we have a quorum is that correct yes all right in accordance with the Freedom of Information Act chapter 4 title 30 code of laws in South Carolina in 1976 and agenda's been posted on the front door of City Hall and notification of this meeting has been given to the news media uh do we need an invocation uh it's on the agenda so Mr Bass looks like he wants to give it away I could tell yeah let us pray father father we thank you uh for today we thank you for our wonderful City and today we're going to say a special prayer and thanks for our firefighters maybe with us during this meeting did our decisions we make glorify your name and your name we pray amen amen for which it stands one nation under God indivisible with liberty and justice for all foreign just have one new business item on the agenda this afternoon is to consider authorizing the submission of required forms to Piva for firefighters and the police officers retirement system so I'm gonna give a little bit of a of a brief uh just intro if you guys will recall this is a conversation that we had pretty heavily during the budget process currently our all of our police officers are on the in the police officers retirement system all the rest of our employees are in the South Carolina Retirement System so there's a difference in years of service and if you're a class 3 employee right now and you're in the South Carolina Retirement System your years of service after April 90. if you are in the poor system you have to do 27 years so this is a big deal for the fire department because obviously it's hard to fight fire when you get to a you know a certain age right um so we agree we kind of agreed you know during the budget process let's go ahead and put it in the budget and so it's in the budget now we are required to submit um a very specific form and so that's why we're here today for you all to give an official vote and then you'll have to sign this document we have to get it to people by June the first I'm going to let um assistant chief James go through a presentation for you guys and then I'm going to cover a couple small budget changes and then um take any questions y'all have obviously you can interrupt Chris if you need to all right thank y'all later on Council um this recruitment retention this is kind of retirement focused is where this presentation is going because that's what we're talking about so as she talked about class two members and class three members you know that's the difference between a 28 year and a 90-year employee for us those class three members that came in after July 2012 that was you know after the city insurance the retiree insurance that everybody before that is eligible for if they do 28 years with the city and class three was the 90 rules so your age and years of service I have to equal 90. so current ly in our department we kind of split right now we do have 49 currently this is Chief strange is not include included in this but it's split 24 and 24. um the pores is beneficial to nearly all our employees now even though it is split even though some of them are under the 28-year original rule so I think this video is supposed to originally play but this is um but it never works like that yeah it never works like it's supposed to so this just kind of supposed to go through some of the things that the firefighters do and the real takeaway here is sometimes we're not as young as we used to be and so those not a year 90 rule employees coming in they um potential to work up to 65 before they can retire so all Personnel at the fire department is subject to the physical demands of the firefighting so while one day this guy may be managing a scene he may be doing fire suppression searching anything else and so that kind of talks about the physical portion of it but you also have to think about the mental aspect of it um in having to do this for potentially 36 years um contribution rates so it does increase with pores it is higher for the employee and the employer the employee sees uh three quarters of a percent increase by swapping the pores and the city the employer contribution is a almost uh two and a half percent of difference um the reason we think this is kind of a big deal every year the firefighters Association there's reports that come out and it asks you what retirement system do you participate in so as you can see nearly 90 percent of fire departments are on Poors and who responded to this and that's generally across the board and that's one of the things that we feel we lose a lot of people to um the other 10 that are on State teachers um that could be anywhere from part-time fire departments that don't have full-time employees in Greenwood County um they're on sers just do the way they started their system new firefighter costs so we're projecting to lose nine employees over the next three years due to retirement or voluntary separation um so we're going to go through the training costs on hiring uncertified firefighter and getting them trained up so this will just show the minimal cost in what we require to get them on the truck so this is what it costs to get them in the door get them equipped and basically their first year of training is almost eighteen thousand dollars obviously this could very well increase we don't have the stuff in place to be able to hold a full-blown eight-week recruit Academy in-house yet um a fire academy has them four times a year and they're hard to get in so um there's a potential to hire our own certified guy and he'll really be no good for interior firefighter operations until he gets trained um and whenever you think about hiring in you also think about keeping the ones that you do have because you know you see it cost eighteen thousand in the first year just think about our five to ten fifteen year how much we've invested in those guys so it is retaining them as well yeah so I mean we go through all the the whole firefighter series Hazmat all the technical rescue that we do for the county EMR all that good stuff certification based on our standards or is there other some other formal certification that is required Beyond Hazmat um this these are like ocean certifications and stuff like that we do require for all our employees because we provide the all hazards thing um within Greenwood County so that that is our requirement and they're trained to the OSHA standards but when they go through the fire academy they come out firefighter two certified and so Brandon I don't know if you can hear me but when they go to the fire so if we hire somebody off the street like I like to call it you know and they're uncertified young guy coming into our fire department they're not certified they have to go