore this and as we we test this this out, which I'm I have some concerns, but I wanna make sure that we're also working very closely with legal, to make
sure, you know, any of our fair labor laws, because I know there's a case out of, Arizona where a female firefighter sued for 3,800,000.0 and won because there wasn't proper, lactation room. And so all the things we may not be thinking about now, I wanna make sure we're working with legal to make sure that we are doing everything we're supposed to, because I'm sure there's a lot that we're not thinking of that that can come up. So, yeah, certainly a lot of questions on this. Councilor Flores, did you have something? Yeah. I'm gonna wait. Okay. Yeah. Thanks. I'm gonna cover a couple of different things. Okay. Okay. You said significantly reduced mandatory, you know, overtime.
Okay? Being one of the problems with retention. So during the pilot program, what does that look like? What's the pool size for paramedics? We have a 12 member paramedic pool. So kinda like our vacation relief for firefighters. Okay. So that's what you're going to implement? Yes, sir. What do you have now? Right now, they are not we don't have a pool for paramedics. They're on twelve hour shifts. Got it. Okay. Now ambulance availability. I wanna cover this because I know we're still trying to cover some ground there. To achieve the increased ALS presence that you want to, cover for the density of
calls, where are we at on that? I mean, are we are we good? Is that an issue? As far as the number of paramedics in our system? Yeah. Yes. We're we're good on paramedics. Density to cover the calls that you're getting. Yes, sir. Be okay there. Yes, sir. ALS calls. Or ALS calls. Yes, sir. Because we can we we have predictive software that shows us where most of the calls will be, and that's where we assign our ALS paramedics. Unit availability is not an issue. Right? Unit availability is not an issue. Right? Availability is not an issue. We just have expend extended travel time to this point.
And that's because we have a shortage of staff and a shortage of medic units, which we're working on. Then I have, one I guess, it's it's a structural related question, okay, to or EMS system. Alright. The position of EMS supervisor, and feel free to, you know, talk about that. Okay. That was adopted. You know, we considered it on the ad hoc committee and the, EMS train physician team. And it has two primary roles. You know, it's administrative, right, and then clinical. Okay? What I'm hearing is clinical is okay. Administrative, maybe a little wonky.
You wanna comment on that or correct me if I'm wrong? Well, actually, that's something that'll have to be addressed in the collective bargaining contract as far as what their specific duties are. I have had several conversations with supervisors who love the clinical work. They don't necessarily like the administrative. So we're gonna look into different, areas doing our collective bargaining sessions to see what we can do to remedy some of that. Right. Thank you, sir. That's That's all I got, Charlie. Good. Thank you. The last thing I have is just on the, the force hire.
Earlier, you said that eight to 10 a day. I believe a majority of that is with our single role. Correct? Yes, sir. Okay. And then Well, that's that's all single role. Eight to 10 single role every day. Yes, sir. Got it. Okay. And then last thing, the the poll results, you said that there's 86% that were 87% from our, management phone poll, and then the four forty conducted a separate poll, which was sixty eight percent sixty eight percent. Among single role? Yes, sir. In favor of the '20 four forty eight schedule change.
Okay. Alright. Councilwoman Beck. Yeah. I councilman Flores brought up a point about ambulance availability and how this impacts us. Currently, right now, are we ever at a place where we don't have ambulance availability? That would be present in every system. Like, if we have a storm come through town it it happens occasionally, and that's just based on call volume. If we have more calls than we have ambulances to assign to it, then that'll impact ambulance availability. Okay.
But just on a normal day with 500, 550 calls, we do have adequate resources to handle that. And that'll remain the same with this change? Yes, ma'am. Okay. Would you have considered yesterday a normal day? It's not a trick question. I'm just asking. Because in the information that we got this morning, it said at 09:35AM yesterday, citywide member cities, ambulance availability is at level zero. No ambulance is available in the city for a call with EMS calls. Or for a member city? Yeah. It said citywide in member cities. I'm just I'm just, I mean, following up on that question of do we ever
have you said not on normal days. Just if yesterday was a normal day, we did not have availability at 09:35. I I would have to, talk to the alarm office and look at I I think for this committee to see is how many times that actually happens on a regular basis as we're moving into the new systems. Are we adequately prepared to do this? And that would I don't ever wanna see that. And I don't think anybody on this table ever wants to see that at 09:36 if the citizen calls and they can't get an ambulance, that's not what we wanna see. Right? And the advantage of this, we'll have an additional 10 units day and night as
opposed to just peak. Yeah. So it will have more consistency in the number of units we have on the street. Yeah. That's just the first time I've ever seen it. So probably it's helpful for all of us to understand how frequently is that already happening, but that's We we can get that information for you. Thank you. Okay. So I I think that was it. The the final final comment was just I know last time we discussed, you said that you thought we were good on resources as far as station build out. So if I looks like we probably will not be. And so I won't put you in a tough position to ask if you have what you need. I would just say let us know what you do need. But we'll do.
