Quality of Life Committee
Wed, Feb 5, 2025 · Quality of Life Committee
https://santafeminutes.space/meeting/310

== Executive Summary ==
The Quality of Life Committee discussed a wide range of topics, including a youth violence interruption pilot program, the implementation of ShotSpotter technology, and a proposed reorganization of city departments. The youth violence program aims to divert young people from the justice system through restorative justice and wraparound case management, with concerns raised about the validity of juvenile justice data. The committee also heard a detailed presentation on ShotSpotter, a gunshot detection system, with strong advocacy for city-wide implementation despite initial plans for a pilot in specific areas.

A significant portion of the meeting focused on a proposed bill to separate the Police and Fire Departments from the Community Health and Safety Department. Proponents argued this would improve efficiency and clarify roles, while opponents expressed concerns about undoing previous work and potential impacts on coordination. The committee approved a contract for a work-based learning internship program with Santa Fe Public Schools and discussed the city's response to a recent Arctic freeze, highlighting effective inter-departmental coordination.

== Key Decisions ==
- Approved the agenda.
- Approved the consent agenda as amended.
- Approved a Professional Services contract with Santa Fe Public Schools for a four-year, $1.2 million work-based learning internship program (Passed 4-0, with one recusal).
- Approved an unspecified item related to the Emergency Management Department's reporting structure (Passed 4-1).

== Motions & Votes ==
- Motion to approve the agenda — Passed.
- Motion to approve the consent agenda as amended — Passed.
- Motion to approve the Professional Services contract with Santa Fe Public Schools for the work-based learning internship program — Passed 4-0 (Councilor Chavez recused herself).
- Motion to approve an unspecified item related to the Emergency Management Department's reporting structure — Passed 4-1 (Councilor Castro voted no).

== Public Comment ==
Councilor Garcia expressed significant concern about the validity of juvenile justice data, suggesting it might not accurately reflect the reality of juvenile crime. Councilor Travis emphasized the importance of relationship navigation and empathy as preventative measures against youth violence. During the ShotSpotter discussion, Councilor Garcia strongly advocated for city-wide implementation, arguing that resident safety justifies the investment and that targeting specific areas could displace crime. Director Williams expressed disappointment at not being consulted on the proposed departmental changes, stating his "fate [was] decided without ever having any say in the matter" and suggested the incoming City Manager's input would have been valuable. Councilor Castro voted against a motion related to the Emergency Management Department, citing concerns about the specific issue and the "huge task" involved.

== Topics ==
- Youth Violence Interruption
- Community Health and Safety Department Reorganization
- Emergency Management Resourcing
- Affordable Housing Initiatives
- Small Business Support
- Economic Development Programs

== Full Transcript ==
Councilor Castro, did the chambers please? Councilor Castro, can we go ahead and go live? We are live. Thank you. Yes, just our side. All right, we are live. We have a quorum, at least. So it is 5:02 p.m., and I will call the February 5th Quality of Life Committee meeting to order. Can I please get a roll call? Councilor Castro? Isn't Councilor Chavis? She is excused, but may be able to join us at a later time. Councilor Garcia? Councilor Faulkner?

Madam Chair: Here.

Madam Chair: You have a quorum.

Thank you so much. Moving on to, oh, let's pause just one moment. Apparently, Councilor Chavis has not received the link from Marcela. Marcel, does it come directly from you? All right, we'll wait one moment until Councilor Chavis is able to join us. Is she on as a panelist? Councilor Chavis, are you able to, or is she still as an attendee? Mike, can you make Councilor Chavis a panelist?

Okay, I'm on now. I'm sorry about that.

Wonderful, thank you. No, we are sorry about that. Glad you now have the link. So please make note in the minutes that Councilor Chavis is indeed present. Moving on to approval of the agenda. Are there any changes from staff or the committee? And if not, can I get a motion to approve?

Second.

Motion and a second. Is no changes, or are we talking consent? Well, I don't know. Councilor Chavis asked to be excused. That come, oh, that'll be consent. Yes. Motion and a second. Can I please get a roll call as we are hybrid today? Councilor Castro?

Yes.

Councilor Chavis?

Yes.

Councilor Garcia?

Yes.

Councilor Faulkner?

Yes.

Madam Chair: Yes. Motion passes. Thank you so much. And now moving on to the consent agenda. Have any items been pulled? Item B has been pulled. And is that pulled, is that the one, Councilor Chavis, that you're pulling for?

Pulling for recusal.

Okay. Any other items that any members of the committee would like to pull at this time? And if not, can I get a motion to approve as amended?

Move to approve as amended.

Motion and a second. May I please have a roll call? Councilor Castro?

Yes.

Councilor Chavis?

Yes.

Councilor Garcia?

Yes.

Councilor Faulkner?

Yes.

Madam Chair: Yes. Motion passes. Wonderful, thanks so much. All right, moving on to presentations. Our first presentation is Youth Violence Interruption. We have the wonderful Julie Sanchez from Youth and Family, our Youth and Family Division Director, our fabulous Chief Paul Joy as well, and Dr. Elizabeth Silva, who is our consultant. So if you will come on up to the podium, and I will hand it over to you.

Thank you, Madam Chair. We have a presentation. Marcel, you may have to pull it up for us. So, hi, good evening. Good evening, everybody. I am here to present on our Youth Community Violence Interruption pilot. It is a collaboration between the City of Santa Fe, the County of Santa Fe, and also our lovely PD is also a part of this work. So what I will say is this pilot project has been in the works, I would say, since about 2020. I'm going to show slides and all that, but really, we saw a pretty significant uptick in youth gun violence across our community at that time. While, oh, thank you. So we'll go ahead and go to the next slide. Thank you. It's for some reason, it's cut off for the record. Darn these Mac users without their HDMI port. So fancy. There we go. That's a little better. Ha. It's still a little small. So we'll read it for you. So the city has seen a drastic actual decrease in youth crime since 2000. If you look at this chart, on the far left is the year 2000, and then to the far right is actually 2024. So you can see there was a very, very alarming amount of youth crime that was happening. A lot of it was gang violence, a lot of it was drugs, trafficking. Each one of these items on the legend on the right, I'm sorry, you can't see it, but we'll share the presentation afterwards. You can see that there was an incredible increase actually in property crime across the city. So that dark blue is property crime. On the very top is actual weapon, weapon arrests. And then when you get down to the orange, that's violence against basically each other. So interpersonal violence generally between individuals. So coming out of the pandemic, you can see there's a line right there that's COVID. So you see there's a dramatic decrease in youth crime. And for a number of reasons, that is because one, we were in lockdown. Two, young people were being monitored a lot more closely by hopefully supervision. But the crime statistics actually drop off there. And then as you see, is coming out of the pandemic, you can start seeing a steady increase with actual weapon violence continuing to grow year after year, which is very alarming for our community. So because of the increase in crime, and because of a number of young people who are murdered over the summer of 2020, as well as gun violence that continued to escalate from that point, the Youth and Family Services Division, along with Santa Fe County's Community Services, work together with our community partners and the Santa Fe Police Department in addressing and looking at an upstream approach to addressing this issue. We prioritized youth most directly associated with violence, and we're looking at centering historic and systemic issues behind violence, which include poverty, economic injustice, racism, and of course, we're centering systematic, it's been a long day, systemic disenfranchisement from services and resources. So what we're really doing is looking at how we address all of these issues while bringing resources to young people in our community. Next slide. And I'll let Dr. Silva take it from here.

Thank you so much, Julie. One of the really exciting things for me getting pulled on as a consultant was the community had already come together to form some really beautiful goals and values around what they wanted youth inter-violence interruption to look like, as well as a consultant had been pulled on to create a strategic plan. And my contract in particular, and the work that we're developing under this pilot, was under the critical priority objective two, which is on the left of the screen. And I'm going to read this because I think it's really important to ground us in the whys of this work. And under critical priority objective two, we are to educate, navigate, and employ youth at high risk for violence, and establish a sustainable program to reduce youth gun and gang group violence, to credibly reach youth, to saturate participants and protective factors, and to build capacity to serve as community support workers equipped to contribute to violence prevention over time. And within that, right, the community, several people from the community had come together, and they had particular goals and values by which they wanted this work to flow. And they really were really intentional in saying, we want these youth and families most impacted to be centered. We want their voices to be heard. We want their experiences to be valued. They wanted to make sure that the threads of work that were happening for youth violence prevention throughout the community were interconnected, so there wasn't overlapping services, so there wasn't the duplication of efforts, and so that resources were well used. And they wanted restorative justice to be the center of how quality of life was treated when looking at young people who are at highest risk for systemic injustices. And they wanted very clearly to address historic and systemic issues behind violence, poverty, economic injustice, and racism, making sure that systemic disenfranchisement from services and resources was centered in how we engage and work with young folks. And so we've been working really closely with Chanel Delgado at the county, and we've come up with some really beautiful collaborations with folks in Santa Fe. I'm going to read this to you, because although we don't have a specific mission vision, this is part of the envisioning efforts that we've been working on for the past year. Collectively, we created a multi-disciplinary task force that includes peers, community leaders, and providers to offer wraparound case management, individual participant support, and accountability for contractual services to interrupt potential patterns of violence for youth at risk for perpetration and victimization of violence. The goal is to allow youth and those most impacted to be experts in their lives and what has led them to association with violence. Within that, we are working with community providers to talk about what it means to develop a case plan based on youth participants' experiences, while holding those providers accountable to those co-developed plans and making adjustments as necessary. And this mural that you see is the work of New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, and it's a mural in the South Valley of Albuquerque. And New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence are actually one of the community partners that are going to be working with the Santa Fe Public Schools and the Teens Center here in Santa Fe. So next, this is one of the main tenants that we're working within, restorative justice. As many of you know, the Santa Fe Public Schools has already created a pretty robust and powerful restorative justice program. With that, we're looking at the social determinants of health, social ecosystems, and macrosocial realities that impact the problems and the conflicts and harms that we see happening within young people, within their peer groups, and at school. And within that, you know, this is kind of a layered approach, but the idea is that we're not just looking at the individual and blaming the individual for their circumstances. We're looking at the individual, the family, the social realities, the political, the economic realities that they're living within. So we're viewing the whole situation, not just blaming the person or even the family.

So one of the most important aspects of this work is how is it being funded? And so we were incredibly fortunate to receive quite a significant pot of ARPA funding that was going to community and youth violence initiatives. Of that funding, we have about $923,500. Specifically on the domestic violence piece, which update, we may have a domestic violence response specialist. So we're incredibly excited for that partnership with PD. Another piece of funding that we recently received was through the New Mexico Department of Health, which will actually be coming forward for approval in the next month or so. And that was a collaborative application between my office and PD in order to address issues of youth gun violence with these partners that we're currently funding, and then also bringing on new technologies to support PD in being able to identify areas that we should be implementing our program. We also received CFD funding for Juvenile Justice specific work. There's also an allocation, thank you to Santa Fe County, that helps to support this work. And then of course, funding from our internal city Children and Youth Commission, which highly supports restorative justice programming specifically at the public schools. So this is a large funding effort to support this work. And it's been really great because we now have at least dedicated funding to continue this work over the next two years. So we're so proud that we were able to get all of the ARPA fund federal funding out to the community for the Youth Community Violence Interruption and Prevention specifically. We were able to award all of these amazing community partners and providers that you see up here. We did it in two different rounds. The first round was education and prevention. And within that first RFQ, we awarded to New Mexicans to Prevent Gun Violence, Santa Public Schools Wave Mural Project, Santa Public Schools Restorative Justice Program, and Resolve New Mexico. In our second round, and the round where we get to kind of begin to implement the pieces of the pilot that work directly with diversion, we awarded to

Girls Inc. of Santa Fe, Gerard's House, and YouthWorks. I might have Chanel come up for a couple of these slides, but we're really excited about this tiered approach that we're coming at the actual diversion and interruption work. We're looking at Santa Fe Public Schools, law enforcement, juvenile probation, and the District Attorney's Office to create each of the referral streamlines. We've had several meetings with each of these entities, and we've actually gathered everyone together and begun to move forward many of the referral process templates that we're creating.

