Based on the context of the White Bear Lake City Council meeting (October 2023), here is the transcript with the speaker names added. [0:04] **Unidentified Speaker:** Yeah you didn't [Laughter] complain. Let me do one more double check and then I'll give you a thumbs up. [0:28] **Unidentified Speaker:** Like across the lake as well, but a lot of people, a lot of people put in on... [0:49] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** All right, we're going to call the meeting to order. Will the clerk please note those in attendance? All will be noted with the exception of council member Angran, who is excused for the evening. Very good. Will you please join me in the Pledge of Allegiance? [1:05] **All:** I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America, and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all. [1:18] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** All right, I trust everyone's had a chance to review the minutes from the regular city council meeting on September 26th. If so, I'd entertain a motion to approve the minutes. [1:30] **Council Member:** Move to approve. [1:31] **Council Member:** Second. [1:32] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** I have a motion and a second. All those in favor say Aye. (Aye) Any opposed? Minutes are approved. Item three: adoption of the agenda. We will be removing item 7A, resolution regarding school resource officer agreement with the White Bear Lake Area Schools. So with that one amendment, are there any other corrections or amendments to the agenda? Seeing none, I'd entertain a motion to adopt the agenda. [1:57] **Council Member:** Second. [1:58] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** I have a motion and a second. All those in favor say Aye. (Aye) Any opposed? We have an agenda. Item four: consent agenda. I’d entertain a motion to approve the consent agenda. Anybody at all? [2:14] **Council Member:** Second. [2:15] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** Do I have a second? I have a motion and a second. All those in favor say Aye. (Aye) Any opposed? Motion carries. The consent agenda is approved. Item five: visitors. The minutes should note with enthusiasm, emphasis added, item five: visitors and presentations. We have the swearing-in of a new police officer and our biannual Police Department report. So with that, Chief Hager, if you can please take it away. [2:36] **Chief Dale Hager:** Thank you, Mr. Mayor, members of the council. Thank you for the opportunity to share our newest police officer tonight with you as we celebrate with him and his family and friends as he takes his oath of office. Officer Dan Swinson was welcomed to White Bear Lake Police Department as a patrol officer on September 11th of this year. Dan is one of our own. He was born and raised here in the city of White Bear Lake. He graduated from White Bear Lake High School and he later graduated from Bethel University. He then, in furtherance of his desire to become a police officer, attended Century College to obtain his law enforcement certificate. Dan's first exposure to law enforcement was when he volunteered for our department in 2007. He worked both as a reserve and as a part-time Community Service Officer for White Bear Lake for four years. During that time, he not only worked as an employee for us, but he volunteered over 1100 hours for the White Bear Lake community. Dan stated that while serving as a reserve, he thought he was doing something meaningful for his community and it lit a spark in him which led him to become a police officer. Dan was first hired as a police officer by the Prairie Island Police Department, where he served a total of 10 years. His time working for this department, located on a large reservation here in Minnesota, provided him with some very valuable and unique experiences which has served him well over his career. Dan left the Prairie Island Police Department and transitioned to Metro Transit Police Department, where he served for two years. During his time there, he worked through some very tough, trying times in our nation's history of law enforcement to include complications brought on by COVID and protests and riots in Minneapolis. These experiences also left a mark on Dan and gave him experiences some of us thankfully will never have. Dan left Metro Transit in 2021 and returned to Prairie Island Police Department where he helped fill some gaps in their staffing shortages. Through his time in law enforcement for the past 10 years, Dan has also worked for the Southern Minnesota Regional Medical Examiner's Office and most recently served as the lead death investigator—again, a unique experience that will make him very valuable to our department. He's very excited to come back home to White Bear Lake. He's grateful for the opportunity to work in his hometown with his unique and plentiful experiences to draw upon. I can tell you that we're also very grateful that we coaxed him back to the city as well. He also has—I'll just say it—a really incredible voice. Like, you'll hear him when he stands here. He's got a combination between a radio DJ and Darth Vader. I'm not sure what it is, but it's really awesome to hear him speak. You guys will experience it today. He's joined today by many of his family members, his mentors, his friends, including his parents and our former police chief, Julie Swanson, who's also served as a mentor for Dan. We’re grateful for that. And then of course, by Becky, who will be pinning on his badge tonight. Dan, would you come up front and our city clerk will issue your oath of office? [5:39] **City Clerk:** All right, please raise your right hand and repeat after me. I, state your name... [5:45] **Officer Dan Swinson:** I, Dan Swinson... [5:46] **City Clerk:** Do solemnly swear... [5:47] **Officer Dan Swinson:** Do solemnly swear... [5:48] **City Clerk:** That I will support... [5:49] **Officer Dan Swinson:** That I will support... [5:50] **City