There's clearly some some needs. So, okay. That's it then, thank you, chief. We're gonna go ahead and move to the emergency communications update, from. Good morning. I'm excited to be here today to give you some good news on progress that we're making to improve the 911 system in the city of Fort Worth. Over the course of 2024 and throughout 2025, we heard you. You told us that it was a priority for us to improve community safety. You asked us to make our public safety response system better, faster, more equitable, and
reliable, and we have strived to meet that priority through a host of different initiatives. So as I talk about the highlight reel for those initiatives for 2025, they all are aligned to this priority. I am happy to say, as I'm standing here, we are responding faster. In the 2024 and throughout 2025, we really have taken a deep dive look at what we've been doing, opportunities that we could evaluate to improve efficiency and infuse efficiency
in our process. We have empowered our 911 call takers to take action quickly. In a previous modality, we transferred all the calls out for fire and EMS. We empowered our 911 call takers to verify the address, verify the phone number, and enter a call for service to facilitate response at the 911 level. In addition to that, we took a deep dive look at where we've been, reports, statistics, research that had been done on the state of nine one one, and our responsiveness, and crafted, developed, and implemented, a phased approach to a new staffing and accountability
model, to ensure that we had the right people in the right place, ready to respond when precious seconds were counting. That new staffing model was deployed late May, early, I'm sorry, late April, early May. And by June, as you can see at the graph on the right, we were able to meet, the National Emergency Number Association standard of best practice, which calls for us to answer 90% of our nine eleven calls within fifteen seconds. So you can see that since June, we have been able to consistently meet and
or exceed that standard, which translates to a better level of service for the community. That represents about a 52% improvement. We're not done. The goal is to make sure that every call is answered within standard, and we have some work to do there, but we have made dramatic improvement in our ability to respond when you need us. So So, we've made modality changes, looked at our staffing allocation and improvements there, but you also called us to make sure that we improved reliability.
One of the ways that we've looked to do that is force some consolidation within our emergency communication centers. So, as a reminder, prior to the July acquisition of EMS, we had three different communication centers within the city. Police, fire, and MedStar EMS. In order for us to meet maximum efficiency, it requires that all of these nine eleven practitioners are working shoulder to shoulder so that we can provide better collaboration and make good decisions in the best interest of those that we serve. In July, the fire and EMS communication centers were consolidated at MedStar's former headquarters on
Altamir. This has improved our call transfers. Formerly, we were transferring to the fire alarm office for fire incidents. EMS was being transferred to MedStar, and police was being handled by the 911 call takers. So, this partnership of putting our telecommunicators together has improved our response coordination, it has improved our operational consistency, and allowed us to align on strategy for faster response. So that doesn't stop there. We also went back to your priority, and you called for us to use modern
approaches, data, and technology to improve the way that we show up for the community and to bolster our public safety response capabilities. We answered that call through, some discovery of innovation to infuse smart next generation nine eleven tools for our teams within the fire, police, and EMS communications teams. Technology that would improve situational awareness, break down language barriers, and ultimately allow us to act quicker. In February 2025, we deployed phase one of a technology pilot through a company called
PREPARED. That's the dealer in these next gen tools. In February 2025, we started with instant transcription and translation on every single call. 1,700,000 phone calls were instantly transcribed, and 10,000 plus of those were translated into languages other than or languages other than English were immediately translated for us. This is important because when language barriers exist, it delays our ability to act. When words were not enough, we also leveraged video to nine eleven services, so that
when the caller could not properly articulate or unable to articulate verbally what was happening, we could put eyes on the situation and understand what was needed, so that we can ensure we got the right people to the right place and the right time. So not all of our work is emergent in nature, in a communications center. But we strive to provide the very best level of service that we can for the community, and that means that we strive to honor every single request. A lot of our work is non emergent. The residents are calling for contact information. Maybe they need to report a noise complaint, or abandoned property, or a host of
other requests. We wanna make sure that we are properly and timely resourcing those. This also helps with our 911 call answer times. Throughout 2025, we ran three live trials of a technology that is an AI call triage software that we call Ava, for automated virtual assistant. When the residents dial our 10 digit non emergency number, they're greeted by Ava, who is programmed to to address and resolve a variety of different non emergency requests.
So, I want to be really clear here, too, this is not 911 calls. These are not life or death situations. These are simply calls that do not require the skill level of a first responder, to provide a timely and adequate response to the community. During those three lab trials, the callers experience zero wait time. That means that instantaneously, our automated virtual assistant is picking up the line and immediately trying to triage and understand what is needed. During those trials, we responded to 12,000 calls.