This is our latest rendition of how we anticipate more of the logistical pieces of the actual referral process to look, with each of the systems—the Santa Fe Public Schools, law enforcement, juvenile probation, and the District Attorney's Office—having a specific program response in which they refer potential participants to the program, to the pilot. We'll get you all copies of that so you could see that in detail, but we're really excited about how we're already using existing programs to create the referral pathways.

One of the pieces that we've been really invested in again is the restorative justice process, in making sure that healing and social determinants of health are integrated into each moment of the referral in the pilot. What this image represents is how the program referrals are initiated, but the most immediate thing that is going to happen is the social determinants of health and psychosocial screening that we're doing with Santa Fe Connect and a community provider who is going to be contracted to specifically work with our referrals. From there, you can see at the bottom level, wraparound case management is the focus of a lot of this difference, and we are looking at how peers, family, potential retaliation, and the social determinants of health are affecting all of the different levels of the restorative justice process.

Finally, one of our latest works that we're trying to build with Gerard's House, who was funded, and the Mountain Club, is a community healing space. We're in the process of developing this curriculum, but right now we have six aspects to it: foundations of healing, cultivating presence and acceptance, healing through compassionate listening, transforming pain into compassion, preventing burnout and sustaining healing, and integration and moving forward. We're really excited about the development of this curriculum. It's coming out of the Mountain Club with Joaquin Martinez, and he's done a whole lot of work with healing and creating social intercultural programs for young folks and integrating them, kind of just developing a sense of self as they decide who they want to be in the world. So we're really excited. That's one of the second tiers of the program that we're creating, and that is all I have.

Mayor: Wonderful, thank you so much. Really, really appreciate you all being here and presenting. Questions from members of the committee? Councilor Travis, if you have anything, I can't see you right now, so feel free to shout out any questions or comments.

Councilor Garcia: Thank you, Madam Chair. I really appreciate this presentation and all the work that's being conducted. The first slide, I think, or a slide, had a lot of data going back to the year 2000, and then there was that cliff that we were attributing to the pandemic, and things kind of leveled off from there. Are we confident in those numbers? I mean, we can only go off the data. The first source of data is what PD reports. Is that how we're getting the data?

Madam Chair: Councilor Garcia, this actually, I brought this up because I'm going to share this with you all as well, and I would love to do a much more formal presentation on it, but this is the District One Juvenile Justice measures and program outcomes. So all of that data actually comes from CFD.

Councilor Garcia: Okay, thank you for telling me the source. I just caused a moment to pause for me because when you see the numbers that were there and then such a massive drop, it wasn't just a little dip, it was a massive drop, and nothing, no uptick. I have some pause for concern around the validity of the data just because I don't know. I think, yeah, I don't know who to ask the question to because I think again, if we can pull up that slide, just because I think it's important that when we're doing this type of work, that we're really looking at slide number two. I'll go ahead and ask Chanel Delgado, who's more deeply involved in the Juvenile Justice realm, to speak on behalf of the data.

Chanel Delgado: Yeah, I mean, and it just because if you, I mean, you can see the decline, the decrease, right? But we're never back up to pre-pandemic levels, which I don't, I, yeah, I just as somebody who studies data for a living, I don't know how reliant that is because again, it then I get back to the source. Are we relying on police reports? What are we relying on? And you know, I definitely understand during the pandemic there was a lot of unreported crimes that were post-pandemic, four years later, three years later, whatever folks want to have that timeline for. Maybe, Madam Delgado, maybe you can help. I just want to just make a quick note that during that time frame, law enforcement priorities definitely shifted, and we saw this across a lot of patterns of time, not just. So I just like to point that out. I think we're barely rebounding from the pandemic in terms of our points of interaction with law enforcement. And I can speak to that from our Team Corp perspective, where we've received referrals from juvenile probation. We're now just starting to re-engage as that's becoming a priority again. And so I think there's a little bit of a lag there that we're seeing, and so it will be interesting to see what the next three years look like, four years of that engagement.

Councilor Garcia: Okay, that's helpful just because I'm not to say anybody's making this claim, but to make the statements that rely, looking at that data, you can say we've had a great impact in working, and we've decreased juvenile crime, and the report, I mean, that graph says it, but I, that's challenging to really think that's the case. So thank you for some of the context. I really appreciate it. With that, no other questions, Madam Chair.

Councilor Caceres: Yes, just a few comments. Thank you all so much for your work. I have sent Director Sanas a request for this to be presented at the Mayor's Youth Advisory Board. I think that would be really relevant for them. And I do have a question. So based on different statuses, different folks might have different repercussions if they do enter the criminal justice system. Do we have any alternatives, or do we have any concern for folks that may have mixed status?

Chanel Delgado: I'd just like to say that the goal of our initiative is to, at pre-adjudication, before there's a formalized offense. We are also looking at interventions that happen post-detention. So if we were to go back to the referral source slide, we'd be able to break down those that are pre-adjudication, and that is our target population. We want to interrupt before they enter the formal system. So with that overarching, well, that's our, that's our primary audience, although we don't want to miss the opportunity to respond to those post-detention.

Councilor Caceres: Perfect, thank you so much. And again, just doubling down on the fact that you have done your due diligence and thought about the different things that go into juvenile incarceration. So thank you so much. No further questions, thank you.

Mayor: Any other questions or comments from the committee?

Councilor Faulkner: I just want to say thank you for the presentation. Super helpful, and you guys seem to be doing really great work. Just let me know how I can support.

Mayor: Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Travis, did you have anything? If not, I'll assume no.

Councilor Travis: I do, I do, I do. I'm so sorry, Councilor Travis. Speaking of youth, my son just got hurt at a basketball game, so I'm on Zoom, and I'm multitasking with him right now. I'm so sorry. With this topic, though, I just wonder in the task force if the conversation or relationship navigation has come up as why we're seeing an increase in violence, because right now, interactions amongst youth, interactions amongst adults, and then interactions with adults and youth, I don't think are the healthiest. I think we have a lack of understanding, a lack of empathy, and we've seen this like increase of behavior, and you know, lack of connection tends to lead to, you know, mental health crisis, which I imagine would lead to crimes. I just wonder if those conversations have been had because I know restorative justice really does address that, but I think it does that as a post-vention, and I'm wondering if there's been talks about relationship building and understanding around behavior as a prevention.

Chanel Delgado: Yes, thank you so much for your question. Absolutely. So in one of the slides, we broke down how there's education and prevention, which was the first RFQ that we did, and then how the second was mostly for the pilot. We had several applicants who are doing education and prevention in the school along those lines of relationship building and prevention. And then we have a whole other leg of our programming that Leila Kelly, who presented to you all a few weeks ago, is working on specifically with interpersonal relationships and interpersonal violence. So yes, we've thought really deeply about that because, you know, one of the main indicators for future violence is if someone has witnessed violence or if someone has been in a situation where they have had violence in their households. So that's actually one of the things that we're looking really carefully at, and we're trying to incorporate that into a lot of the prevention pieces. And I know like right now, one of the, can you guys hear me okay?

Councilor Travis: Yes.

Chanel Delgado: Okay, perfect. I know like at, in schools, you know, in all schools, private schools, public, charter, one of the big challenges that educators face right now is like classroom management, and behavior has evolved very differently, especially with the pandemic. So in regards to education, is that for adults? Is there initiative set in place for adults who interact consistently with our youth around behavior, restorative justice, and prevention, or is it just education for youth themselves? Because, you know, we really have to be like the guides in navigating that understanding and the example of what preservative justice looks like with how we approach youth. So is there emphasis on adult behavior or more so on youth behavior?

Chanel Delgado: So I'll answer part of that question, and thank you so much for that question. So on the very second to last slide, a lot of the work that we're doing with Gerard's House and particularly one of the incredible teachers at the Mountain Club is addressing just that. And you can see again, we're developing this curriculum as we speak, but one of the reasons the Mountain Club is so incredibly successful is that they pull the parents in to learn about how they can also be part of the healing process because a lot of times we have parents that are doing their very best. And I've sat in a couple of restorative justice circles with Santa Fe Public Schools, and these parents are being pulled in lots of directions, and although the healing is happening, and we're doing our best as a community to try and support entire families, part of this curriculum that we're developing with the Mountain Club and Mr. Martinez is specifically looking at that and how we can engage families differently and how we can offer this as something not just for young people, but for their parents and their support networks.

Councilor Travis: That's really awesome. I love that. And you know, I would love, you know, to see something with, you know, schools, private, charter, public, and giving that support to our educators. You know, I often say, and I'm, I always, I...

always mention behavior because, you know, violence is a form of behavior. But all of the behaviors that come before that extreme is a form of communication. And so, you know, I always say behavior is a language. And if we all would be more proficient in that language, especially I think adults observing students and responding to, or sorry, I say students, to kids and responding to kids, we would be equipped for a lot of preventative measures. So really understanding behavior as a language would be really important as I think a preventative measure in addressing this data. And that's just the comment I have and just success I've found in how I can catch high-risk students, high-risk students, and give them the relationship and the love and understanding that becomes a preventative measure from them, or from their behavior, to increase in a negative way.

Councilor Travis: I just wanted to let you know that I know you're familiar with the PAX Institute. They were just awarded funding, specifically grant funding, specifically for New Mexico. They are the founders of PAX Good Behavior Game. They recently just received funding for New Mexico to expand those services to specifically focus on adult interactions, self-reg. Educators are one of their primary focus areas. I'd be happy to connect you with that institute.

Absolutely. I've been, I know Michelle Katz. That's very exciting. I've been trained in PAX. So that, that is, it works. And I think it works for all ages. So that's really exciting news. And thank you for your work and the data and just making this an area of focus. It's going to take all of us working together to continue to protect our youth and equip them with the skills, coping skills, to be, you know, contributing community members. So I just thank you for your work and dedication and involvement with that. Thank you.

Thank you, Councilor. I just have a couple questions. First of all, thank you all for being here for this work and really excited to see it at this place. Now, I know it's something we've been discussing for a while that this was coming, so very happy to have you all here. I guess what I'm curious about, especially since we know that some of these dollars are ARPA dollars and at some point we will need other dollars. And one thing that I always worry about with social and public health programs is how we define success and also when we can expect to see it, because it's never when funders think that they will. So I was hoping you could speak a little to those things. What would we consider success with this program? And what is a realistic time frame by which we might actually see the fruits of this labor? Because it's not going to necessarily be in one to three years. And so that is going to be something that we're going to have to contend with as we continue to look for dollars.

Madam Chair, that's a great question. One of the things I just realized is not included in this ARPA funding circle is our evaluation, which has been done and will continue to be happening through an organization called Aspen Solutions. So they actually developed an evaluation template for each one of these organizations to measure success. And what success means, at least to me, I'll let my colleagues here also speak to it, but is seeing a reduction, right? Is looking at a reduction of youth crime, specifically gun violence and violent crime. Gun violence and interpersonal, those are the two big ones. That would be a measurement of success for me. Hearing even anecdotally from Chief and his officers that they're seeing far less youth or running into far less youth committing crime, that to me would be a huge measure of success.

I'll just add to that. We are also working with the New Mexico Sentencing Commission to develop focus groups with the young folks and their families to see how effective it is. And I think one of the things I'm most proud of as I've developed this with the team is how much we're trying to look to young people and their families to guide what is working and what is not working. And that was heavily built into the evaluation that we gave all of the providers and community organizations. We have a ton of questions that are based on how well this is working for the young people and their families immediately and their ideas to how to make it better. So we're not just asking questions like how many people are being served, how many people did you see, how many people completed their case plan. We're really looking to the young folks and their families to guide if we're doing a good job.