Clerk:** The Constitution of the United States... [5:51] **Officer Dan Swinson:** The Constitution of the United States... [5:53] **City Clerk:** And the State of Minnesota... [5:54] **Officer Dan Swinson:** And the State of Minnesota... [5:56] **City Clerk:** And will discharge... [5:57] **Officer Dan Swinson:** And will discharge... [5:58] **City Clerk:** And faithfully execute... [5:59] **Officer Dan Swinson:** And faithfully execute... [6:01] **City Clerk:** The duties devolving upon me... [6:03] **Officer Dan Swinson:** The duties devolving upon me... [6:05] **City Clerk:** As a police officer for the City of White Bear Lake... [6:07] **Officer Dan Swinson:** As a police officer for the City of White Bear Lake... [6:10] **City Clerk:** Without fear or favor... [6:11] **Officer Dan Swinson:** Without fear or favor... [6:12] **City Clerk:** To the best of my judgment and ability. [6:14] **Officer Dan Swinson:** To the best of my judgment and ability. [Music] [Applause] [6:20] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** Congratulations. [Applause] [6:39] **Chief Dale Hager:** I think that Dan and his family and friends will leave and we'll go back to the police department and we'll continue on. [7:28] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** The crowd is kind of thinned out. Move to adjourn—only staff left! All right. All right, Chief, whenever you're ready with the report, proceed. [7:38] **Chief Dale Hager:** That's right, we got our... thank you, Mayor. Mayor, members of the council, I was told that I might be the only thing on the agenda tonight. I said it would just take 50 or 60 minutes here and you guys will be out of here. [7:53] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** Stretch it out! [7:55] **Chief Dale Hager:** Appreciate that. Yeah, thank you for having me here. I've had a pretty active first 40 days or so on the job and I'm just really grateful to the City Manager's office and for the leaders that are sitting before me here that kind of helped ease me into this position. I'm really grateful to you and all my staff for that. This is my department family. This was the most recent picture we had, sitting right exactly where you are right now earlier this year. As you can see, former Chief Swanson is still in that picture and mostly that depicts our department, save just a few officers who we have hired recently. This is our current department staffing... issues that we have, or current department staff. I've put pictures of our leadership team there because they're the ones that really helped me out here in the last 40 days or so. I can say that, of course, we have a chief of police, we have one captain—we will have one to take my spot eventually here when we get a little bit more staffing, a little more secure in our staffing. We have four sergeants, we have 16 police officers. I should say at the bottom there, we currently have 28 sworn police officers working for our city. We were authorized for 31 but as you see there, one captain, we're missing one there. Out of the 16 Patrol officers, we soon will have four on... we have three now injured, we will soon have four injured. So that is a total of seven that we're down out of the 31. Additionally, we have two officers who are on FTO (Field Training) right now, so their training—do they count as officers, don't they? They ride two to a car. So really, out of 31, we're about eight down. Which is taking its toll. I'm not saying it for any reason you guys can't do anything about it—you've been nothing but supportive of us through this entire time. We have four Community Services officers, we'll hire one very soon. We have four administrative staff: records and evidence, body cameras and digital media personnel. So that's what our staff currently looks like. We have four patrol teams, each one of them led by a sergeant. You can see here's some pictures; a couple of them are dated, I think one of those is now a school resource officer. But the shifts we work, you're either a Sunday-Monday-Tuesday car or your Wednesday-Thursday-Friday car, and then your every other Saturday. And if you're a day shift, you work somewhere around 6:00 or 7:00 in the morning to somewhere around 5:00 or 6:00 or 7:00 at night. So they're about 11-and-a-half-hour shifts. You know, we're at minimums now, sometimes we're a little below minimums because of our staffing issues. But in a perfect world, we would have four officers and one sergeant on each shift. Our investigative staff includes, for the most part, the folks on the screen here. We have three adult criminal investigators and they work, for lack of a better term, bankers' hours. We have two juvenile investigators or SROs and they work, generally, they work school hours. And then we have one investigator, not pictured here, on the violent crime enforcement team. And we're relatively staffed up there, although we have had an injury in this area and we'll be one light there as well. Our staffing changes this year include all the people that you've sworn in so far in 2023, to include Dan there. We haven't had an official picture of him, so I made him stand there and get his picture taken so I could put him back up there. Didn’t make him hold any numbers, right? [Laughter] That's kind of what it looks like. So anyway, I think this is a... we have a really great run of officers right here. I'm really proud of how these have turned out. More than a few of these are my former students, which just makes me even more proud. But the story of our lives over the last six months has been construction. As you can see, our side of the city buildings are torn apart. We're the department that's kind of living through it. We're just moving around from room to room as they do their construction. But the good news is, last week and this week we've started to move back into the 1990s building. We were the last eight months or so living in the 1960s building. We've moved into the 1990s