HomeMy WebLinkAbout2026.05.18 Public Services Commission1
COTTAGE GROVE PUBLIC SERVICES
COMMISSION
May 18, 2026
COUNCIL CHAMBERS - 7:00 PM
1. Call to Order
2. Pledge of Allegiance
3. Roll Call
4. Approval of the Agenda
5. Approval of Minutes
A 3/16/26 Minutes
6. Open Forum
7. Presentations
A Construction Update
B Fire Year In Review
8. Business Items
9. Commission Comments
10. Staff Reports and Materials
11. Council Comments
A Council Agendas
12. Adjournment
COTTAGE GROVE PUBLIC SERVICES COMMISSION March 16, 2026
12800 Ravine Parkway South
Cottage Grove, MN 55016
COUNCIL CHAMBER - 7:00 P.M.
1. CALL TO ORDER
The Cottage Grove Public Services Commission meeting was called to order at 7:00 p.m. by Commissioner Lise’ Rediske.
2. PLEDGE OF ALLEGIANCE
Commissioner Rediske asked everyone to please stand and join in reciting the Pledge of Allegiance.
3. ROLL CALL
Kari Reubish had called the roll. Present: Commissioner Lise’ Rediske; Commissioner Jenny Olson; Commissioner Nate Lotts;
Commissioner Tracy Jenson
Absent: Chair Mary Kons; Vice Chair Ron Kath; Commissioner Kelsey Moyer
Staff Present: Nick Arrigoni, Fire Department Captain
Ryan Burfeind, Public Works Director
Gary Orloff, Public Works Street Superintendent
Brad Petersen, Police Department Captain
Council Member Dave Clausen
4. APPROVAL OF THE AGENDA
Commissioner Lotts made a motion to approve the agenda; second by Commissioner Olson. Motion carried: 4-0.
5. APPROVAL OF MINUTES
A. Staff Recommendation: Approve the 11-17-2025 Public Services Commission Meeting Minutes.
Commissioner Jenson made a motion to approve the 11-17-2025 Public Services Commission Meeting Minutes; second by
Commissioner Olson. Motion carried: 4-0.
6. OPEN FORUM
Commissioner Rediske opened the Open Forum and said this is the opportunity for anyone who wished to speak on anything that’s
not on tonight’s agenda. No one spoke. Commissioner Rediske closed the Open Forum.
7. PRESENTATIONS
A. Year in Review by Police Department
Captain Brad Petersen said I’m going to take a few minutes and wrap up 2025 and set the stage for what’s coming in 2026. I’m going
to try to run through this at a pretty fast clip and give the major highlights, but if you see something that you want to take a little
deeper dive into, by all means holler or throw something at me. I could spend quite a bit of time talking about all of our
accomplishments in 2025, but I won’t do that. For the sake of time, I’ll just highlight some of our major accomplishments:
• We successfully launched our new C.S.O. Cadet Program, which was highly successful in recruiting and developing talent.
We have our first two cadets on the street as solo police officers now, so we’re very proud to announce that. As you know,
everybody’s very proud of our new K-9, our Therapy K-9 Riggs. He’s doing amazing work out there.
• We have a DWI-Traffic Safety Officer, which was grant funded, was highly successful. We’ll talk a little bit more about that
in a few minutes.
• We have a new Crime Scene Team that hit the streets and was functional throughout the majority of the year.
• We launched a bunch of new technology, including Automated License Plate Readers.
• We were recognized as a model agency for our Officer Wellness programming.
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Another thing that I’m also proud to announce and I know I told you this before, but our Community Satisfaction Rating, which is
measured a couple different ways, is extremely high. So, our POLCO Study showed above-average satisfaction in our overall Public
Safety Services and then our own internal polling is showing about a 93-to-95% satisfaction rating. So, our officers are delivering
great customer service and the community is largely very pleased with the way we’re delivering Public Safety services.
• Our community is extremely safe, as compared to most other communities, locally and across the country. Despite our
rapid growth, crime is very, very low, it’s been trending down since 2019. There’s a little caveat to that crime trend that I’ll
get to in a moment. Our call volume is dramatically increasing for a number of different reasons, one of those being the
growth in our community, so of course there will be a demand for police services, but that doesn’t equate to increasing
crime. A lot of it is because we’re doing more traffic stops, we’re doing more proactive police services, things of that nature.
Because of the low crime rate, our Investigative Division is not over saturated with tasks in their queue; so, on average,
each detective has about nine cases that they’re actively investigating in comparison to detectives in other communities,
who oftentimes have 20, 30, 40 or more active cases that they’re investigating. So, what that means is our investigators and
detectives have the ability to spend a lot of time on those cases, they’re really bringing them to closure, so they have an
extremely high closure and prosecution rate. It gives us a lot of time to focus on proactive problem solving, community
engagement, and things like that rather than just being completely reactive to crime.