Wonderful. Thank you. And then did you guys have an answer for that time frame piece? I think that it is good for us as individuals who will be funding in terms of our expectations and managing those expectations for how long this work actually takes.

Madam Chair, as you know, change is incremental and takes a very long time. And so I would love to come back in five years and say, here's the progress that we've made, here are different achievements that we've accomplished year by year. But I think you're right, it's going to take anywhere between five and seven years to really see positive changes because we're talking about not only just addressing issues, but also creating cultural shifts and social shifts. So yeah, five to seven years.

Wonderful. Thank you. And I know that that's a hard number to actually place, so I appreciate you trying to put a number on there because again, my point is that as we think about this and as we, you know, come across discussions around funding and continuing this work, is that we really know that we're not all of a sudden going to see in two years everything is, it's fine. If it was that easy, we would have solved this issue already.

Did you have something to add, Ms. Elgato?

Just wanted to add that I think it's important to keep in mind the different, sorry, can you jump right into the mic? The different ref, I'm so tall too, so it, the different referral streams and how we capture that data, right? So if we're trying to capture in a preventative lens, that data is going to look very different from a district attorney diversion. So I just want to throw that out there. Success could be really easy on a DA level because we can say like, these are how many cases were diverted to this program. But those that we're capturing before it even hits the district attorney, which we're hoping to do, is going to look very different. So just want to throw that out there. The difference and impact can be evident in numbers quickly for certain and not so quickly for others.

Wonderful. Thank you. I appreciate that differentiation. Well, thank you all so much for being here and for your work. I look forward to seeing you again soon whenever Julie tells me it is time to bring you back for an update. But please do reach out. I can speak for myself. I assume the committee would agree with me, but please do reach out for anything that we can do to help you succeed with this, with this important project. Thank you.

And that actually segues well into our next presentation. Wonderful part of, so Julie, don't go anywhere. Our next presentation, using tech to intervene in gun violence. And I have Julie Sanchez still and Ms. Terry Green, and I will hand the floor over to you.

Thank you so much. Section here. So related to this project, specifically addressing gun violence, this is something that we've been looking into going back to 2021, 2020. And as anyone who come, as an example, at your town hall and some of the other community meetings I've had where I present data and speak to data and the numbers of what we have and what we're seeing, what we're not seeing, one of the responses that we get is, well, that's because people aren't calling and that's because people aren't, aren't engaging. Okay, well, I, I can only operate with the data that we have and that's presented to us.

Chief, can you get a little closer to the mic? So Councilor Travis can listen. Like eat the mic pretty much. Sorry. All right. Can hear myself more, which is not great. But specific to violence interruption, my department, going back to 2020, we've done two different programs specific to youth violence and gun violence. There was Operation Stop the Violence in 2020, and then in 2021, we had our violence in a, violence intervention team. Both programs and both operations were heavily involved with reaching out to our community partners to see what we were seeing, engage with our officers and our detectives, and then go and try to make contact with the community members and the families to try to get them out of that particular violent lifestyle that some of them were involved in in youth gangs and get people into hopefully some, some better decision-making and and ways of life. But as it relates to this next program here, as you all know, I'm a big fan of technology and leveraging technology to make us more efficient and also better serve the community with, with the issues that we're seeing. One of the, one of the frustrations with specific gun violence is when I go to these community meetings is again, as an example, where people will say, well, we're hearing gunshots all the time, or people are shooting guns, and it either takes police a long time to get there or police don't respond period. And when we have those conversations amongst those community members, what we see often are people A, won't call because they don't want to get involved and they don't want to be identified as, as a potential victim or witness and fear retaliation, or they assume somebody else is going to call because, you know, that if I heard it, certainly somebody else heard it and and someone else will take care of that. And or another one is, well, we're not going to call because why bother if if someone's really hurt, someone will call and find out eventually. In relation to all that, this technology and what you're going to see here, this presentation with ShotSpotter, we've done a lot of back and forth and discussion with this company for again, going back four years, I think is when we first started having these conversations. But there are a number of benefits for not only us as the department, but but the community as a whole and hopefully will serve Director Sanchez's team and getting folks services sooner. So with that, I can jump back and forth, but going to kick it off to Ms. Green here.

Madam Chair and council members, I'm Terry Green. I'm grateful to be here tonight and I appreciate your time. I'm hoping that we can get some slides up on the screen. It'll make it easier. However, I can talk through it. I can talk through it also. I think that, can we email Marcel? If we've done this in the past where we email the slide deck to you and then you're able to pull it up. Does it, does that work to do that? Okay, we, we'll give you a moment to get some slides. Visuals are nice. Thank you, by the way, for giving me the time. Our master genius in the back. So I'll get started. So my name is Terry Green, as I mentioned, the Western, the Western Director for the unit, the Western United States. I work with a company called SoundThinking. Some of you know us as ShotSpotter. We've been known as ShotSpotter for over 30 years and we changed our name last year because ShotSpotter has been gunshot detection, which we've done well for all these years, but we've added new products and so we changed our name to SoundThinking. And some of you may also know us because Albuquerque is a user of ShotSpotter gunshot detection. And the purpose of this, of, of this segue from the community outreach portion is gun violence often goes unreported, as council member Garcia mentioned, crime goes unreported. And as Chief mentioned, there are a lot of reasons why gunfire.

goes unreported. Again, sometimes you don't know it's gunfire. You think it might be fireworks, and you're not sure. The purpose of ShotSpotter is to alert police quickly to gunfire, letting them know exactly where it occurred. The audio, the visual, everything is provided to them within seconds. That's vetted, and there's a vetting process. If you're interested, I can play a short video for you if we can get that running. But the idea is to give you information, or give the police information, for gunfire rather than it being fleeting. Because unless you saw gunfire occur, it's hard to tell where it happened. A lot of times people report gunfire, and it's as much as two football fields off. We know this because we've done an analysis across our client base, over 180 customers in total, and we can see that there's a disconnect, a large gap with the actual occurrence.

So we talked about this: 80% goes unreported. Sometimes people look at me, chiefs especially, with some skepticism, like, "Oh no, people report crime in my town." But when we start to get ShotSpotter up and running, the sensors that go on buildings, generally up high, they detect outdoor gunfire, anything over 110 dB. We've talked about this a little bit as to why people don't call 911. Sometimes it's fear; they don't want to get involved. Sometimes it's the fear of retaliation. Recognition, as I mentioned, the fireworks aspect or backfires, and they don't want to waste resources by calling. Redundancy might be, "The neighbor probably called, so we don't need to call." And then again, resignation, where you just, "Well, they never show up." And part of that reason is because sometimes the police don't know about it. So what we want to do is try to fill that gap.

So what we did is we took data that the police department offered. It was just innocuous computer-aided dispatch data of reported gunfire. And what we did is looked at hot spots of where anything could be tied to a gun-related incident, things like aggravated assaults, homicides. And what we did is prepared a general coverage area to consider for gunshot detection. I'll talk about how this ties in with the trauma aspects in just a minute, the segue from what we just talked about. We did this analysis and came across, or came up with, some areas to consider for gunshot detection where you're seeing the most gunfire. So this is a data-driven decision, and it's the police department that will make the final decision, but this is what we have in mind for this today. Do you have any comments about this? My little tablet here, sorry, you have it as well. So in those two areas, this goes back from January of 20... can you hear me again? Sorry. So this goes back to January of 2020 through to June of 2023. And so throughout that time, this includes welfare checks, domestic violence, homicides, aggravated assaults, anything in which there was a report of gunfire or there was a gun used. In that time span, there were 222 calls for service where a gun was used in some form or fashion in these two little areas here of the hot spots, so to speak. That accounts for 43% of citywide calls in which a gun was used. So those two areas of two square miles each account for 43% of the city's total call volume related just to gunfire. I'll get back off there.

So we have the stats there. What I want to talk about is leveraging gunfire for community outreach. This is something we've been doing for years. We actually have a couple of community engagement directors that are part of the service and really working with the police department and the community outreach programs and helping them understand the data that we're collecting, which is when and where gunfire occurred, times of day, days of the week, where and when it's most prevalent. And then leveraging that for the Office of Violence Prevention and Office of Violence Interventions, school-based programs. We have the ability to show where gunfire is occurring in and around schools. And then also, we prepare all these great analytical tools that are accessible by the police department to determine during school hours, again, hot spots, high incident locations. So there's a wealth of information that can be pulled from our analytics, which are included. Hospital-based intervention programs and victim services programs, just supporting what we've just heard and talked about. And so that data is very important, and we make it available in a user-friendly manner. We can also create dashboards for different groups to make it easy for them to get exactly what they're looking for.

But there is a, when gunfire goes unreported especially, there's just a vicarious trauma that can occur where kids are exposed to gun violence, and they're having to go to school, and maybe they've had to, they were woken up by gunfire, and no one showed up, and they're scared, and it causes problems. Sometimes they have a hard time focusing on their schoolwork. So this whole program we developed, which we refer to as Data for Good, is really helping our customers take the data and leverage it for all of these great violence interruption and prevention aspects. This is an example of, I have it innocuous, but it's an example of a coverage area. So there's a lot of data we collect that the police department's record system may not collect, and it's captured through the app because in seconds the officers have all this intelligence, a lot of critical information that can help them respond more tactfully, or in a tactical way, I guess. And also with more intel, knowing exactly where the gunfire occurred, so they're not susceptible, hopefully, to an ambush. They know where it happened, they know what to look for, they're looking for victims, they can apply life-saving measures like tourniquets and things like that. So we're trying to get them to the scene quickly and improve the response time to the community.

This is an example of data that's produced by the mobile app, which we provide to all officers, allowing them to check boxes of aspects to the incidents, such as whether victims were found, whether they applied life-saving techniques, number of casings found, which can be used in investigations to tie guns that may have been used in other crimes, and a series of information that is useful that isn't always picked up in the records management applications within the police department. And then we can produce all this great data. One of the nice statistics and metrics we use is being able to tell you all how fast the police responded by comparing computer-aided dispatched 911 calls, whether you received a call or not, whether there was a delay. Oftentimes, again, the location was off. So we can tell you what the difference is. So there's all those great analyses we can provide to really show that it's working and to give you more transparency to your community that you're doing something about it. You're not just, you never want to give the feeling that you're ignoring them, you just don't always know about it. And in Albuquerque, as an example, just because they're the closest to you, what they've seen is they've done a lot of follow-up with the community, and we teach that as best practices. We have former command staff members that used ShotSpotter in their own departments, and they meet with the police department and provide all these best practices, and we continue to come out and meet with them and make sure they're leveraging everything they can with ShotSpotter for the best so they can get the most value out of it, but also engaging the community better and giving them a sense of trust that the police care and that they're responding quickly.

So this, if you can't see it, is just an example of high incident locations, and we can tell you the number of rounds being fired, we can tell you the time of day, and so forth. A lot of statistics that are available either customized or right out of the box with these dashboards we create for you at no cost. Now, the data is, again, we started this program a few years ago, Data for Good, and this is just an example in Florida, Miami-Dade County. I've met this gentleman, Wayne Rollins, and they're just so passionate about reaching out using the data, data, sorry, data to determine where gun violence is affecting, especially kids, and trying to find them and offer services to where they might be able to keep them from making bad decisions down the road and getting involved in other crimes. And so this is just a really good example. He's walking one stop, and there's a lot of videos and such on this gentleman's work. He's done a great job, and we'd like to help bring that here and complement the work that you're doing with your outreach programs.

We also encourage follow-up, and this is what Albuquerque is doing in the areas where they're doing follow-up. So they check in on people to say, "Hey, there was a shooting that occurred in the neighborhood a few days ago or yesterday or whenever they can get out there." She has in her hand, this officer has some, like, door hangers that we provide so that if people are afraid to open the door, they can leave it, and it has a phone number and information about what their purpose was for knocking and knocking on their door and checking on them. And we really encourage this because again, you want to show the community that they want to show the community that they care. So conducting welfare checks and follow-ups is important.