building and we're extremely happy about it. These are just some pictures of some of the rooms that we've already kind of taken over. Some of them will be permanent, some of them are temporary until the other building then goes through their facelift and then we'll go back into that building. Just more examples of how we've kind of occupied some of the space here. You see on the bottom left there, that's our conference room. That's a space where we just stuck three investigators to work out of the same office there. And then we had our patrol room there on the bottom right. That's where all of our cops are in that room at some point in time during the day. But for the most part, all the other rooms are—that's the way they'll look moving forward. And we're really grateful, really excited about this project. Every time we have just a little bit of a hiccup in our department due to construction, we just kind of have to remind ourselves that this will end and it'll be great when it's over and we'll park indoors and everything is just going to work out a lot better. So we're certainly grateful to all of you here for that. Just a little background, I think you know this about the Minnesota POST Board (Police Officer Standards and Training). They are the board in Minnesota that handles our training and licensing of officers. In 2023, they adopted many new rules on us, kind of all stemming from some bigger picture law enforcement and criminal justice reform activity that's happening, and they have affected us. We've of course acted accordingly and made the required changes. But they revolve around background investigation requirements and some discriminatory conduct definitions, some selection standards that have changed, standards of conduct that have changed, and then they've added some required policies. A lot of our policies are POST-mandated policies; they're the same in every department across the state. We have to have them worded the way they give it to us, which we're pretty grateful for because then we know exactly what the rules are, we don't have to guess. So that's changed a little bit in '23, we had to just kind of follow some new guidelines from them. We have several partnerships as you are all aware: Northeast Family Service Community Action Advocate Program—we share an advocate with many other suburban agencies in Ramsey County to kind of help us deal with some of our regular customers or people that maybe need some additional help in the area of potentially mental health or some other kind of systemic issue that they're having. We also have a staff on board, Jonathan Bunt, who helps us deal with a lot of our officer wellness programs and mental health with officers. We're extremely grateful—I know you heard this last time—but I know he was on board last January when our department went through our struggles, and we're so eternally grateful that he was and really kind of gave us some guidance through that. We, of course, have officers that serve on the violent crime enforcement team as I said earlier, on the SWAT team, and with the mobile field force. We have officers that help the rest of the county in doing that. We lean on the Minnesota BCA (Bureau of Criminal Apprehension) often for testing of our evidence and processing our crime scenes. And then of course we lean on the Minnesota Chiefs Association and the Ramsey County Chiefs of Police Association, just kind of sharing best practices. I leaned on both those organizations, as well as the Public Safety Commissioner, when we went through this issue with our SRO, and so it was greatly appreciated that I had these folks to lean on. We have a pretty active volunteer program to include our CERT (Community Emergency Response Team). We've trained over 100 people in CERT over the last six years. We're taking a little break because we don't have much of a building to have classes in this year, but we'll pick that up again next year. Same thing with our Citizens Police Academy—we're taking a little bit of break there and we'll pick that up again. Triad and our police reserves are still a very active group in the city and they help us out in a variety of ways. Just a really great group of people that want to give their time for the betterment of their community and we appreciate that we can help kind of foster that and arrange for that to work out. And then lastly, the thing that if I had to say what we're made of here in White Bear Lake is our community engagement. These are just some of the things that we do. I threw a few pictures on there of this year's events and, as you can see, we're all summer long we're very active. I suppose one of my goals when I was hired is that we multiply this a great deal. I know that this is a lot; I know that our officers won't be loving the idea that I'm saying "hey, remember what we used to do, let's double that, let's get going, let's do some more stuff." I think we can refocus some of our energies to reach some people in our city that maybe don't have regular positive interactions with police. So that's my goal for this winter and next summer. So with that, short and sweet like I promised, if anybody has any questions or anything they'd like to add. [18:24] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** Thank you, Chief. I don't have any questions. And before I throw it to Council, I just want to say in the 40 days or so that you have been Chief, I have gotten some feedback from residents and it's all been positive. So, I think by and large the consensus has been that you're doing a great job and the residents feel good that you're in this position. So I at least wanted to relay that to you, that several people have reached out and it's all been positive. So keep up the good work. And with that, do Council have any questions for Chief? Council member Edberg. [18:55] **Council Member Edberg:** Thank you, Mr. Mayor. Chief, your report on our staffing vacancies is concerning. What are the strategies