This transcript has been formatted with the names of the Mayor, Councilmembers, and City Staff based on the context provided. [0:02] [Music] [0:44] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Good evening and welcome to the February 5th City Council meeting. If you join me in a moment of silence and the Pledge of Allegiance. [1:13] **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. [1:27] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** Roll call please. Volk? **Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Here. **Ann Orlofsky:** Hellier? **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Here. **Ann Orlofsky:** Bermel? **Councilmember John Bermel:** Here. **Ann Orlofsky:** Wolter? **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** Here. **Ann Orlofsky:** Lee? **Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Here. [1:45] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay, moving on to item number three, citizens' comments. This is an opportunity for residents or business owners for up to three minutes to discuss any issues that are pertinent that may not be on the agenda. [Pause] Okay, moving on. Additional agenda information, Mr. Miller? [2:06] **City Administrator Justin Miller:** [No changes/updates]. [2:07] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okie do. Moving on to item five, our presentations and introductions, and I'll turn it over to our Police Chief for his quarterly update. [2:21] **Police Chief Brad Paulson:** Good evening, Mayor, members of the Council. I’m here tonight to report our quarterly update covering the final three months of 2023. As we do, starting out with our mission statement: The Lakeville Police Department exists to ensure an excellent quality of life in Lakeville by serving and protecting in a professional and innovative way. Highlighting some staff achievements here—and what we've tried to do is add a few more photos to try to put names with faces a little bit to the extent that we can; sometimes we see one or the other but not always in conjunction. So all six of these officers were named field training officers in the last few months of 2023, and they join a group of already trained field training officers with a growing and evolving department. We're always training people, so adding a few folks to the cadre of trainers is very helpful. So Bill Onedine, Ariel Hudson, Nick Jacobson, Mariah Kellington, Jeremy Lerfald, and Jolene Warden were officially named. A field training officer spends a handful of months onboarding and spending one-on-one training time with our new sworn officers as they start out. It's not just being a good police officer that makes a good trainer, but a good coach and mentor as well, and these folks all have exhibited those qualities. Jeremy Lerfald on the bottom left—his time is short-lived as he was recently promoted to Sergeant, so he'll be quickly transitioning out of that role, but that's a good move for him. Continuing on with some awards and recognitions: On the left there is Officer Emily Bears. Emily was instrumental in coordinating our open house, as you recall probably from last May—the first time we've done it in a number of years. She really took the lead on that, a lot of logistics involved; we really didn't know what to expect from a turnout standpoint. She did a great job in organizing that. Then on the right, two of our Sergeants, Josh Flynn and Thor Howe. They're two of our lead instructors with our use of force training division. Sergeant Flynn more on the hand-to-hand defensive tactic side and Sergeant Howe on the firearm side. But we've really worked to kind of reinvent a lot of the training that we do to more simulate realistic situations—a lot of moving and shooting on the range and incorporating some Jiu-Jitsu training in with our defensive tactics, and both of those guys have done a great job in bringing those new skills and those new ideas to our training team. Some happenings with our community engagement folks and our staff in general: On the left there was our third and final "Custard with a Cop" of 2023. This one was out at Ardmore Village where we kind of take over the office space there and welcome the community in, answer questions, interact with families and kids, and hand out some goodies. Culver's does a great job of sponsoring and providing custards; custard or ice cream always draws a crowd, which is helpful, so they enjoyed doing that. We were also at Queen Anne Courts and Lakeville Point earlier in the year. Then four events on the right; they're all kind of holiday season related. The "Cops and Coats" is a drive that we host and take new and gently used coats and donate them to the Lewis House 360 Community shelter. "Shop with a Hero" is in conjunction with the Fire Department where we pair up with some families in need; they provide shopping lists, we hit Target and pair up a young kid with a police officer or firefighter. It's a great event; I think our staff enjoys it just as much as the kids do. "Toys for Tots" is part of obviously a larger campaign where we provide some drop boxes and help get toys up to the KARE 11 facility for the big drop. And then, a little bit lower key by design, the "Santa in Blue"—throughout the course of the year our staff identifies some children or families that have gone through a pretty tough call or a tough time where we submit names. We have great business partners in the community that help donate gifts and we host an event where those gifts are