This is NIBIN, and I'll let Chief kind of respond to this. This is our ability to help the police uncover more evidence than they normally would find with, let's say, a shooting that occurred where it wasn't reported.

Chief: Sure. So NIBIN, National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, hopefully I got that right. So what that does is basically every gun, when it shoots off a bullet and the casing is ejected, the case for that bullet, that leaves basically a fingerprint for that gun. So whenever we respond to these calls in which gunfire has occurred and we canvass the area for spent casings, we collect those casings, we send those to the state DPS lab, which has a NIBIN machine, and that helps identify how many times or how many different incidents a particular gun is linked to. And so when we do recover that gun, we can tie that gun to X number of crimes and incidents.

Thank you. You did a far better job than I would. Okay, so yes, so just the increased evidence that can help solve crimes. And again, solvability can bring closure to victims who survive, closure to the victims' families, and that's important. And what I've seen, and what I've, when I've met with Albuquerque, I mean, they have an impressive, nearly 100% solvability with their gun-related crimes with ShotSpotter notifications. We also include as part of our service free training for the District Attorney's offices, prosecutors, attorneys, prosecuting attorney's offices, to leverage ShotSpotter in court. There is a way to play the audio and the visual of the shots being fired to corroborate their evidence in cases and to, again, maybe prove premeditated murder. There's been all kinds of cases over the years, over 300 that have been tried in court. We have people that will represent the police department if needed, so we offer expert witness testimony. And again, 23 states, we're court admissible. And we want to make sure that if you do with this program, that your prosecutors get trained. And we have a former District Attorney, a Deputy District Attorney out of Alameda County, which is Oakland. Oakland's a big ShotSpotter user, and she and a couple of others do the training.

And then we have forensic experts that have worked with us for years that, if for example, you have an officer-involved shooting or even a homicide, there's a detailed forensic report that we can provide as part of the service upon request. And it shows things like trajectory and the technology behind it, improving who shot first and things like that. So that's really important, it's just having the right intel. And we're court admissible, and that's an important piece of what we do.

A few more slides. I went, "Whoa!" I'm so proud of them. They are one of my customers and they went live in two areas, two square miles and one square mile that are not contiguous. And we use data to derive those coverage areas. They went live on Valentine's Day last year and they have had impressive results in such a small area. And within two months, they were able to produce these stats for their community, for the city council members, to say, "This is how many ShotSpotter alerts we had versus the number of corresponding, let's say, CAD events, computer-aided dispatch events, the number of casings they found." Again, they're tracking behind the scenes the response times and their ability to respond faster with ShotSpotter because we alert the police with exact intel within 30 to 60 seconds. 60 seconds is our service level guarantee, and often we're under 60 seconds. It's vetted and there's a process that we do, and I can show it to you, but I'm mindful that there are other presentations.

And then again, where they were able to save lives. So nine incidents where officers arrived quickly and they were able to apply tourniquets and get them to trauma centers, et cetera. So that's important, is being able to show your community that this can help save lives. Lancaster, California, they're another one that went live around the same time, and the mayor and chief and deputy chief has just been praising the fact that we are alerting their police department of incidents that they don't know about so that they can respond. This is a thank you card from one of our chiefs from West Columbia. They're about the size of Santa Fe, and it's a community member thanking him for putting in a program, ShotSpotter, that allows her to feel safer in taking her child to parks and such, and she feels safer knowing that it's there. Lastly, just helping the police department and community build a better relationship and support your outreach efforts. And that's it. Any questions?

Councilor Garcia: Wonderful, thank you so much. Really, really appreciate all the detail. Questions, comments from members of the committee? Councilor Garcia.

Councilor Garcia: Thank you, Madam Chair, and thank you for the presentation. I guess the big question in the room is, are we looking at implementing this, Chief? Where would we implement such technology?

Chief: Madam Chair, Councilor Garcia, yes, we are. And that's the two areas that we spoke about. Those are the areas that we are hoping to implement this technology.

Councilor Garcia: Okay, so can we pull up that map? Sir, I don't know who has it. So I just want us to make sure that we know that there's much more geographic area of the city versus what's represented in the two circled areas. And I'm completely supportive of implementing technology in the areas identified, but I think we also need to implement it across the city. And is there a way for us to understand how much it would cost ultimately to look at implementing such technology every mile, every half, something that way? It's not in those two areas because I mean, this circle to the right, I live there. I will 100% confirm that there are gunshots if not every day, every other day. Now, I know that these two areas identified are not the only areas in the city that have gunshots. And what I don't want to do is begin to target specific areas of our community. What I want us to do is ensure that every resident in our city feels safe knowing that there is such technology that can work to keep them safe. Because I mean, Chief, correct me if I'm wrong, crime happens all across the city. It doesn't happen in those circles. It doesn't happen solely on the Southside. It doesn't happen solely on Hopewell. Man, we've got crime being committed across our city at this moment.

Chief: Citywide and statewide.

Councilor Garcia: Okay, so I would like, I mean, I completely agree with, let's begin to implement technology in some of the identified areas, but we also need to begin to take that proactive approach and ensuring that residents know that there is going to be technology that is going to protect them, that should crime happen, we're going to be working to not only prevent but catch those offenders and hold them accountable. And that's the way we begin to make our community safer. So if I guess, Director Sanchez, how can we do that? Let's expand this circle and make that red circle the entire city of Santa Fe, not just those two areas.

Director Sanchez: Madam Chair, Councilor Garcia, there are a lot of questions you had there, so I'll try to...

Councilor Garcia: Sorry. Well, the big, big, I guess the biggest question is, how can we broaden that circle? Just what, what, what is, can, can some a plan be brought to us to not solely identify those areas, but begin to implement a citywide program that supports every single resident in the city?

Director Sanchez: Madam Chair, Councilor Garcia, we are actually using a state grant to pay for this project. It's a pilot project for one year, and we're using it in these two locations. I will say it's a very expensive program, so if I would love to implement it across the city, but I think if we see some gradual successes with this current pilot, we can expand it through additional grant funding from the state.

Councilor Garcia: Okay, so that one of the questions I had was cost, and I'm not going to say cost isn't an issue, but when it comes to protecting our residents, we can't let cost begin to say, "Well, we only have so much and we're going to put it in these areas." What happens is then crime is going to get driven to other parts of the city because we know that there's such technology in these areas, and these areas might become safer and other areas of the city become less safe. That's not what we want. We should begin to implement a system where you fire off gunshots, the technology is going to catch you, and ultimately Chief Joy and his team is going to catch up with you. And so if, if we can begin to investigate how to move beyond this circle, and I'm, I'm thankful we're beginning to look at some of the problematic areas, but I don't want us to stop there, and I don't want us to use cost as a justification because at the end of the day, I'm hearing from residents constantly about the crime and how unsafe their in our communities. And if this is going to help, this is the investment that the city needs to take utilizing taxpayer dollars. That's at the end of the day, that's what we're charged with, is ensuring the resident safety. So what, what, and I guess maybe this is a question, I don't know, Director Sanchez, who cost, let's, let's start talking dollar figures. What, what is this type of programming cost?

Director Sanchez: So, Madam Chair, Councilor Garcia, so our grant that we're going to bring forward to you in the next couple of weeks is a Department of Health grant in which we've, I think, set aside about $380,000 for this particular coverage of these two square mile areas. So we're getting two square miles for $380,000 for one year. Maybe you can help with the cost analysis, and I apologize, I forgot your name.

Terry Green: Terry Green. Yes, Green.

Councilor Garcia: So if you can help us and, and maybe this is something that can be, you can help Director Sanchez bring forth to us, is an analysis of what it would cost to implement such technology throughout the entire city utilizing a geographic placement system, that way we're not solely looking at this, we can, and, and that way residents aren't saying, "Well, why are you only putting up in my neighborhood and not the other neighborhoods?"

Terry Green: Madam Chair, Councilor Garcia, thank you so much. So it is, it's a per square mile flat rate, and everything I talked about tonight is included, the court admissible aspects and things like that. It is $75,000 per square mile, and it includes everything. And, okay, and, and it's, and so what most cities do is they start out, and I encourage this, to start out in the areas where you have your hottest areas because we don't want you to pay for coverage where you don't need it. I mean, in where I live, there's no gunfire, so it would be a waste of our city's money to, you know, pay for our city, the area I live in, to, to be covered. So we use analysis, again, data driven. And then what we found is that cities expand, maybe they get federal funding. I know Albuquerque started with just a small three square miles about four or five years ago. I've been here four years, and they've gradually grown it from federal funding and some state funding that they were able to garner. So like, to prove it, I mean, this proves itself quickly if you're putting it in an area where you have gun violence, and we've used data to determine that, and then grow it. I just had a city in LA that started with two square miles, and they went, they just covered their whole city, and it's about seven and a half total square miles, and they were able to secure federal funding to help them with that. So I, I would encourage you to start, prove that it works, show that your community that it works, and then, and then look at maybe adding it in areas where you might need it.

Councilor Garcia: No, I, I completely agree with that concept, but I think we should be working towards that end goal of having the hope that we can cover every square inch of the city of Santa Fe. And I think the investment to $75,000 per square mile is, if it works to save lives, it's money well invested. It works to make community members feel safe and neighborhoods more safe, it's money well invested. And so thank you for bringing this forward, Director Sanchez, I appreciate it because again, I hear the gunshots, but I know my neighborhood's not the only one impacted. I know neighborhoods that aren't identified on this map are hearing gunshots as well. And I want to ensure that those residents feel safe as well. So, I guess lastly, the technology, when we get to the, the details of being able to see who's firing shots, et cetera, that then might bring concern of residents of privacy violations. Can you speak to any of that, Terry, in regards to any privacy violations that residents might have had before, you know, as these, this type of technology was being implemented in their neighborhoods?

Terry Green: This is audio detection only, so there's no video unless you choose to have it integrated with videos. So for the most part, it's just detecting fire and leading the police toward gunfire occurred. So it's bridging that gap of 911. So, so yeah, and again, it's, it's triggered by loud impulses, and then there's a process by which we vet it. There's, it's almost like our own dispatch center where the, the sensors send a, a relay to two, one of two centers that we have nationwide, and our team looks at it at the, at the waveform pattern, the pattern that it makes, and determines that it's gunfire over anything else. Again, appends situational awareness for the officers and response, but as far as identifying who did it, that's actually not our job, but we provide the technology to help and that Nan system to help the police investigate and figure that.

Councilor Garcia: Okay, that's helpful, and it's my misunderstanding then. So we identify the location through the sound, we work with Chief Joy and his team to identify possible video that could have recorded the event, and as we've got some video of the event, so that's right. Okay, we don't sell video, so it all works in tandem. Okay. Um, last question I've got around this, and this is for Director Sanchez. Um, do we, a year goes by quick. How long does it take for this to be, this type of technology to be implemented? So I guess that's the question because before we know it, it's going to be February 2026, and that way the public is well aware of time frame. You had mentioned that the proposal is going to be...

Coming from in front of us, how soon after would technology begin to be implemented?

So it depends. We start your subscription from the time you go live, so we don't start it from when you sign. So what we do is if there's a grant, as an example, and you give the blessing to move forward, we can actually start the process at our own risk of putting in the sensors and getting permissions. Because we don't just put sensors up without gathering permissions. We tend to use tall buildings or government buildings first, or corporations, companies, light posts. And again, High doesn't pick up conversations. Again, it's triggered by loud impulsive sounds. And then we try to get it ready for you to go live pretty close to where we can formalize it. But an average is about a month per square mile. But often times, especially if you own your streetlights and we can leverage those or your street poles, we can get that done a lot sooner. So the worst case scenario is a month per square mile. And again, the ticker of the subscription starts from when you go live.