to the academy to be trained and when they come out their firefighter 2 certified and so that is included in this 18 000 number that he's provided so and on top of that can we go back to that real quick I've just I just clicked back to it you should be able to see it which one where is that orange on the left yeah the the eight week recruit training uncertified the 5182. okay okay and then we train them to be Hazmat certified and EMR and so that that's that all hazards that he was talking about which are where how our firefighters are trained judge I was just looking for in the next slide he's going to show you the difference between bringing in a guy who's already firefighter two certified versus a guy who's not or girl or girl so this shows the difference between uncertified and certified obviously we still have to do the some initial training get them used to what we do and outfit them but uh uncertifies eighteen thousand dollars versus sixty seven hundred dollars for someone that's certified um and so whenever you talk about replacing nine positions over the next few years while we have had some success with getting uncertified you can see the benefit of being able to hire those people being able to quit losing some of our Greenwood County natives that go work for areas around Greenville and stuff like that um that we've we've increased our salaries and stuff like that but one of the big kickers is this retirement now and don't you don't you have to undergo additional training through the years to there's not this is the initial training right that's not the training that you have about eighteen thousand dollars is our initial training our you get it in in the first year um I would I would hate to know the numbers of some of the expenses we've spent with training um [Music] and then obviously leads back to trying to just be on board with things across the state being able to get some lateral hires coming in um the guys from Greenwood that want to come back and work in their Hometown because it is a big kicker whenever they they can retire they're on the poor system they can retire in 27. we said well come here for us but you got to start under the rule of 90. and it can you explain that rule of 90. I mean it's not 90 years [Music] you have to really stop to do the math because as you get 10 years older your years of service gets 10 years less until they the easiest one to do is the age of 20. because you say 35 years of service that makes him 55 years old 55 plus 35 is 90. so if he came in when he was 20 he'd have to work too now I get it because I'm like 90. I know it's it's like you have to work through them 90. what we're being what the proposal is today we know that if you were before 1992 you had to work 28 years 2012. um before 2012. excuse me before 2012. um and the fifth there's the 90 th rule what is the proposal now with with the pores so so anybody enrolled in pores right now has to work 27 years A Class 2 employee would have used to have to do 25 and now class 3 employee under Polaris has to do 27. okay all right gotcha is that your last one that's that's all I have so you'll have any questions any other questions from the phone well just I I don't know that it's necessary it may be a follow-up question after this but um for budgetary purposes as he mentioned it's going to cost a little bit more we feel like we can capture that in the budget without a budget amendment being necessary yeah so I'll touch on that now and then if anybody has any questions about the budget piece I'll answer this that's okay um I have a question okay so what is the amount it's been authorized is that the eighteen thousand no I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna go over the numbers now okay so when we're so we started this process in talking to Poor's or talking to people about this probably a year ago um and at the time the information that we got from piba led us to believe that it would not be favorable for all of our employees to swap to Porters so at that time when we were planning from a budget standpoint we had about half like 20 we thought 20 firefighters that would probably make a swap meaning you'd have to pay that extra you know two and a quarter or two and a half on those 20 employees and So based on that information um the budget included we only had paper half a year because it's effective July one so it would have been twenty four thousand dollars an additional retirement money and we budgeted 12 for half a year so fast forward to many many many many more conversations with pebo we've talked to everybody that works there we're pretty sure and what we've determined is that it is favorable for everybody to go because you can do what's called concurrent service so I'm going to use Tanner as an example said he's under the he's a class three employee meaning he has to work 28 years even if he swaps to um even if he makes the shift to Poor's he still has to work 28 years but his years are concurrent meaning he's paid 24 years into scrs he'll work four years in Poor's and he'll get a scrs check and he'll get a poorest check previously we thought you had to start over so for somebody like Tanner with 24 years in that wouldn't make any sense for him to do that so now where we're at is that we have 41 of 48 employees that want to swap to pause and we have seven that don't and So that obviously changes the budget number a little bit so instead of 12 000 in the budget for this year we'll need more like 24. and then for next year 2024 instead of budgeting 24 to say 30 000 depending on turnover and stuff like that you'll have to budget probably like 48. eventually in say three to five years you'll be at a point where you'll probably have to budget about sixty thousand that'll be the difference in every firefighter that works for the city being in poor versus the CRS um so we had event in our minds we knew that we would reach that eventual 60 000 number over three to five years it's just kind of fast tracks that a little bit more so to Brandon's point because I met him yesterday about several different things I talked to him about this um you we'll need about an extra twelve thousand dollars in the 2023 budget to pay this extra percentage for the 41 that want to swap over um I believe that we'll probably be able to absorb it in our existing budget that's been approved with some transfers within the general fund if we get towards the end of the year and we feel like we need a budget amendment we may have to do one but I really don't don't foresee that so um at this time we're not asking you for a budget amendment but we do want to make you aware of those budget numbers are all of our firefighter positions filled