that you have available to you to address that? For example, when your counterpart Chief Peterson was... over the past year we've talked about how we don't send our firefighters as often or as consistently outside the community. We have obligations with Ramsey County and others, so I don't know what those options are, but the fact that we are down as many as we are, it's a concern. What strategies do you have? [19:46] **Chief Dale Hager:** Yeah, thank you Mr. Mayor, members of the council. I've been lucky to work with our city manager Crawford in kind of developing some of those strategies. Right now, we're in the mode of trying to keep this afloat, and so we are circling the wagons a little bit in that we have some investigators that could possibly help out on the street. So we are taking... that's one of our options to allow one of our investigators on the street to help fill some shifts. We're doing that. Additionally, we lowered our minimums this summer because we just simply couldn't put that many people on the street without having every shift be an overtime shift, and it's just not sustainable to do that. So the thing that suffers in that is our self-initiated activity. I don't—you can probably tell—I don't have our statistics here in front of us, and there's a few reasons for that. Not shame or anything like that; I'm very proud of the work that our people do. But this summer we got a new records management system, and that records management system and our old one, they don't play that well together. And so if I were to get some statistics to kind of show some year-to-year averages and what has changed, I was fearing that I wasn't going to be completely honest, and that was the last thing that I wanted to do—if I gave you some bad numbers as far as citations or arrests and that kind of thing. I can say that when comparing 2022 numbers to pre-COVID numbers, we're down and we're down in almost all categories. The intensity of the calls that we respond to are more serious, but the number of self-initiated activities that we're doing is down. So what we're doing as a strategy is we're stirring the hornets' nest less to occupy our officer time, we're circling the wagons to get more of our maybe non-patrol officers to help out on patrol, and then we are trying some maybe some new strategies—just testing them out again with the city manager's leadership on that—we're trying a new method of hiring to maybe get people in the door maybe a little bit more efficiently and maybe not lose out to other departments because it's such a competitive market right now. The slower you go to onboard officers, the more you're going to lose to other departments. [22:18] **Council Member Edberg:** We've observed more pinning ceremonies for police officers in the past, oh I don't know, year or two than perhaps in the previous 12 years that I've been on the Council. Can you speak to the turnover issue? And it's not just turnover; it's turnover, recruitment competition, competitive advantage in hiring—that whole ball of wax. Where are we at with that? [22:45] **Chief Dale Hager:** Sure. Thank you Mr. Mayor, members of the council. As I said earlier, this is a really competitive market that we're in right now. Prior to, I would say somewhere around 2017 or '18, the average number of departments that were hiring in the state fell somewhere around between 9 and 30 departments. It was down from a few years ago, but yet 10 to 15 departments were hiring every day. As you look on the website that contains all jobs in the state of Minnesota, last I looked it’s over 200. So there are multiple agencies hiring multiple officers. With that, everybody's competing against each other and everybody's battling for each other's officers. When I started, if I just can be honest, you start with a department and you better stay there because the likelihood that you're going to get somewhere else is very low. And if you went somewhere else, you're going to start at the bottom of the totem pole again and it's not a great position to be in. Those things have changed drastically now and they're doing that specifically to attract more people. We had a few officers last year that went to the county—three officers now that went to the county—and each one of them was just able to call the position they wanted and they got it. We can't do that. We're just not big enough to allow a one-year officer who has been working nights for one year to just call a day position and then have it. We just can't do it. But other bigger departments can. There was... we lost two officers to Stillwater last year. Both of them happened to live in Wisconsin across the bridge from Stillwater. It's pretty hard to talk somebody away from going to next door where they can just drive across the bridge and be at work for roughly the same pay. And because we're so competitive with each other, you know, other departments are offering exactly what they're making walking out the door here. So there's very little downside to new officers leaving departments. And I think that we had a string of that for a while. Now, we haven't had somebody leave for, I don't know, it must be six to eight months maybe. So maybe that's the end—there's an end in sight for that. As I said, this is our fifth officer that we swore in tonight. If I had my wish, we'd swear in three more by the end of the year, but I don't think we're going to get there. So possibly we'll swear in one more by the end of the year, but most likely we'll be doing the same thing through the holidays and through spring next year. And by the time they all get out back on the street—in a perfect world, if we get them all out on the street, all of our injured people back on, and we start plowing forward—that's looking at next summer to next fall when that'll happen. So a lot of things can happen between now and next summer/next fall. [25:52] **Council Member Edberg:** Mr. Mayor, could I ask one last one please? So Chief, being