Okay, thank you. Thank you for that update. No other questions. Thank you for the presentation.

Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Counselor. Counselor Castro, just a few questions. Chief Joy, can you explain to us how many incidents would represent a green or a red in this map?

No, I didn't put the heat map together, so I wouldn't be able to tell you how many. Again, we use data, you know, the location data mostly and the type of incident that was reported from the computer data dispatch. So anything that was called into 911. And then of this data, we came back with the numbers that we came up with, a homicide, aggravated assault, and so forth. So these are sort of the numbers in those areas where it's red. So the numbers in the area where it's red would be possibly four. That was in one of the two square mile areas. Homicides.

Yes, I'm just looking. Could we go back to the map for a second at what these red areas represent in terms of volume of calls or incidents?

And that's that's pretty much derived here, dictated here. But what you're not seeing in this map is unreported data. So what you'll find is that there's a lot of non-fatal shootings, people shooting in the air and things.

I was getting there. Thank you so much, Ms. Green. But can we go back to the map for a second? Sorry, I just I want to get a sense of the volume because we previously heard that we're not getting a lot of calls because folks maybe feel that somebody else is going to call it in. So I want to get a sense in a city of 90,000 people, how many incidents would be reflected in red? So would it be your I we only saw four homicides. What would be representative of the amount of calls? I'm seeing dots. Are those individual calls?

Those are where the incidents occurred. Again, represented by the log on the next couple of slides. But again, this there was a stat that I showed that 80% go unreported in those areas. Right. So if you do implement this, I think you're going to find more guns are being fired than you know about.

Sure. I'm actually just trying to find out exactly how severe this problem is in relation to our population.

Madam Chair, Counselor Castro, if I'm reading this correctly, and I remember in talking with Terry, the quantity per area is actually reflected here. So you can see 33. If we look at, thank you, figure C, yes, in that area there were two homicides and that's actually represented on as a red little figure in the heat map of where those homicides occurred. The blue icon is actually aggravated assaults. So in that first section, there's 33% of the total that were aggravated assaults. The light blue is actually weapon law violations and there were a total of 36 within that area accounting for 29%. So the heat map is looking at that entire quantity, which is 54 incidences, which account for 24.5%, if that makes sense.

That makes sense. Thank you so much, Director. I really appreciate that. Now, Ms. Green, I'm really glad that in your community there's not gun violence, but for the rest of us that live in the real world, is there any way that we can make sure that specific communities are not targeted by this technology?

I'm sorry, would you like to answer this question? Counselor, can you let me hear that one again?

Sure. How are we making sure that this technology is not affecting specific segments of our population more than others?

Well, the whole point of the information here is that this is data driven. And so this isn't selected. I didn't, we're not just picking an arbitrary neighborhood. It's based on calls for service specific to gun violence in a particular neighborhood and area.

But it is your testimony that 80% of those calls are not not part of that database.

Well, that's the estimate from Ms. Green that in total 80% of gunshots go undetected. And as Counselor Garcia mentioned as well, and in my own experience in these community meetings, a lot of these calls, we know that a lot of these calls aren't being called in because people assume either somebody else is or they don't want to get involved.

Thank you. Ms. Green, to your knowledge, has there been any cities who have chosen to pull back from this technology?

Yes.

Which ones?

Chicago.

Any others?

Yes, we've had some pullback and then resign. Suffolk County, New York.

Anything in Arkansas?

I don't believe so.

Okay. I would really love if you, the governing body, could, because all of us are going to be voting on this, get a report of best practices and maybe some adverse reactions from cities after they have had the technology. Thank you. No further questions.

Thank you, Counselor. Any other questions, comments, members of the committee? Counselor Travis, do you have anything? One, I will go ahead and Counselor Travis, if you do have something, please do let me know. Thank you. Thank you. So a couple, a couple questions. So when I'm thinking about, you know, some of the benefits you're talking about being able to identify victims faster, I'm curious if there's, you know, we have our fire department that's our EMS and they also run our ambulances. Is there any possibility that, well, first of all, let me actually scroll back. So the mechanism by which there is an alert to police, would that go directly to our police department? Would it go to RECC? Chief, this might be a question for you of what this would start to look like.

Madam Chair, the plan is for it to go to both. So it would go directly to our officers in their in-car units and it would also flag for RECC so the call for service gets created, but it also gives us that direct notification.

And is there any conversation around the direct notification going to fire so that we could potentially get the EMS over as soon as possible?

I kind of defer that to Ms. Green as far as past practice and other how it's being utilized in other agencies and cities, but I'm I'd be perfectly all for it.

Ms. Green, have you seen that occur in other communities?

Generally, it goes to dispatch and police at the same time. And the reason is is dispatch might still be on the call if if there is a 911 call getting information, whereas we can alert police and this is going to be a procedural directive directed by the chief here to say if he if the officers can get it at the same time, they can start rolling towards the incident. And then again, have it go. I mean, if if you wanted EMS to be notified, it's it's certainly possible. It's it's really up to the police department and how they want to control the alerts and who gets them.

Okay. And I would imagine fire that works well for their their workflow, which I am unfamiliar with, but you all would know better. And then I I was curious about when Albuquerque Police Department when they're doing the follow-ups, I I would imagine that as you mentioned, there's door hangers because sometimes people like, why is a police officer knocking on my door? I'm not going to answer. And we have really worked hard to identify other professionals that might be better trained. So caseworkers, social workers, if we're dealing with, you know, the trauma, if we're dealing with the the after effects that are more of the emotional and psychological, have you seen communities that have utilized other professionals as opposed to police? I mean, and also, you know, we talk about how our police are pretty stretched thin. You know, this is one of our big challenges. And so so I would be wary to to also put that where I also believe it may be something that could be better utilized or better performed by another professional service, if that makes sense.

Madam Chair, that's a great question. That's something that as we develop this program, I think once our pilot program takes off, would probably be taken on in partnership with PD to do more community outreach.

Okay, thank you.

Madam Chair, one more thing to answer your question. Yes, we absolutely have cities that use community resource officers, school resource officers, and other types of in fact, some some cities have pastor-led groups. So they go out and determine, you know, where gunfire occurred to try to find the the families of victims and offer offer services that way. So in that part of the community engagement that we bring with it, we have two people that represent that division and they'll do presentations and train and and kind of share those best practices with the community outreach groups as well.

Okay, thank you. And then I I don't believe this has been covered. I apologize if it has. Data ownership. That's always one of my favorite topics. Who owns this data? What is done with it? When is it disposed of? Obviously, as you mentioned, some of this may be utilized in, you know, prosecution, in which case that can can last a really long time. But but control of that data and and who has access to it is something that I'm always very concerned with with any technology. So can you please give me more information about that?

Sure. And and it is controlled by us. However, you have full access to the data. So it's it's hosted securely and and again, the ability to query that data at any time is is the police department's capability. All of that is also defined in our Master Services Agreement, which I can provide the specifics for you to review.

And does anybody else have access to that data?

No. Just yeah, no, you those who are set up as users by the police department administrator of our system.

And is there a destruction process procedure that's put in place?

Retention rate and we can discuss that as part of the agreement if you if you move forward.

Okay, thank you. I appreciate that.

Sure.

I I don't think I have any other questions at this time. I you know, I think this is a really interesting really interesting project and I I definitely understand Counselor Garcia with the comment around, you know, when we look at at the wider, you know, issues of the community that there is not just one area. So I I would be interested to see how this pilot is, you know, with the success rate of it, what it does start to look like in the community. So back to actually that I'm not sure if if this direct question got addressed, but Counselor Garcia had mentioned something about concern of, you know, does this ever do we ever see violence increase in other areas if there is technology utilized in a specific area? Do we see kind of that push out or not? Is that not something you've experienced personally?

No, I I would have to run some. Sorry, Madam Chair. Don't worry about it. I would have to talk to my team to see where that may have occurred. There is a term and I think I think you're familiar with it. It focused deterrence, you know, putting it in an area where people know that it's there. And I think a council member Garcia mentioned it, you know, if you know it's there, you're not less likely to.

to commit crime, doesn't it? We haven't really seen it move too much, but we have seen a decrease sometimes because of that. But yeah, I would have to provide. I know that I cover the west and I haven't really seen that within my own agency customers. Yeah, it's a really interesting concept because it's the concept around, is crime driven by, you know, are these things driven by the desire to do these anywhere that they can, or are they location-driven? You know, what is going on within a certain area that might pull an individual there? So it is a really interesting question about why an individual will go to a specific area to potentially utilize gun violence and how that might change per individual. And would that individual then say, "Hey, there's cameras here, I'm going to go over here." So it's a fascinating question as to the root causes of why we're seeing this occurring.

So if you do have any more information on that, I would be really, really curious to hear about that.

Madam Chair: The data that we provide behind the scenes can help you determine that too if you decide to move forward with this. So we can help you run those analyses to see what happened prior to ShotSpotter and after, and see what's going on in your city. We'll be happy to provide those analyses like we did for the one that you saw.

Wonderful. And this would, I guess, would be a question for Chief and/or Director Sanchez. In terms of when we would potentially have a contract that we would be reviewing, what is the timeframe that you all are looking at at this moment?

Madam Chair: That is to be determined by our city process.

No problem. Yeah, I understand that takes a while. Okay. Well, I have no further questions at this time. Thank you again. This is, you know, really interesting. I look forward to actually digging into a lot more of the information from other cities and I'll reach out to both of you when if I have any additional questions of things that I want to explore. So thank you and thank you, Ms. Green, for being here. Really appreciate it so much.

Okay, moving along. We have one item pulled from consent. It's a request for approval of a Professional Services contract with Santa Fe Public Schools for the continuation of the work-based learning internship program utilizing one-time funding in the total amount of $1,200,000 for a four-year term. We have Lizzie Portillo, our Economic Development Specialist here, and Johanna Nelson, our Director of the Office of Economic Development. Counselor Chavez, you had pulled this for recusal. Would you like to go ahead and do that?

Yes, I'm going to recuse myself from this item because I'm employed by Santa Fe Public Schools.

Thank you, Counselor. In the past, when we've been on Zoom, we had you log off, and so I'll text you to log back in. And just for our technical support, be aware that she'll be popping back in and we'll need to promote her back to panelist. Did anybody else have any other questions? Counselor Castro actually also pulled this item. Yes, go ahead.

Ready for me? Perfect. So offline, I actually got to talk to staff a little bit about my concerns with this program, and I believe that it will be going to relevant subcommittees for input. But I just, I think it's a great program and I hope that we can work through some of the barriers that we have for some of our students.

Okay, any other questions or comments at this time?

To approve.

Second.

Motion and a second. May I please have a roll call?

Councilor Castro? Yes. Councilor Garcia? Yes. Councilor Faulkner? Yes. Madam Chair? Yes. Passing.

Wonderful. Thank you so much. Let me text. Okay, we have Counselor Travis coming back on. While we are waiting for her, I will go ahead and read us into our next item. So we have on discussion a consideration of Bill number 2024-18, adoption of Ordinance number 2025-D, to be determined. Counselor, sponsored by Councilor Amanda Travis, Councilor Parra Faulkner, and Councilor Lee Garcia. It's a bill relating to City Administration, amending Section 2-8 SFCC 1987 to change the title from Community Health and Safety Department to Health and Human Services Department, remove the Police Department and the Fire Department from that section, and create two new sections, 28.8 and 28.9, for the Police Department and Fire Department respectively. We have Marcy Yglesias, our Legislation and Policy Innovation Manager, as well as representatives from our various departments here. Oh, perfect timing, Councilor Chavez. I will go ahead before starting and give Councilor Travis and Councilor Faulkner the opportunity to speak to this as they are the sponsor. So I will pass it over to either of you.