right now are they all field yes and we did recently our most two recent hires were firefighter two certified so the pay the pay increases that you all gave in conjunction with the budget and I think this sort of promise to pull go to Poor's has been really beneficial for their recruitment um because I know that they've come to me many times and said gosh you have this great guy he's been working seven years for this other department they're in Poor's and he wants to come work for us but he's he's not leaving pores and so um it does tire her hands sometimes I'm not saying all the time but you can see that 89 of responding agencies of 136 firefighter fire departments in the state of South Carolina are already on pores we've been having the counties go ahead the count we've been talking with the county you know they're they're batting this idea around as well we don't know exactly what they're going to do because every employee situation is a little bit unique and so it may behoove them to to go to poison at midnight so we don't really know for sure what they're planning to do I guess that's my question is the seven this don't want to they're free to stick with their current situation that's right but anybody any new hire will have to go under pours decisions made with that they won't have the option of transferring once the decision is made so if they decide to stay with that CRS they're staying with a CRS so what would what would be the I mean the reason that the seven that wanted to stick with it they've just they've done a calculation and feel like it's best for them I just want to understand so every employee every employee situation is really really unique and so it will be difficult to explain to you why one person might stay and one person might go but um each one of these people every employee in the fire department was given an opportunity to talk to people directly and ask their specific questions because you just can't make a blanket uh application to every single person so I don't know why those seven have opted to stick with scrs that's their own personal choice based on questions and conversations they've had with people with their paycheck as long as they're grandfathered in to be able to make it's yours yeah but they have to make their choice now they don't this is the only this is the only option that this is the only time they have available to say yes I want to swap you want to say something if you do come on up yeah come on talk yeah talking to Mike a quick answer to some of the guys that that elected to stay um two of them are retire rehire so there's absolutely no benefit one way or another to them it doesn't cost them anything they wouldn't gain anything um the other two there's two more that are set to retire in September and October respectively in one to two months in the polar system would do absolutely nothing for them and uh the other three currently work in scrs systems part-time and they're close to retirement so they were shooting for their highest average compensation in that respective system so they opted out everybody opted out for a good reason it was just specific to what they were doing I got you damn the system that's that's the retirement system that all all city employees are under except the police department the chef's Police Department right okay so and everyone's not everyone is not eligible to be in poor so it's only it's very specific to those in fire suppression police departments and uh then there's some like magistrate judges and things like that but um the only employees that work for the City of Greenwood that are eligible are police and fire under state law okay because if if it was available to everybody everybody would want to be on it well it's a lot harder for police and fire to work till 65 because it's physically taxing yes yeah which is likely I don't know the reason why they have these separate Retirement Systems I'm not sure the judge doesn't make any sense whatsoever because that's not physically taxing EMS would make more sense if you had County you know I will tell you I'm just and I know that's not even here nor there I'll say one little other caveat is um magistrate judges are qualified under the law but Municipal judges are not um Haley we tried we we've worked with Haley and people to try to get her in with the firefighters but um they've consistently denied her requests we're going to submit a form for her but um it's odd they just default straight back to the law and they say it specifically says magistrates and it it does not include Municipal judges who do the exact same work interesting I don't get why judges are in it to begin tell us how you really feel I'm telling you how I really feel a copy of those slides to my uh my iPad yes okay does y'all have any questions okay um what we what we need is just a a vote on that agenda item which I don't have right in front of me all right we have a motion in regards to this agenda item most do we have a number does that motion have numbers no it's not a resolution so you just need to make a motion to authorize this book okay uh motion to authorize the submission of required forms to people for firefighters coverage in the police officers Retirement System second we have a motion by Miss hoto second by Mr Miller any further discussion regarding the motion hearing none all in favor of the motion on the table at the um just from my camera angle I see Jonathan's hand I see Matt's hand up I can't I just can't see Nikki everyone in the room has their hand up in favor all right uh Mr Dean I I vote in favor and I think I heard Betty vote in favor any opposed all right that motion carries unanimously with seven votes thank you um before you guys adjourn I do want to mention that I need everybody's signature on the form I have to submit and so maybe you could take it and have Robert sign it Matthew no yes if not one of us can run it out to you guys to get it signed um because we just need to get it up to them by the first so we'll we'll be calling you guys to meet you somewhere get your signature today Julie um it doesn't have to be today but tomorrow will be great I can bring it out to you Robert and then finally come on probably in the next hour for me oh okay that'll be great I don't think he heard you he said you can come by okay okay that'd be great thank you all right any any further matters to take up motion to adjourn second we have a motion by Mr Miller's second by Mr Bass any further discussion regarding the tournament all in favor of adjournment aye all right [Music] like that motion carries unanimously with seven votes you all think think everybody for coming together under any short notice thank you