within an organization and promoted from within is both bane and blessing; it comes with each. At some point, what—if you have any observations that you'd care to share with us—about what is the status of our force? And what are the emerging needs and the emerging opportunities or threats that we need to prepare for? I'd welcome hearing about that. Now, you may or may not want to or feel prepared to do that now—maybe that is your next visit with us—but I'm kind of thinking that our status quo isn't going to perpetuate itself very well going forward. And from a policy and budget standpoint, we need to be thinking differently. Now, that's just one council member, but is there anything that you would prefer to... that you'd like to say at the moment about forces facing us and issues facing us? [27:01] **Chief Dale Hager:** Sure. I'll say a little bit, but I'm also certainly willing to get you more information if you'd like in the future. But just right off the top of my head, we are dealing with—Mr. Mayor, members of the council, sorry to get ahead of myself there—but we are dealing with a mental health crisis every day. What is unique about our city, having some experience from some other cities—I still feel like the new guy here, I've been here nine and a half years as a captain, but definitely feel like the new person still—and I have some familiarity with some other departments having worked in other departments and having close friends and colleagues with other departments. Everybody's dealing with the same thing. What I really appreciate about our city is that we're tackling it. We're taking on psychiatrists, psychologists to deal with our officers' problems and we're also partnering with other agencies to have Northeast Family Services, Youth and Family Services, to try to deal with some of our community's problems. That is our future. I think violent behavior is moving out towards us. It used to be if you're kind of a northern suburb, you kind of were insulated from that. Some of the activity is moving our way. We had an officer shot last year, as you're aware. Violence is moving in our direction. And I think between mental health calls and our response to it, and the violence that's occurring on our streets more continuously every day, I think that our department is handling it well in that we're tackling it head-on. So I appreciate that. I don't know that all departments are doing that. I'm appreciative that we work so well with the City Manager's office and with you folks to make sure that we have the equipment that we need. There's shortages all over the place. We're short squad cars—not due to anything that anybody here did, but just they're not making squad cars like they used to. We're down six right now. We have to get six squad cars made and they've already been ordered, they're all set to go and they just can't catch up. So there's just some potentially some issues on the horizon with squad issues. And then, as you're all aware, we picked up a couple drones and we have four drone operators and that is going to be crucial for us moving forward. We're not the last ones to get them, but we're not the first ones to get them. We're doing what we're supposed to do. That's the future of law enforcement is drones. They'll have all kinds of case law and all kinds of best practices that'll move forward over the next 10 years over drones. And I know we got two and it probably took a lot to get some, but I suspect they'll be knocking on your door real soon to try to get a bunch more because I think that's the future of law enforcement. The community is clamoring for us to stop dealing with certain types of cases and certain types of people, and the answer to that, I think, is through drones. We can get out and see a problem before our officers ever get on scene. We can be safer that way. I think that's happening soon. I won't ask yet, City Manager Crawford, but I see someday that that's going to happen. [30:26] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** Thank you, Chief. [30:28] **Chief Dale Hager:** Sure. [30:29] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** Any other questions from the Council? All right, thank you very much for your report. All right, let me march through item six: public hearings—we have nothing scheduled. Item seven—we no longer have anything scheduled. Item eight: new business—nothing scheduled. Item nine: discussion—nothing scheduled. Item ten: communication from the City Manager. Ms. Crawford. [30:44] **City Manager Lindy Crawford:** Thank you, Mayor and members of the council. Just a couple of upcoming events, couple ribbon cuttings that I definitely would request your presence at if you are available. The walking bridge in the arts district—the ribbon cutting is Tuesday, October 17th at 4:00 p.m., just a few hours prior to our work session. This bridge has been in the works for a while; it connects the White Bear Center for the Arts with the Hanifl Performing Arts Center. And so there'll be a naming ceremony and I believe the city clerk will give you some information on that. So please come. As well as Northeast Youth and Family Services, their clinic here in White Bear Lake—we, the city, own that building—they are having a ribbon cutting. They've made some renovations inside, so that is Thursday, October 19th at 3:45 p.m. And again, just they've updated the space, so please try and come. That is a very important partnership—actually all everything that's listed on there are very important partnerships for the city—so we would welcome you to join staff at those two upcoming events. And that's what I have for tonight. Thank you. [32:00] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** Thank you. Council, any questions for Ms. Crawford? Seeing none, I would entertain a motion to adjourn. [32:15] **Council Member:** So moved. [32:18] **Council Member:** Second. [32:20] **Mayor Dan Koupal:** All those in favor say Aye. (Aye) We're adjourned.