Let us pray.

Dear Gracious Eternal Father, we thank you for another day's journey, and we ask that you continue to touch our law enforcement, touch the bereavement of the soldiers who were lost in war, touch, Lord, all around our city, all of the officers that serve so gallantly and bravely to do the duty they do every day.

And we ask this and many more blessings, in Jesus' name, amen I obtain a motion for approval of tonight's agenda So moved Moved by Mr. Busker Second Second by Mr. Newton Any questions? All in favor?

Aye All opposed?

Okay, the approval of 80 minutes for February 10, 2026 So moved moved by Mr. Busker, seconded by Mr. Moon, all in favor, all opposed, approval of claims, have you guys seen the claims, public safety, $195,362.05, and public property, $53,465.81.

Moved by Mixon News, seconded by Mr. Busker. All in favor? All in favor? All opposed? I'd like to follow comment. Report to committee, sheriff's department. Thank you, Mr. Bush. Right now we have four in the FTO program still. We still have two at school. They'll be graduating in April. We held a mayor commission interview last night. We had seven corrections officers that interviewed, all of to be good candidates. They're all going for one position.

Crime suppression unit stats, I believe, were sent out. We had a pretty good month.

New business. What have we got here now? Well, that's all I have.

Okay. All right. Any questions? Okay. Mersey, May.

Thank you, Mr. Bush. That's all my report is quite lengthy. I'm not going to read it to you guys.

and I'm going to cover a few of the things I think I'm kind of recording.

Deputy Director of Wardswine attended a Little Night Fire Service Institute and three-fourth policemen hosted an active shooter incident command and school safety violent event incident training on February 12th and 13th, shooting on a island.

It was two-fold. The first day was the director of law enforcement.

for the second day was cured towards the school system and school supervisors. He worked out really well. The training was excellent. Robin was very impressed with that time's loss spent. I think we're going to try to do more of that in the future, trying to include our Stevenson County ERT team and so forth and so on. Another training that we attended was obviously the annual So, where are you at here?

It was a mass casualty tabletop drill held at FHN Mercy Health, put on by Night Park.

That was on February 25th.

That was a bus accident with fatalities.

A tabletop drill included sheriff's office, our office, police department, hospital, fire, other local agencies, too.

So, we've been busy with doing these drills here lately.

That's a good thing for us.

We have our upcoming training, which is the Homeland Security and Exercise Evaluation Program training on April 1st and 2nd at the County Courthouse That is still on schedule and on track to happen We are still working on trying to get a date for the senior officials and appointed officials NIMS training This will happen before May 16th, it'll be on a Saturday morning, I just don't have the date yet And as soon as I get the date confirmed, I want to get that out to you guys as soon as possible.

We had some issues with the instructor being able to attend.

Received an email.

This is the situation for us.

Our dispatchers in the CAD system, the PSAP, Public Safety Answering Point System, 911 centers, both for the county and for the city, The National Weather Service has reached out, and we're kind of in a bad area as far as radar goes here in Northwest Illinois.

They have sometimes not been able to get competent weather instances and emergencies reported to them.

So we're working on a system that will be able to automatically send our weather incidents to the National Weather Service in Davenport.

as soon as the dispatch arrives and types it into their system, it will automatically email them and let them know hypothetically if we have flash flooding, if we have a tornado on the ground, if we have snow in excess, whatever the report comes in and it becomes a report via police or fire, it will go down to the National Service. This is in the process of happening, but I think that's going to go.

So, a couple other upcoming trainings. CN Railroad, my experience with them has been nothing but professional. My ears are the fire service. They're a great organization. Unfortunately, they did have a derailment up in Nora here a couple months ago. Every year, they reach out and they have trainings. There's a couple coming up. Freeport Fire and a division hazmat team is going to be training down at Valley Shards in Freeport on Thursday, no, on Tuesday.

the 14th of April. And then out in the ethanol plant in Lena, they have actually three dates set up for the rural fire departments to attend. It's just basically incident response training and car familiarization. So if they roll up on what they did in aura, they'll be more familiar. And this is really not like a reactive type training. They offer this every year. So it's something that CN is very good about. And I'm glad that they are the only railroad going through our area. Another thing, talking about the EMPG grant that supplies my budget, I received all of the money back that we applied for for fiscal year 2024-2025. I received a check in February that capped our total at $22,344, which is what we applied for. Right now, federal government, for that part, is shut down, so there'll be no more money's being allocated. So Stevens County, we're fortunate to get ours. There are a lot of counties out there that are not being fully funded at this point. And we're still waiting for fiscal year 2025 grant to come through. They're optimistic. I don't know. We'll have to wait and see. And I think that's, oh, two other things.

Two organizations in the state of Illinois. One is IASMA. It's an Illinois Emergency Services Management Association. This is a longstanding organization that's been in the emergency management business for many years. I'm told, I have not thought of it yet, but I have not put a lot of time looking into it yet, but I'm told that our county did reach and pass a resolution to be involved. It's basically a mutual aid agreement is what this is. It's for county to county, i.e.

If I needed something from Winnebago County, if we were part of this and we had to sign an agreement, we could exchange mostly material type things, equipment, okay?