The premise of this legislation, what had concerns around the fact that three of our critical departments that are facing having to contend with the homeless issue and crime and a range of Human Services issues were all being housed under one umbrella that then I feel as an organizational development consultant or professional that that was causing undue competition between the departments. And that I also feel like the culture of the Police Department and the Fire Department is different than the culture of a Health and Human Services Department. And I think if by separating them, we're going to give all three of those departments the ability to grow the way they need to grow, especially the what would be the new Health and Human Services Department. So we were really kind of giving these departments some breathing room to do the jobs that they need to do that are the most critical jobs that they need to do. And so my experience as a professional in this field is that the way it's organized now may have been working before we hit crises, but now that we're in crisis, we need to be agile and flexible and give these departments the breathing room they need.

Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Travis, anything to add?

Yes, thank you, Chair, and Councilor Faulkner. I do think that the separation of the departments will increase efficiency. I also think that there are some major priorities and expectations by our community in these areas. And right now, I think there's a lot of blurring of funds and blurring of resources to try to meet these needs. I believe that departments could collaborate. I think as a city, that's what needs to occur, but I don't think that being under the same umbrella when there is a range of needs that have to meet is appropriate. I think that they could collaborate successfully as separate departments so they are well-resourced, so they can set clear expectations and understanding of their role within our community, and that's clear to the community. I also think that it helps with just the chain of command in regards to responding to an emergency. That's a big piece for me, but honestly, budgeting is a big piece for me too. I think that it's kind of unclear to me why things are budgeted a certain way under all three of those areas as there's a lot of, like I said, blurred lines in funds. And I think that that might be having a negative impact on police and fire, or even on our community department. So I think really separating them, identifying their needs and the community needs and how they need to meet them, and funding more appropriately as separate entities is going to be much more effective. And I think it's going to benefit not only the staff within the departments, but it's going to benefit the community more so and how they're resourced to meet needs. So I think it's just something that is going to just make our organization run more effectively, especially in those three critical areas.

Thank you. Thank you, Councilor. To the committee, questions or comments from members of the committee at this time? Councilor Garcia.

Thank you, Madam Chair. No questions, just I 100% support this proposal. When the city reorganized back in 2020, this was a big reason why I did not vote in support of that reorganization solely because it created that additional layer of bureaucracy between our first responders and the ultimate decision-makers. And in those time of crisis, you don't need extra bureaucracy. And so with that being said, I fully support this. I do want us to begin to explore also extracting Emergency Management as well and have them autonomously work like fire and police as well because we don't need bureaucracy stopping helping people in crisis situations. So with that, thank you to the sponsors for bringing this forward.

Thank you, Councilor. Councilor Castro.

Yeah, just really quickly, I do stand in opposition to this legislation. I think that this undoes a lot of the work that former counselors had done. I think it was done far too quickly. Point being that Community Health and Safety does include Emergency Management still, who technically works very closely with fire in particular and with PD. I find this to be a way to sort of remove formally some supervision that was there with the position of Community Health and Safety. We have been acting without that supervision for over a year and a half without passing this resolution. In my opinion, we're out of compliance. So yeah, I stand in opposition to this.

Thank you. Thank you, Councilor. I have some questions. I, you know, I'm actually, I think what I'm trying to figure out here, what is the problem that we're trying to solve and are we solving it? So I do want to reference budget, and this is more of a general comment that I think the issues with budgeting are not our organizational structure, but our budgeting process. And I think that we do have a really big issue with our budgeting process. And I think that the opaqueness of the budgeting process is something that we see regardless of whether or not we have these stacked departments. So I understand that there is some conversation around the way that that gets filtered up, but I would just say that I think that we are seeing, we see an issue from what we see as a council, as a finance committee, as a finance committee member, of not understanding where, as I always say, we don't know what was left on the cutting room floor. We don't, we don't get information as to what were the different priorities of the various departments and how are those priorities chosen. I think that that is really important because I don't think that this, you know, regardless of what we do with this, if this is going to fit, that this would fix some of our issues with budgeting. And it is something that we need to continue to look at because our budgeting process is not as, it's not as open to the council and the community as we'd like it to be. And I don't think that the council has as much flexibility within it. So I just want to make that comment. In terms of Emergency Management not coming over, I am curious as to that decision or not being pulled out. So Emergency Management right now kind of seems like it's kind of just hanging out in what would be the future Health and Human Services Department. It is more of a public safety department from my understanding. So I maybe one of the sponsors, if you guys might have any information around why that decision was made.

So we could have run several pieces of legislation in a bundle, but because of our legislative drafting process, we can't bundle our legislation. So this is just step one in a series of pieces of legislation that are going to address Emergency Management, risk management, address how community, the new Health and Human Services Department would look like, code enforcement. There's a whole range of things that need to be fixed in the opinion of the sponsors of the pieces of legislation. And so this is not the final step. This is actually just the first step. And so my

Experience around policy is the more complicated you make legislation, the harder it is for the community to understand it, for the council to understand it, debate you can have over it. And so taking simpler baby steps was the strategy that we chose to take. Okay, yeah, I appreciate the, and I understand, you know, and we've talked about other departments in the city that I have taken some issue with. Coming for you, sorry, there's kids. I just wanted to add, I have a bunch of kids and a sick kid and an injured kid. I just wanted to emphasize that, yes, there's work I think, Counselor Paez and Counselor Garcia, and I, Counselor Lee Garcia and I, are still focused on. And I think it's really just how do we, and this is, I'm not going to speak for them, but for me, I feel like the way we're organized actually makes it so some of our departments are stretched really thin because we allow so much for, or for roles to be blurred. So it does, it's not collaboration, it becomes confusion, and it becomes a lack of efficiency, and it becomes us not utilizing our resources the best way. So I think that this first step in reorganization is to address that. But there's so much more that needs to be done. So I just wanted to stress my reasoning behind this piece, but also the pieces that we have coming forward in the future.

So specifically when we're looking at role definition, what roles and what activities do you, I mean, is it imagined that would not be under the purview of police and/or fire in this scenario? And you know, where do those live? Because that's one that I'm still, I'm also not sure that I understand because I do believe that when we, you know, deal with things like homelessness, that does hit a variety of different departments in a variety of different ways. Now we've also seen this done in different, you know, mechanisms by which the city manager identifies issues in the different departments that need to be working within, you know, those specific issues and bringing them together. So I'm not saying that, you know, if the departments are separated that no collaboration occurs, but what is the sponsor's vision for what would not be happening within those departments and who's going to be picking that, picking that up?

So the way that we're moving forward is that once we move these departments out, then we can focus on what's happening in each of those departments that is taking up more of a bandwidth than it should for their critical duties. So like nuisance stuff, dog catching, doing the speed cameras and the mufflers, the noise cameras, all of these things that are kind of nuisance level things that would be better housed in code enforcement. And so the next step is to work with Health and Human Services to get their department lined up in a way that they want it lined up in. And then at the same time, work on code enforcement and creating that department. And I know that's a lot of people wanted the code enforcement department, and that way we can free these guys up to do the jobs that they are meant to be doing. They deal with a lot of nuisance stuff that could be better housed and better managed someplace else. And so I wouldn't mind having the chiefs or the departments come up and speak to this because I've taken a lot of time to speak to fire, police, and to the community health and safety departments and some of their, the people in those under that department. And my understanding is the general consensus is they all feel like we ask them continually what they need from us, and they are telling us very clearly this is something they need. And so I just would like to hear from them and give them the opportunity to express why this legislation might be helpful.

Yeah, I would, I would appreciate it because I think my challenge that I'm running into here is again, what are the problems are we trying to solve and does this legislation solve it? And I'm seeing a disconnect there because standing up a code enforcement department, you know, that could happen under our current structure. So it doesn't mean that this structure would be, is somehow preventing it. My mic got really close there. You know, as well as, you know, the idea that our departments are stretched really thin, that's not, that's not a new story or that's not unique to this department. So I just, I think that's where I'm really struggling and maybe chiefs, you might be able to enlighten me a little bit about how you think that this would improve the efficiency of the departments, as well as, you know, make sure that we are still meeting all of these really important needs at the time being because we can't drop them. So, you know, it's not like all of a sudden you go out and we're going to have a nuisance over to somewhere else.

Chair: Can I just add something before they speak? I just want to, is that okay?

Yeah, absolutely. I just want to bring your example of homelessness. This is a perfect example to me of a blurred line because police and fire are under this department. We assume it's naturally their responsibility more so than any other department, which may not be the case. They have consumed a lot of that responsibility and sometimes they have to. Sometimes there is public safety or sometimes there are things that tie them in directly, but that's a very blurred line that our community assumes that police and fire are more so responsible for homelessness than anyone else in the city. To me, that's not the case. That is a very clear, false, I should say, false and unclear reality, but it's how it's presented because of the fact that they've been put under this department and have been really emphasized as the people responsible for this issue that needs to be addressed. They are not the only ones that are responsible for that, that issue. So that is something that, yeah, they could serve as a partner in collaborating where them entering into that collaboration, the expectation and addressing that issue is much more clearer than what it is now. And I think your, so your example of homelessness is to me the perfect example of how that role is very blurred and the image to the community, community members is not necessarily the truth and how we kind of all work together and whose responsibility it is to address certain really important issues that we're seeing as a city.

Thank you, Counselor. Although I would respectfully, disrespectfully disagree because I believe part of the reason that we did do this, this collaboration was because of the amount of resources that were already coming from police and fire for homelessness because when you call in an emergency situation, if you call 911 because you have an individual that is, that is violent or that is, you know, unresponsive, you know, we're not sending out community services. We're not going to send out community services. This is the concept of the ARU. Where I would agree is I think that, that, you know, this conversation around the roles, who's, whose responsibility is it for prevention and who's busy with, you know, dealing with some of those really emergent Band-Aids. So I'm sorry, Chiefs, we, we veered off, but back to you.

I'll kick this off, Madam Chair, just real quick. I, Community Health and Safety is on the line and I'll be happy to speak as well. Thank you so much, Henry. I appreciate it. Or Director Hammond Paul, sorry. So I, I've been fortunate to, I'll start with this, everything that Counselor Garcia said and Counselor Chavez said and Counselor Vounte, I, I really couldn't say it better than, than what they've already expressed. I've been fortunate to be a chief now under both systems here and what I can say is from my personal experience as far as, and everyone knows I'm a fan of efficiency and trying to get things done well and get them done right and get them done as quickly as we can, get that done, all the things. From my perspective, things have been more efficient and smoother and, and overall better for us under this current situation where I don't have that extra, and I start too, I, I love Kira and the people who could have been in that position. I don't think there's anybody who could have done it better than, than what she, she dealt with and, and the way she had to run things and all the things that she was tasked with. When we talk about capacity and being stretched thin, I, she's not here obviously to speak for herself, but I got to watch it firsthand. She was stretched thin because police and fire take up so much of that capacity for the department and there were so many things that she was also directed to deal with and handle and address homelessness and take care of all these other social service systems. But we, our two departments take up so much capacity and, and whenever there's a major event, we're it. We, you know, we're the ones that take all, all the attention, which also takes her attention. And in a role where we, law enforcement is not the best department to be dealing with homelessness. The fire department is not the best department to be dealing with homelessness. We handled these calls because there hasn't been anyone to appropriately address these issues beforehand. I think Mr. Hammond Paul, since he's taken over in his role, working collaboratively with us where he can say, hey, are you guys, what's your, what's your data show? What are you guys dealing with? We can send that over to him. That, that's been allowing him hopefully to focus more on the things that he needs to focus on rather than, hey, Joy, what are you doing about X crime in X area? That's, that's for public safety. That's for the city manager. That's for me to deal with with you all. What I saw a lot firsthand was I would get an inquiry from Director AOA, I'd respond to Director AOA, and then I'd get an inquiry from, from City Blair or from Mayor or sometimes from a counselor with the same thing where, again, my, my interest is doing it well and doing it right and doing it done best the first time.