delivered with Santa and opened up and have some treats there as well. All fun events, and I have to give a shout-out to our Public Safety Foundation for the work that they do in helping us out and helping solicit donations for those programs. Back in October, we celebrated 50 years of our Reserve program. Way back in October of 1973, they started out with twice as many reserves as they had police officers at that time; kind of hard to think about that nowadays. But we have 17 reserves, all in a volunteer capacity. They provide thousands of hours of work to our department from special events like Pan-O-Prog to routine weekend patrols where they might pair up with an officer to help out. They go through a pretty significant amount of training on the front end because they are wearing Police Department uniforms and vehicles and they get approached with questions, and a lot of times people don't necessarily know what their role is. So a lot of the training is for them to be able to handle things or pass that off appropriately, but also help with things like traffic direction, medical assists, talking on the radio, resolving conflicts, and just provide a lot of service to our department and to the community as a whole. Just a brief update on our unmanned aerial systems program, more commonly probably known as a drone program. As you recall, last year we worked through the process to get this program up and running and we have seven trained pilots, which was kind of our target for the first year. They've all been through the FAA certification and have been flying. They also fly at least 30 minutes a month; I think all of them have been over that as they're getting used to operating these devices. We have three drones in the fleet—two of the bigger ones that are more for outdoor area searches and, towards the end of the year, we had a donor that provided a small drone for indoor work: building searches, residential things, cases of those natures. It's important to note that especially for the indoor one, that drone cannot fly anywhere where an officer isn't legally allowed to be. So if an officer can't be standing in that spot, that drone can't be flying through that building. I think that's just one thing we want to point out. Mission-wise, they flew 256 missions between August and December. Now, a little misleading; a large dose of those were training missions just getting up and running, but all of these are tracked. The state statute requires it, so even if it's a training mission, those are all tracked—the intent and the length and things like that. But there were 14 missions for active law enforcement incidents, and we also paired with our K9 training group and our City Communication staff to shoot some video as well; good practice for us to utilize our skills in some of those lower stress environments. Our Crime Scene Unit is another group to highlight. They had a full team training in November. We have 14 sworn officers and a Sergeant that make up our Crime Scene Unit, and this is a secondary assignment; all of these people have primary roles in the department either as patrol officers, sergeants, or detectives. But this team does a lot of training and they process a lot of scenes. As you can see on the bottom there, in 2023 as a whole they processed a total of 80 crime scenes—everything from person crimes, weapon calls, property, death scenes, things like that. There's a list there of some of the skills and training that they provide. But really it does a couple things for us: Number one, we do have access to a State Crime Lab but their threshold for coming out is pretty high—homicides, pretty significant incidents where we fortunately don't have too many of those. But there's a lot of things that happen where we want crime scene work, so our team is able to handle that. It also really shortens our turnaround time on evidence being submitted to the State Crime Lab. If you think of like a burglary scene where maybe we would collect a pop can or something like that, instead of sending that can in and having the state lab look for fingerprints and DNA, we can do a lot of that in-house and then just send the fingerprint itself or a DNA swab. We do a lot of the front-end processing and it makes that turnaround time much quicker in getting results back. Just some other bulleted points on some training and development—I won't list all of these, but highlighting a few: South Metro SWAT team, they train monthly; we currently have three operators on that team. Again, that's a regional team made up of Dakota and Rice County agencies. A COPS conference—which sounds like a very general conference, right?—this is "Concerns of Police Survivors" is the acronym there. But the two officers attending there are members of our peer support team and that conference is a law enforcement wellness conference. We've sent people the last few years; it's a good way to learn of trends and things that we can bring back and train our staff on from a wellness perspective. And then the AX200 training—I'm not going to get into specifics because I don't know a whole lot about that—that's our electronic crimes unit detective, but he was out in Virginia for some training out there and some pretty specialized stuff. As you can imagine, that level of training is ongoing and changes quite frequently. Then on the bottom there, every about 3 years we're audited by our licensing board, the Minnesota POST Board. We were audited in December. Our training records, making sure obviously all of our sworn staff are up to date on training, making sure all our policies are in place—all things went very well, but there is a significant amount of work from the staff side to prepare for those audits and to produce those records. I'm proud of the work that our staff does not only in passing the audit but also preparing for it. And this is a year-long slide on "Travis's Law" calls. Some of you may recall Travis's Law not too long ago, but what that does is routes certain 911 calls to a crisis response center, which in Lakeville is Dakota County Crisis. So this is just some statistics year-end for 2023, both countywide and Lakeville. 