I'm going to research this. There's some pushback on our region level as to say as to why we need to have this in resolution form, maybe a memorandum of understanding might be a little easier to do and serve the same purpose.

so I'm researching this. I may be back with this next month to take to the council and ask for your approval on but I'm just not ready to do that right now and very similar is the Illinois incident management system is IMS which is another organization this one a little different this one is a mutual aid agreement for the 13 counties in Northwest Illinois Region 2 that also includes equipment, and also includes like personnel. So if they needed to have Robin or myself to head down to Bureau County because they have a mass tornado go through there and they need some help running their EOC, we would send us down there. Again, we're still looking at maybe a memorandum of understanding would be better suited versus the resolution. But smoke supply sample language, both cannot be deviated from. That's the problem.

for my submissions for Cardinal. Cardinal may want to make some changes. They really can't be because it's a regional agreed upon language. I'm going to continue to research this a little bit more here next week or two, and I'll make a presentation next month about how I'm going to pursue this fluid. And that is all I have.

You know, Rob and I were talking in December, January is kind of slow. Nobody want to do anything. And man, February hit and we've been wrong. That's good, though. That's good. As far as with the school shooting training, that done at the school or do schools have any kind of drill in the school shootings or what?

Yes. Throughout the county, well, the city does for sure, but throughout the county, there's mandatory fire drills and lockdown drills, what they have.

and right now I'm doing all the training in all of our county schools for Active Shooter type of stuff.

Okay.

Okay.

Yeah, this particular class was kind of instigated, I believe, by the fire chiefs, rural fire chiefs in the county that wanted to have some kind of training, and it was spirited by the city of Freeport Police Department, and it was good training.

Okay.

Good training.

Good as well.

Okay.

Inquest.

All right.

You got a coroner.

Coroner's report, February, there were 49 total deaths. There were six call-outs or six deaths on the scene. There was one autopsy. 16 death certificates were signed off by the coroner, 33 by a doctor, 42 were natural causes, and six deaths are pending investigation.

Okay. And those stats are all down from January, which is amazing. Down from January? Yep. Okay. Total deaths in January of 59, we're at 49 in February. Okay. Any questions? Okay. Let's move on. Are they going to need old business? Any new business? If not, any comments from the committee members?

You can probably hear this again, but the upcoming summer NACO's convention is in New Orleans, and we bumped up the, I don't think you forgot that, we bumped it up, $5,000 a county to get extra people to go Sorry, what month is that?

It's in July, middle of July, towards the weekend, first couple days of the week Assuming it would be before UCCI?

just before the conference.

Yeah, it's like the week before.

And then later that weekend, that Sunday is when the golf game happens.

Do you have dates for the UCCI event?

Yeah.

While he's looking at that, Mr. Bush, did you want to comment at all on the interviews or interviews for the corner?

You want me to talk?

Yeah.

We spoke with Tom Knezki yesterday, myself, Mr. Bush, and Mr. Hadley. We interviewed him. Not really in depth, just kind of got a feel for his ideas and some of the ideas that the board members wanted to see done in that office.

I basically told everyone in the room that I've been working with Tom since probably November about getting him into this office and kind of getting his feet wet.

He has been doing that, but once he takes over full-time, I'll work hand-in-hand with him with whatever he needs, and hopefully everything works out.

Our recommendation at the time was unanimous that Tom would be put in that position after March 17th with a projection date of around April 1st, and then he would be in that position as appointed until November 5th when he would be elected, and he is on the ballot.

Yeah, I was okay with it. I mean, he had been in that position and working. And so I guess the only question I had is, how serious are you for the position? Yeah. I think a lot of times people want to get into a position. They want to get in there about what it's about. Then they lose interest.

so that was my major concern is you know was he gonna stay so um yeah yeah and I think one of the other questions that us three had without Tom in the room is when is the resolution up that the wages can be discussed is that this year? No I don't think so we're only halfway through the firm I believe so it'd be 27 Spring of 27, it's 180 days prior to the election, I think, or is it this morning?

Because this election cycle wins and will be discussed April, May.

Yeah.

So?

So not until a year from now.

Effective in 28, January.

Okay.

And I think another question that came out as far as Virginia for his deputy.

Yeah.

Well, increase in that.

Oh, thank you. Can you handle that by resolution? Deputy Poynus?

No, when Mr. Welch did it, I believe he presented it through the budget.

Yeah. Okay. Okay.

So that's something that, you know, budget gets addressed every year.

Okay.

Just a couple of dates.

And I mean, just to keep in mind, April 14 to 15, you probably already know about that, but just put it out there, it's the UCCI legislative, and it's a dual, a joint event between the Chicago Association, which is ISACO and UCCI, and 14 to 15, it's going to be packed in state because both the House and Senate are in session, so everybody's in town.

So if you're going to go make a reservation because the hotels are going to be gone Now I think Mr. Bush, myself, don't know that anybody else has gotten back to us on again Thank you, Jerry, I'll keep talking about it So that's the only issue is hotels will be challenging if you stay the night On that other piece, in July we have the annual NACO convention again That's the 17th through the 22nd and so we can also do this and yes again we've added more money in case somebody wants to go you'll see you probably get on if you haven't got an email about how they don't do it so and then the annual golf outing the annual UCCI event is 26 27 28 of July yeah so that's a Sunday Monday Tuesday okay thank you so July going to be a business owner.

So that's all I have.

Okay.

One other thing, if we may take delegation to Washington, D.C., we're looking at doing that.

We have just an Illinois delegation of county board members.

So if you're thinking you might want to do that, that'll happen probably.

But we can fall over.

It'll be in the fall.

Yeah.

Thanks, sir.

All right.

There's nothing else.

I'll entertain a motion to move by Mr. Busker, seconded by Mr. Newton.

Yes, sir.

All in favor.

All in favor.

Good night.