And of those 12,000 calls, what we realized is that 26% of those were able to be triaged by AVA, by the software, and we were able to provide quick resolution to the caller. And the beauty of that is, that's 26% that we gave time back to our 911 call takers so that they could quickly respond to 911. So, when the community is calling in, we're able to respond quickly and triage the needs. So, we've talked a little bit about, our staffing and our modality changes and efficiencies,
but honestly, none of this would be possible without relationships. Over the course of the last year, as a new department, we really strived to find balance and forge better relationships with our fellow public safety partners. So we have hearty relationships with Fort Worth Police Department, Fort Worth Fire and EMS, the Office of the Medical Director, and our city management team. This is where the thought leadership happens, this is where collaboration happens, and this is where we form unified approaches to improving our system.
And, of course, none of this would be possible without the incredible men and women that serve in our emergency communication centers. Over the course of 2025, we really prioritized retention of these teams. You've heard chief talk about the retention issues they're they're experiencing in the field. There are also retention issues within the communication center. But we know that investing in our people is a key to our success. So over 2025, we worked diligently to educate, equip, and empower them to make a difference in the lives of those that they serve. We bolstered our continuing education, making sure that they had opportunities to get out and
experience, professional development outside of the communications center, interact and develop network relationships with other practitioners within the area to learn and glean from their successes, and what could we do in the city of Fort Worth to provide this better level of service to the community. We also revamped our quality assurance program. It's very important that we inspect what we expect, make sure that our teams have the tools and knowledge necessary to execute on the mission. This really has driven a great improvement in our accuracy, and our operational consistency, and
all of that means that we can show up in a better way for the community when those seconds are counting. So those are some of the advancements that we have realized in 2025, but we are not done. And I wanna make sure that that's clear. We still have work to do. As I have mentioned several times, our goal is to get the right people to the right place in the right time, and to provide an incredible level of service to the community. And there is still work to be done there. We are committed to focusing on those mission driven improvements that truly do make a difference. We have to continue to look at ways to evolve, ways to improve, and constantly
evaluate that and work towards improvement. We regularly are reviewing where we've been, where we're going, and engaging with our teams to make sure that we're getting it right. We will continue to pilot Prepare to Assist, all the next generation technologies that I mentioned, and also look at other innovation in ways that we can empower our teams to work smarter on behalf of the community. With that being said, I look forward to any feedback or questions that you may have. Councilman Flores, one quick question. Going back to the Assisted Call Take Act, that's a, federal grant program.
Right? No, sir. Is it? Okay. So how do, what So that pilot originally was funded through CCPD funding. Okay. Gotcha. Okay. I do know that at least a few years back, there was, maybe this it was the same naming program that I thought was, the same and funded through federal funding or grant funding 56 states with, you know, financial assistance. That's why I asked about it. But if it isn't, it isn't. So that's fine. Not to my knowledge.
Thank you. Mhmm. Any other questions? I think our district directors would certainly love to see about getting Ava in our offices. Sounds like that's amazing technology. So, okay. Any other questions or discussions on that? No. I did have a a comment. First of all, thank you so much for for, the presentation. You you stated that there are things that you will continue to work on and and and improvements. What what what, if anything, can we do? I mean, what are what are some of the barriers, some of the obstacles, some of of those things? Are there are there any? So I I think there are a lot of things that we wanna continue to
work towards, but I have found in my twenty eight year plus career in nine one one that culture and our people are our most important commodity. So we have to continue to find ways to support them, make sure that their mental health wellness and resiliency is top of mind, that they have the tools to work smarter, and all of those things are an ongoing evaluation. As we find those efficiencies, we will bring those forward and ask for support on those. We recently have extended, job offers to new management to come into the communications center,
one of which will be charged with developing programs to support our frontline workers in nine one one to make sure that they do have the tools and resources to have longevity within their career. Technology is rapidly evolving in this space. There are a lot of things going on, and we're really just trying to evaluate what the good fit is, and how does that help us elevate the level of service that we're providing here. So as technology grows, we absolutely will keep a eye on that to align with the priority that you've given us, and we will come with projects, and asking for
your review for those. Thank you. Yes, ma'am. Thank you so much. Thank you. Appreciate it. Alright. Any future discussion items? K. Mister Johnson, I just have one, and that's just an update on city and state laws on ebike and scooter usage on roadways, sidewalks, and trails. I'm getting a lot of complaints, from a lot of our neighborhoods where we have, parks trails and a lot of issues around the, the e bikes and what our HOA's can do to, I guess, prevent some of those issues, whether we need to
create ordinances or not. So k. Got it. Yeah. Ambulatory time update. Got it. K. Alright. If nothing else, meeting adjourned.