• Use of Force: Ours is very, very low. We did over 50,000 Calls for Service, and out of that, only 91 Uses of Force. We’ll talk
more about this in a minute, but the majority of those Uses of Force are very, very low level, where it’s either a threat or a
display of Use of Force or very low level of Use of Force. All of the Use of Force was deemed reasonable, within policy, so
we’re not seeing any issues that we need to address there. So, by all metrics and comparisons, our department is highly
professional, high performing, very efficient, and a lot of people consider us a model agency, which makes us pretty proud.
• Call Volume: You can see that year over year we’re growing in Call Volume. Last year we took almost 10,000 Calls for
Service more than the previous year. As I said, a lot of that is due to more traffic stops, more proactive patrols, more
livability issues, but not crime, and we’re making fewer arrests as compared to past years. One thing to note is we ended
2024 about six officers down, and those were mostly anticipated departures, we don’t have a retention issue. However,
that kind of put us in the hole to start 2025, and so we recruited heavily and hired and trained those six officers, but that
takes time. So, you can see in our average Response Time, we had a little increase from Quarter 1, but by the time we
finished the year in 2025, we were back down to 5.5 minutes Response Time, which exceeds the benchmark average across
the country.
• Community Service Officers: We had more Community Service Officers (CSOs), and that was because of the C.S.O. Cadet
Program. That takes time, money, and training to get those officers on the street as solo officers.
• Reserve Officers: One thing that I’m also really excited to announce is that our Reserve Officers put in a lot more hours last
year, and that’s because that program has seen a lot of growth and the program has been restored to its once great, robust,
and very active state that we had pre-COVID. It took a hit during the COVID years, but we’re right back to where we need to
be with that program.
• Proactive Policing: You can see how many proactive checks we’re doing, we’re in excess of 20,000 checks per year, where
we’re checking schools, parks, businesses, things like that, to try and detect and prevent crime.
• Medical Calls: We’re seeing more medical calls. As our community ages and grows, obviously we’re going to see more
medical calls. The overdose calls have remained relatively stable, that’s a trend that we’re seeing everywhere, not just here.
The good news is we’re seeing fewer overdose deaths. Mental health calls are still occupying a lot of our time and focus.
The good news is I can report that they’re being managed very, very effectively, and we’ll get into the details of that here in
a moment. The takeaway from that is that is a major focus and a major draw on our resources.
• Crimes: As I said, crime is very low when we compare Cottage Grove to the other benchmark cities across the country. So, if
you look at the graph on the left, the blue shows our person crimes, the green shows our property crimes. Cottage Grove is
on the left and the benchmark cities are on the right, and you can see by comparison how much fewer crimes we have than
the other comparable cities. That chart on the right shows the actual count of those various types of crimes, so by looking
at that, you can see how truly safe Cottage Grove is. Here’s another way of looking at crime: In that top left, it reports Part 1
and Part 2 crimes. Part 1 is generally your most serious crimes, Part 2 is a little bit less severe. From 2024 to 2025, you can
see for the most part our crime has reduced, and here’s that caveat that I was talking about: You can see that the Part 2
crime increased from 2024 to 2025, and that is largely due to two factors: 1) The significant increase in DWI arrests; by
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being deliberate about targeting and arresting more DWI drivers, which keeps our streets safe, we inflated that number
from past years to this year. 2) We implement that online crime reporting, so we’re capturing more of that unreported
crime factor, which is a good thing. So, as the community reports more of those crimes to us, it gives us the ability to track,
trend, and take action to prevent more of that crime. While you might look at that, on the surface it looks like that crime
rate increased, at least the Part 2 crimes, that’s actually a good thing in this case. When we look down at that bottom trend
line, you can see that over the last six years, our overall crime rate has dramatically decreased, which goes to the overall
safety of our community.
• Traffic Safety: You can see that over the last year, we did about 2,000 more traffic stops, and that’s due to our DWI-Traffic
Safety Officer and just an overall focus on traffic safety across our whole patrol division. That translates to more traffic
stops, more citations, and more arrests. That also will impact our overall Traffic Safety, which one way to measure that is
crashes. As our community grows, we can expect to see more crashes. So, we saw a subtle increase in crashes from 2024 to
2025, a pretty significant increase in fatalities, an increase from two in 2024 to four in 2025. However, three of those four
crashes occurred on Highway 61 where we don’t have primary jurisdiction, but we do have to record those numbers in our
statistics. So, although we did see an increase in traffic crashes and fatalities, when we compare Cottage Grove to the
benchmarks cities, our Traffic Safety is significantly safer than those other benchmark cities.