Madam Chair, members of the committee, I think we've been fortunate to be able to run under both systems. We've had a director of AOA and then we've been able to, over the last multiple months, 12 months or so, to be independent and run a little differently and be able to see how both of those systems kind of work. And fortunately, we're able to see that being able to be independent and be able to go directly to the city manager, the mayor, to the council with, with different issues as they arise has been way more efficient for us. Been able to collaborate between all the departments currently. Just in the last month, we've, we've been collaborating on code blue activations and stuff like that and we've seen a way more efficient response being able to do that over this last month. And so the efficiency of, of how we're currently running just has proven to us that it is a better system and, and working together and we've been able to collaborate better together instead of trying to go through another third-party entity and to be able to get all our pieces in a row. We're, we're able to collaborate directly one with another on all these different projects that we're working on.

Thank you, Director Hammond Paul. Do you have anything to add to this part of the conversation at this moment in time?

I do. Thank you, Madam Chair, counselors. And I apologize for not being there in person and not being on video, but definitely here. Can you all hear me okay?

Yes, we can. Thank you.

I guess I would start by saying, I, I come at this with some bonafides. I'm an emergency management professional and prior to taking this role, that's where I'd spent most of my career managing large crises, multiple jurisdictions, both in the private sector, at state level and in the humanitarian sector internationally. So I come at this with, you know,

With some perspective and experience, I would quickly say that I think homelessness might be the wrong thing for us to be pointing to as an example because it is by definition multisectoral. It's a best practice nationally to have a coordinated response, often led by emergency management professionals with support from groups like housing experts, case outreach experts, and public health experts. So I hope that an outcome of this is not to detract from the national best practice of having a coordinated response and engagement when it comes to homelessness.

I think my biggest perspective on this is less about the specifics of this legislation, but instead emphasizing the importance of flexibility in organizational structure. As a department head, I understand the need for city departments to evolve in response to changing needs, priorities, and challenges. I think that maintaining flexibility in how departments are structured allows leadership to adapt as necessary. From an operational perspective, needing to reorganize through a very overly or a very belabored kind of legislative process makes the operational side of things quite difficult. I think that's kind of testament to what some of the chiefs have been saying earlier. So, I'm flagging a risk for overly rigid legislation, which just doesn't let us react to moments in time that are necessary and when things change.

I think we need adaptability in the public safety and human services space. Public safety, health, and human services are all interconnected fields that require cross-departmental collaboration. So I want to make sure that as we continue this conversation, we are talking about how we improve coordination and collaboration rather than silo it. I don't believe that that is a necessary function; there are necessarily reporting structures. It's more of a muscle that you build between departments to collaborate. So, I've been neutral on the proposed change with the exception of, I think that as a government, we should be trying to maintain flexibility in how we can reorganize. In the hypothetical that homelessness is able to be addressed in a handful of years effectively, we can then repurpose certain parts of a division to be better served for the public and making sure that we have the nimbleness to react to leadership or administration changes.

I would lastly say that I think some of what we're talking about is actually about management and not necessarily organizational structure. I don't think organizational structure is necessarily the solve for lack of coordination or poor coordination. I think as we've seen in our current structure, where fire and police aren't reporting into community health and safety, we've actually improved coordination in some instances, such as Code Blue, implementing just good management practices, again, not based on organizational structure. So I would encourage us to think of how legislation impacts management principles as opposed to necessarily only thinking about the organizational structure at hand. Again, I think my last point is just that the key challenge is ensuring effective coordination and leadership regardless of where departments are placed within the org chart.

Mayor: Thank you so much, Dr. Hammond-Paul. I think you bring up a really good point about one of the challenges that we run into as a council, where the day-to-day operations power lies. In the sense that we actually don't necessarily, you know, we do have legislation that does talk about the overall goals and responsibilities of each department, but when push comes to shove, excuse me, the city manager is the one that is responsible for a lot of the day-to-day operations of pulling on different teams to different initiatives. That oversight for that lies with the city manager. So one thing that I would ask, and I understand that you are in favor of this legislation, and I'm asking you in order to figure out, you know, were there advantages to the current structure that potentially could be lost, and how could we mitigate those losses if we do move forward and approve this?

Okay, I'm trying to guess what the current structure would be. Not the current structure, because the current structure is that we, as it was, no. I've told other folks before, I try to do my best to not weigh in as far as like, I want this or I don't want this, as far as when it comes to speaking with you all. My interest is only, and this is why I went back to, I've been fortunate to work under both systems now, and I can say that as far as the efficiency of my department, I can't speak of fire now, things are functionally better. So as far as what would be lost, I can't think of anything that we wouldn't be doing that we aren't, because currently as it is now, we don't have a director in place over us, right? So we're just, I'm arguing with myself, but to short answer with all my rambling is no, I can't think of anything that would be lost from the PD side.

Madam Chair, members of the community, I think that is a tough question. What I think that could be a possible loss, as I'm just thinking about this over in my head, is we could lose a possible another advocate for us when we're doing things right. But at the same time, we're able to advocate for ourselves for our main priorities and for what we're trying to accomplish when it comes to our goals and initiatives that we're trying to put in place too. So I don't think it would be a true loss, but it would just give us, I think we'd still have that advocate there for us in that other department with Human Services. I think they would still advocate for some of the things that we would try to do anyways. So I don't think that would be a true loss, but that was the only thing that I could come up with in my thoughts.

Thank you. I do appreciate that, Chief. Unfortunately, Chief Joy, excuse me, Director Sanchez is not here. But the work that has happened between police and Youth and Family Services, is that something that would have occurred anyway, do you believe?

Madam Chair, I believe it would have. I think I'm very fortunate that Director Hammond-Paul is in his position. I'm very fortunate that Director Salar is in, or D. Sanchez, rather. Yeah, I was going to get there, working through my rolodex in my head. No, short answer again, yes. I think the right people are in the right positions. I think we all work very well together. In as much as Director Sanchez liked to say it was a collaborative effort, her team has done the heavy lifting with getting these grants and the work that we got to do the presentations for you off the ground. So absolutely, I think the collaboration is going to happen regardless because the right people are there.

Hey, thank you. I appreciate that. Yeah, this, you know, this, I think what's been tough about this is again, I'm, you know, I'm not on the ground internally. So when I'm hearing kind of some of these conversations around again, what problem are we trying to solve and does this solve it? It seems to be pretty nuanced, is what I'm hearing. Now, I will say one thing that you did say that made me think that this might be a good direction to go in is the role of the Community Health and Safety Director. This has been one of my concerns around these mega departments is the directors at the head are not able to focus as much on their area of expertise. We have seen that, I think, throughout our departments that, you know, they're wearing too many hats, and that has not allowed for them to really have that innovative problem-solving component that we would like to see from a lot of these individuals that we have in charge because they have their area of expertise, and we're trying to put them in charge of other things, and that doesn't always work out well. So I actually, I really appreciate you bringing that up because I think that when we are talking about efficiencies and how we best utilize our staff, there are some areas where we have lost, I think, the effectiveness of some of those individuals that got popped up to some of those mega director positions. It's really, it's really confusing that we have departments over departments. You know, we should have, we should have made bureaus or divisions, but too late now. So thank you for bringing that up. That's a really interesting conversation. Marcel Henry has his hand up.

Oh, Director Hammond-Paul, did you have something to add?

Oh, I was just, I wanted to kind of play the, or complement what the chiefs had said. I obviously haven't been here long enough to have the experience of how things were run under the previous iteration of these things. That said, you know, I think you asked what had worked well or what are the risks, and I believe the fire chief, or the representative from the fire department, said something to the effect of needing an advocate in all the departments. I would say that, again, I think homelessness is, I don't want this to be just about homelessness because I think that is a multisectoral, multi-departmental responsibility. But needing that the law enforcement and fire department understand and embrace the support that's needed for Human Services as well. So making that as like co-equals and part of the discussion of how you actually have a robust, you know, service for individuals in the community, a set of services for individuals in the community. Again, I don't think that that is dictated by organizational structure. I think that's dictated through coordination mechanisms and leadership and management.

Thank you, Director. I appreciate that. Okay, I don't think I have any additional questions at this moment in time. I appreciate it. I'm, I guess I'm, I'm fine with trying this structure out again because, you know, I'm seeing from what I'm hearing from the people on the ground, and again, I don't know what your lives look like every single day, and actually hearing from Director Hammond-Paul on, on, you know, how the coordination has been able to work. I don't think that I'm seeing a negative to making this change at this time. However, my concern is that, you know, the vision of the Community Health and Safety Department as it, as it was, really had to do with this idea of, you know, there, there's such an interconnection. I mean, and we saw it today with the, with the presentation with you and Director Sanchez about the, the intersection of a lot of these community services and how that works along this spectrum of public safety, of criminal justice, of broader public health. You know, this is why recreation was popped over into Community Services, is this idea that if we, you know, have opportunities for people to beneficially spend their time, if they're youth, or, you know, stay healthy, that we are less likely to have, you know, a call for a violent act committed by a 17-year-old, or less likely for somebody to, you know, be called in for a heart attack at, you know, 55. So, I do, I do agree though with Director Hammond-Paul that there is this aspect of management that's, that does become the question of how the city manager is able to do these, and I guess what's happening right now is this feeling of like giving up the power to make those things happen. But, but that potentially is a good thing if it actually means.

and that things are going to be functioning more appropriately. At some point, we have to trust our City Manager or boot them. With that, I will yield the floor.

Councilor Castro: Yes, thank you, Chair. I just have a couple more questions since I have Chiefs up here. I will start with Fire. Is there any reason in particular the ARU was not moved out of Fire into Community Health and Safety, being that we are having the discussion around the in-house community?

Chief: Yes, Madam Chair, members of the committee. I think it's important for us to establish a structure of the umbrella first before getting into all the little details of how that department will run in the future. Establishing a set structure first is really important before jumping the gun and moving ahead and running before you can actually run.

I'll offer the sponsors the same opportunity to answer that question.

Councilor: My part, again, looking at working legislation, moving the ARU units out would have to involve some bars, possibly some financial things that were more complicated. So, in talking to the Fire Chief, we felt that its first best move is to move the departments out and then address the more complicated things that we have to address. We can't do it all in one piece of legislation.

Councilor: I actually want to add to that one because I've had some conversations with one of our EMS captains about this because it does make sense. However, there are some challenges when it comes to, I believe, pensions with Fire, and where EMS has already been, there are some issues with HIPAA, with insurance, with areas that Fire is already set up to deal with that Community Services does not have the ability to do, to take those at this time. That said, I know that there has been some conversations statewide around this issue and how that potentially could open up an opportunity if we do decide that Miho as a whole and the ARU are better aligned with Community Health and Safety. But at this moment, they couldn't quite function due to some other regulations that are not of our power to change. And I apologize that I'm forcing all of my colleagues to answer questions that we've talked about before. This is sort of for the benefit of the public because we are having these conversations offline.

And Chief Joy, the last question I'm going to have for you today is around accountability. So my biggest hesitation around the move away from Community Health and Safety was sort of the relationship with PD and community in particular, the increase in use of force. Can you address that, please?

Chief Joy: Okay, specific to use of force, just accountability. So there was a perception or an idea that under Community Health and Safety, there would be a better relationship with PD and maybe some reporting. Is there any way that we can continue to be clear with our community and report back on some of these incidents?