992 calls were routed right from our Dakota 911 center to crisis without ever dispatching any other services, and in the end, 83% of those were handled without police departments ever getting involved, which I think is a pretty successful rate. Breaking that down to Lakeville, 90 of those calls were ours, so about 9% of the total. Then just kind of some high/low numbers there: December was the highest month and January the lowest. Kind of strange when they're back-to-back, but with crisis calls, we see the holidays kind of be a spike in some mental health issues and crisis, a time of stress and need for a lot of folks. If you're wondering on the 83%—so what happens is 100% of these calls go right to crisis, but there are times where maybe the crisis worker shows up at the scene or something they learn on a phone call where they then do loop back and get police departments involved. So there are some of those that we end up getting involved with, but 83% handled without any involvement I think is pretty good. Two cases of distinction to highlight here: On the left is what we've called the "porch pirate"—kind of a term that gets thrown out with all the package deliveries that go on all over the place and certainly here in Lakeville. But we had an issue with packages being taken from residential neighborhoods and doorsteps. We were able to develop a suspect and a suspect vehicle, did some surveillance, and actually were able to catch this person freshly leaving the scene of a stolen package. We got the vehicle stopped and ended up recovering over 80 items. 30 victims—almost all were reunited with happy owners. The driver and the suspect here was charged with a couple felonies related to mail theft. Those are a little bit tough to investigate and took a lot of time with our staff and following, and a lot of good tips submitted as well from our public that noticed things that didn't seem in place. We're happy for people speaking up when they see something in their neighborhoods. Then on the right, kind of a nice story with our embedded social worker Jess Hoppy. This was a parent who was really struggling with a young child with some behavioral issues, ended up calling the police department because they just didn't know where else to go. We helped kind of ease the situation in the very short term, but then quickly turned this over to our embedded social worker who then worked with the family ongoing. We got some good feedback from this family on some successes with this young child; it really reduced our service commitment from a police department standpoint but also left this family off in a lot better place with resources. It's just nice to be able to have someone walk alongside them rather than just pass off a phone number and say "here you go, call them." So just a good way to highlight that partnership we have going on. Then a handful of slides here related to statistics, both fourth quarter and then year-to-date. Our case files for the fourth quarter—we were almost on par with 2022. Year-to-date or annually, we were about 3,000 case numbers above where we were in 2022. These are all incidents that generate an official police report. Then calls for service in general—fourth quarter we were just about 13,500 calls, up about 3,000 from 2022 during that time period. A couple of the types that we look at frequently: The mental health side, welfare check, and crisis type calls were relatively steady between 2022 and 2023 for the fourth quarter. Then year-to-date, we were at about 51,500—that's up quite a bit from the 42,200 in 2022. Welfare checks were up a little bit and crisis/mental health were as well; and again, that's full year in 2023. Then on the traffic side of things, traffic stops were up pretty significantly in the fourth quarter, and those are all self-initiated. We have a dedicated traffic car and did some other traffic details where we focused on some problem areas. It's hard to totally tell if there's correlation there, but when traffic numbers are up, it's good to see crashes—and especially personal injury crashes—down. With vehicle speeds and enforcement out there, we're hoping that's making a difference. And then year-to-date again, the traffic stops are up quite a bit. Property damage crashes were pretty equal to 2022. Personal injury were up a little bit—and to get a personal injury crash, it’s anybody claiming injury during a crash. It doesn't necessarily mean they went to the hospital or even were visibly injured, but if they're claiming injury, it goes down as a personal injury crash. So, a real variety of injury types there. Some of our major offense reporting between 2022 and 2023 year-to-date: Our DUI (driving under the influence) offenses were up by quite a bit. Again, that kind of leads back to our proactive traffic work. Aggravated assaults were up by about 10. Vehicle thefts