Chief Joy: Yeah, so Councilor Ker, our reporting to the community with regard to use of force has not changed prior to being under Director AOA and since being independent, I guess, from that. We do our annual, what do you say, our every year, our end-of-year report. We're putting together 2024 as we are now. I haven't seen how we did as far from 2024 to 2023 yet. So that was a 74% increase. That was an increase in 2023, which we saw. Yeah, so that's 2022, 21 to 23. And as I said, when I interacted with the media, what did we see? We saw that more people were fighting with our officers, more people were running, more people were actively resisting. We have several levels of checks when we do a use of force. It's we do a first initial supervisor evaluation that goes through their chain of command. We have also a use of force committee that reviews quarterly all uses of force in any given quarter. Those can also be requested more immediately if there's a supervisor who is in any way unsure or has a specific concern. There's also Internal Affairs who sits on the committee. We have our use of force instructors and defensive tactic instructors who sit on the committee. All of those make sure that they identify was it used appropriately, was it within policy, was it in compliance with state law? Anytime there's it's identified that there is a violation, was there corrective action done? What was the level of corrective action? Was it an officer issue or is it a training issue that needs to be addressed? These are all things that are done for every use of force throughout the department.

Councilor: And I hesitate to believe media, but there was some sense that feeling from officers and maybe we have a few new officers on the force that could have been a contributing factor. So I will just say that I would love to continue to work with Chief Joy on ways that we can report to our community that is functional for everyone. Thank you.

Chair: Thank you, Councilor. Any other comments or questions at this time?

Councilor: I'd just like to reiterate what Director Hammond Paul said. I know that we're requesting to move Police and Fire out from under the Community Health and Safety Department. That is, I do feel like structurally that needs to happen, but I do agree with him that the belief that forcing people into one umbrella was then going to force them into collaborating is folly. That is absolutely a leadership decision. That's how managers are trained. That's how they choose to interact with each other. You can't force people to work together with structure.

Chair: Yeah, thank you. Thank you, Councilor. You know, I would just add to, to, you know, the Councilor Castro said around undoing the work of previous councils. Having been one of the people that was sitting on this dais when we did go ahead and pass the reorg, I think it's important for us to be able to look at things that we did and say this didn't quite work the way that we thought it would and be willing to let go of it. I mean, I think this is something we don't do very well in government, is say, "Oops, not quite, didn't quite hit the mark." And what worries me is that that means that we are less likely to take chances on things because we're kind of trained that we're not allowed to make mistakes and heaven forbid we do something wrong. But I think that it actually does us a lot more damage.

Councilor: So I just say one other, sure. The reality is, I don't think that we need to look at this as the council who put this structure in place was doing anything wrong or made a mistake. We are in a different place as a city that probably would have worked had we not faced some of the things we're facing right now. So I, as a new councilor, I don't want any of the members of the council or the executive branch to feel at all like we were viewing this as sponsors, as the city made a mistake or any councilors made a mistake. I just feel like again, we, exactly what you're saying, it's not a mistake when you have to change how you, how you do things if you have to change things in response to a changing environment.

Chair: I appreciate that generosity from myself. I'm like, "Whoops, we made a mistake." But, you know, that, that's my own vote that I can.

Councilor: And I also, if I could add, Chair, I also don't think it's like undoing work of councilors. I think it's responding to like Councilor P. Faulkner said, responding to like the evolution of change that we experience in human nature. If we don't do the un, or undo the work of those before us, and I wouldn't say undo, I would say evolve from, then we're not going to respond to the differing change that our community faces year after year, depending on the environment they live in, depending on the political environment we're living in. It's just, it's how a city should function and how leaders should respond to need is that evolution. You know, we're responding to a need for change and doing that appropriately.

Chair: You guys are giving me a lot of pushback for me saying why I'm voting for your bill. Just kidding. But I do appreciate that and I, I think that that also is, you know, we can't, we can't be so tied to what we've done in the past. I, I personally do not think that this worked the way that I had envisioned when we voted in favor of this. And so that's why I'm not afraid to, to, to unravel this piece. I do think that we do still need to look at some of the goals that we had and even if this did not achieve it, whether because it wasn't ever going to be successful because the world changed, it doesn't matter. But we still need to be focusing on how we continue to move in those directions. I think actually the conversation on budget is, is perfect because I really, I don't think this is going to fix our budget issues that we see as a council. And so we should continue to, to really work on it. Now, maybe it'll make things easier for you guys, and that, that would be great. But I understand this will be a continuing conversation. But, you know, I'm, I'm willing to try this at this time because, you know, I don't think that that what I was hoping to see quite occurred and it sounds like there are other mechanisms by which those things that did come out of it could continue. But that some of the day-to-day operations potentially are going to be a bit smoother.

Director Hammond Paul: Thank you. Thank you, Madam Chair, Councilors. I think Director Brian Williams from the Office of Emergency Management is also on the line. And I don't know if he had anything to contribute, but I will say that as an emergency management professional and having worked in multiple jurisdictions under that guise, wanting to see a fully resourced and supported Office of Emergency Management would do amazing things for this city. It's an important part of the tracta that I think we're investing in as a city and I'd love to see that if as a kind of externality of this discussion, a recognition of the need to fully resource and build out that capability. But I don't know if Director Williams is interested. I just wanted to make sure.

Chair: Yeah, thank you so much because for some reason I can't see the participants. So I really appreciate that. Director Williams, do you have any thoughts to add to this conversation at this time?

Director Williams: Well, it's, you know, it's kind of a challenging conversation for me because like Chief Joy and most of our other colleagues, I thought very highly of Kira and sort of became a Kira believer in what Community Health and Safety was envisioned to be. I think that the Chiefs may be right that the portfolio is just simply too large for one individual and that's, you know, it does speak to an individual's ability to manage an organization. If you've got, in the case of Kira, I believe it was roughly 60% of the entire city population, employee population in one department. I will say, and, and I guess I'm sort of disappointed neither one of the Chiefs, none of the Chiefs nor any of the councilors that are proposing this legislation ever sort of reached out to me and said, "Hey, what do you think?" It was sort of a bit of having my fate decided without ever having any say in the matter. This is the first time anyone other than other councilors off, offline have raised this discussion. I do think that as you look at incidents that have happened around the country, California, North Carolina, it's clear that the demands on Emergency Management are growing and it really is, as Henry pointed out, something that demands a greater level of resourcing and commitment. I will say, I kind of was thinking we might benefit from, you know, Mark Scott's input to this discussion as our incoming City Manager, who has, you know, a background across a wide range of communities. It's not like he just worked in a big city or he just worked in a small town. I think that that he may have some insights to bring to the conversation in terms of how we

I think to some degree again the chiefs are right that being a direct report to the city manager is more efficient. I would have some caution that the city manager is so busy. I question to what degree they would really be able to manage and oversee the organization. But again, I think this is a good conversation for us to be having and that's an important issue. And I sincerely hope that this committee and others really dig down and deep in their thinking and realize how important Emergency Management is to the ultimate success of our city in the event of those terrible things that can happen. And that's where I'm at.

**Director Williams:** Thank you so much, Director Williams. I really appreciate you weighing in. And I do think that Emergency Management is going to be an interesting piece of this continued conversation regardless of whether or not this does pass.

**Councilor:** If I can say something, Madam Chair, I would commit to you, Director Williams, that I will work on this. It was in the lineup of things we were doing. We were just trying to pull things out. It's almost like a thread on a sweater. Once you start pulling, it just all starts coming. But I commit to help you with whatever you need to do to get your department where you like it.

**Councilor Garcia:** Then, Councilor Castro. Thank you, Madam Chair. Thank you, Director Williams, for your comments. My comment is more so in reflection of where we were in 2020, just because it was mentioned undoing work of councilors. And this was not the council's work, just for clarification. This was a proposal brought forth by Mayor Weber, and it was not fully accepted by the council at the time. I believe the final vote was six to three. And back at that time, I expressed the same concerns that are being brought forth to recommend the change before us. At that time, there were lots of vacancies within city government, and this was to help to address many vacancies. I don't see that as having happened. It was also sold to us that this was going to make government more efficient. That absolutely did not happen. This was under the guise that it was going to lower the number of folks reporting to the city manager from 17 to 7. I see the proposal is only as something that's the consolidation of power, and that's what I think, in my opinion, I think it was. And it didn't make our government stronger. It didn't make our government better. And again, I'm thankful that we're really looking at how to support folks such as PD and Fire and Mr. Williams, and ultimately allow them to get their work done without having that extra layer of bureaucracy. The proposals like this in front of us help to professionalize government. Back then, this was sold to us as the consolidation was going to professionalize government. Again, I don't think that has happened. So with that, no other comments. Just wanted to provide some context to where we were at in 2020 when this proposal was before the council.

**Councilor Castro:** Great. Thank you for that context, Councilor. Six to three sounds to me like the governing body did support this resolution. I do want to just mention that I was originally on this legislation, and part of the reason I jumped off was that I think it is, to Councilor Vogner's point, a huge task. And we are trying to figure out where to tackle these issues. This issue in particular with the Department of Emergency Management, especially around fire in particular, is a huge concern to me. So I did reach out to several of these folks. I do want to continue to say that this is very, very important that these three departments are under the same umbrella and work together regularly. And that's why I will be voting no tonight. Thank you.

**Chair:** Thank you so much. Any other questions or comments? We don't have a motion on the floor. I apologize. We should have done that a long time ago. Is there a motion to approve?

**Councilor:** Second.

**Chair:** We have a motion and a second. Is there any more discussion? Roll call, please.

**Councilor Castro:** No.

**Councilor Chavis:** Yes.

**Councilor Garcia:** Yes.

**Councilor Funner:** Yes.

**Madam Chair:** Yes.

**Chair:** Motion passes. Thank you so much. Thank you, everybody, for being here. Really appreciate it. Okay, let's keep rolling. Moving on to Matters from Staff. Director Nelson, anything from you today?

**Director Nelson:** Madam Chair, councilors, good evening. Great to see everyone. We've got a couple of updates to share with you. And Marcel was great because she shared the director's update from EDAC earlier today. So that gives you some highlights from Economic Development regarding the Office of Affordable Housing. I want to make sure everybody's aware that those RFPs are still indeed open for CDBG and Affordable Housing Trust Fund. Please tell your folks and your networks that we are actively looking for proposals. The deadline is February 14th, I believe. And I also want to let you know that we had a really successful grand opening for the NMSU Arrowhead office last week. NMSU came up in full force. That was at the Santa Fe Business Incubator. A lot of excitement to roll out the office and that program that's going to be leading our Small Business Navigator Hub. It includes so much services, grants, all sorts of stuff that we're really excited to partner with them on. And I'm pulling up, of course, I've got other items. We're hosting the Beyond the Profit series. There's an event going on right now. There's a topic on circular economy next week. Last thing I'll mention is we are hosting the Business 101 series, and that's at the Cide Library. That's our collaboration with Land Use, and the Land Use team will be there to answer questions to help folks navigate how to get a business license and speak directly to the Land Use team. That'll be a translated event as well. We've had a lot of success with those. Please help spread the word. And I'm going to stop because I'll just keep listing off events. If you've got anything you want to ask me about, let me know. Sign up for our newsletter. Please spread the word to your constituents. And that's the best way to stay up to date with everything going on. Thank you.

**Chair:** Wonderful. Thank you so much, Director Nelson. Director Hammond Paul, do you have anything for us this evening?

**Director Hammond Paul:** Madam Chair, councilors, two quick things. Apropos the conversation we just had about organizational management and structure, I want to point to the effectiveness of the coordination that happened during the Arctic freeze. Coordinated efforts from not only the Department of Community Health and Safety, Police and Fire, but also Transit, numerous other city departments, as well as other stakeholders in the community. We sheltered an additional 90 people per night on average during that period. And there were incredible life-saving measures executed by a bunch of city staff, as well as community partners to prevent loss of life during that time. So I think it's worth lauding the efforts that were really shared across the city and many departments, as well as community partners. So thank you so much.

**Chair:** Dr. Hammond Paul, Marcel, anything from you today?

**Marcel:** None.

**Chair:** All right. Any Matters from the committee?

**Councilor Castro:** Just the Economic Development and Community Health and Safety and all of our amazing departments have been doing a really, really great job. So thank you.

**Chair:** Thank you. I have no matters today. Our next meeting is Wednesday, February 19th. And at 7:31 p.m., we are adjourned. Thank you, everyone.