were down, which is good to see—we had quite a few of those in 2021 and 2022. Vandalism up a little bit, and holding pretty steady were weapons and sex offenses. Finally, just comparing as we do to a couple of our neighboring cities on this total calls for service—these are billable calls from Dakota 911. We were up a little bit from Burnsville and even more so from Apple Valley: 46,446 for us. Ending with a nice positive comment from a citizen on our Facebook page just giving us a little shout-out. When I say "us," this was our overnight staff; must have found an open door somewhere at their property or a vehicle, we don't know exactly what, but the officer involved was able to secure the door and hung a little note there. We have some door hangers that we leave just saying, "Hey, we were out, noticed the door open." If we can secure it without infringing upon anybody's property we can do that, but we'll hang a little note just so they're aware of it. Kind of nice for overnight folks that are out there a lot to get some recognition for being the eyes and ears while much of the community is sleeping. With that, I'm happy to entertain any questions that I can. [19:24] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Questions? Comments? Thanks Chief for a very thorough response and thanks to your department for all the work that they do. [19:34] **Police Chief Brad Paulson:** You bet. Thank you. [19:35] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** All right, moving on to item six, our consent agenda. Mr. Miller, anything you wanted to highlight here? [19:42] **City Administrator Justin Miller:** Thank you, Mayor and Council. A few items: Item 6G is a resolution approving appointments to city council committees and inter-agencies. This is an annual process that you go through, appointing yourself to various personnel, public safety, and liquor committees, as well as those that are representing the city in external affairs. Item 6I is a resolution amending the Lakeville Fire Relief Association bylaws relating to pension benefit levels. You discussed this at your last work session and it changes the vesting levels as well as increases the annual contribution amount to what we call the paid-on-call department—our volunteer fire department. Item 6M is actually two resolutions; it was in your packet as one resolution, but these resolutions will be amending the start times for your City Council meetings. This Council discussed at your retreat and has agreed to change both regular City Council meetings and work sessions to 6 p.m. starting March 1st. And then item 6U is a purchase agreement with the Milligan Studio for three public artworks which will go at the new Antlers Park as well as the Lakeville Area Art Center downtown. [20:47] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay, very good. Any items for the Council you wanted to discuss or pull? [20:54] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** Uh, I need to pull item F, appointing judges for the presidential nomination primary, because I'm on the list, so I need to abstain from that. [21:03] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay. Anything else? If not, I'll take a motion to approve the consent agenda except for item F. [21:10] **Councilmember Michelle Volk:** I move to approve the consent agenda except for item F. [21:15] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay. Is there a second? [Seconded]. Further discussion? All in favor say "Aye." **Councilmembers:** Aye. **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Opposed? [None]. Consent agenda passes. We'll move on. It sounds like we just need to approve F. Councilmember Wolter doesn't want to vote for his $23 per diem as an election judge. [21:32] **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** I think it's more than that. [21:34] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** I know, I just made up that number. Um, sorry, I'm trying to find the resolution here. Is there somebody that wants to make a motion on letter F? Yep, John. [21:42] **Councilmember John Bermel:** Uh, I move to approve the resolution appointing election judges for the March 5, 2024, presidential nomination primary. [21:55] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay, and is there a second? [Seconded]. Okay, any discussion about the motion? Okay, we'll just do a roll call. [22:15] **City Clerk Ann Orlofsky:** Volk? **Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Hi. **Ann Orlofsky:** Hellier? **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Hi. **Ann Orlofsky:** Bermel? **Councilmember John Bermel:** Aye. **Ann Orlofsky:** Wolter? **Councilmember Dan Wolter:** Abstain. **Ann Orlofsky:** Lee? **Councilmember Joshua Lee:** Aye. [22:25] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Okay, very good. Moving on to 7, 8, and 9: unfinished and new business. Anything Council wants to bring up? [No response]. Okay, if not, our next regular meeting is Tuesday, February 20th, because of President's Day, right here at City Hall. Next work session is Monday, February 26th, at the water treatment facility. And with that, I will take a motion to adjourn. [22:56] **Councilmember John Bermel:** So moved. [22:58] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Is there a second? **Councilmember Michelle Volk:** Second. [23:01] **Mayor Luke Hellier:** All in favor say "Aye." **Councilmembers:** Aye. **Mayor Luke Hellier:** Opposed? We're adjourned. [23:12] [Applause] [Music]