• Investigative Division: Less cases were referred to them, which is largely due to the decrease in crime rate. However,
they’re still charging about the same number of cases; again, that’s because they have the time to investigate those cases,
which leads to successful charging. You can see that they’re maintaining about an 80% clearance rate, and I don’t know of
another agency that’s maintaining that level of clearance rate. Sometimes you’ll see cities who have a violent crime
problem or a vehicle theft program, and they’ll invest a lot of energy on that one area, and they’ll manage to maintain a
very high clearance rate, such as 80%; but then you’ll see a decrease in clearance in those other crimes because they just
don’t have the bandwidth to investigate all types of crime. Whereas when we average it across the board, we maintain an
80% clearance rate. On the bottom right, you can see our Community Impact Team and some of the work they’re doing,
they’re spending a lot of time and energy planning and maintaining safety at all of our community events, which continues
to grow and draw more of our bandwidth.
• Case Management Unit (CMU): CMU is managing a very, very high workload. Our CMU are those staff that deal with clients
who would otherwise generate a lot of call volume and draw a lot of Public Safety resources because they’re people who
are dealing with mental health issues, substance abuse issues, and other things like that. And, so, this is probably the slide
that I’m most proud of; with our CMU, we measured our success by the number of calls, the number of arrests, and the
number of emergency hospitalizations in that clientele before they were enrolled in CMU vs. after. You can see that after
they were enrolled in CMU, there’s an 89% reduction in overall call volume, 65% reduction in arrests, and an 81% reduction
in hospitalizations. So, that’s just absolute proof of the good work that they’re doing and how that goes to make our
community safer, and it improves the lives of those clients and their families as well. I’ll say that they average about 47
active cases, so there are a lot of people on their books, but there are about 47 active cases that they’re managing, and that
number ebbs and flows, but throughout the year they average about 47 cases. So, when you think about that, Detective
Shaver, our embedded social worker, and then a couple parttime people when they have time they’re contributing; so,
those two people are really trying to manage 47 people, and you can only imagine if we had another social worker or
another detective to deal with this problem, they’d only be more effective.
• Use of Force: As I said, 91 reportable Uses of Force. Cottage Grove is unique in that we require our officers to report even
very low levels of force. If our officer displays a weapon or threatens to use force, that requires them to report because we
want to capture all of that, we want to make sure that all of those incidents are reviewed thoroughly, and that we take
away every possible lesson from those incidents so we can use the least amount of force and be most responsive to our
community. Although you can see that number is slightly increasing, keep in mind that our call volume is going up
dramatically over that same time period. So, proportionately, in comparison to our Calls for Service, we’re using less force
from year to year. We think about that just in terms of true percentages, and I don't know what 91 divided by 51,000 is, but
it’s a very, very small number that we’re actually using force, and that’s contrary to the narrative out there. If you watch TV
or read the news, people might think that police in general are heavy handed or we use force very commonly, but that’s
just actually untrue. So, every Use of Force is reviewed by our Use of Force Review Panel, and all 91 of those incidents were
deemed reasonable, within policy. We took away three opportunities to improve our training, tactics, equipment policy,
things like that. On the bottom left, you can see how many times we actually used force vs. just the threat or display of
force, most of that force was very low level. We’re doing hands on to do an escort hold or grappling with somebody, we’re
not Tasing people or using K-9s to bite people or using PepperBall with very high frequency at all. Most of those higher
levels of force last year I could count on one hand. Another thing that I’m proud to announce is that our pursuits keep
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trending down, and we’ve accomplished that not by being restrictive in our approach and policy regarding pursuits. We
could easily accomplish that reduction by creating a very restrictive policy and telling our officers they can’t pursue, but we
accomplished that through allowing our officers to use their own discretion to decide when it’s reasonable and safe to
pursue. Our officers are making great decisions, they’re not out there endangering the public, unnecessarily banging up our
squad cars, they’re just making good, sound decisions about when it’s safe and feasible and practical to pursue. That’s
transiting to fewer pursuits and that’s a good thing because pursuits are highly dangerous to our community at times.
• Sworn Staffing: As I said, we closed out 2025 at full staff. If you compare Cottage Grove to other communities, we tend to
have fewer sworn officers than other communities, but we operate at a very high efficiency level, and our officers are cross
trained in a number of different disciplines. So, we accomplish a lot with those fewer officers. You can also see that we have
pretty low sick and injured hours, which speaks to our culture of safety and our high morale here and the fact that we’re full
staffed. When we’re full staffed, our officers have a luxury of taking time off when they need it or want it vs. having to call
in sick.
• Budget: Speaking of efficiency, you can see our operating budget and our overtime budget in comparison to other
communities. It shows how efficiently we’re operating. On that bottom left, in the actual overtime hours, you can see that
even starting the year at six officers down, we closed out the year with fewer overtime hours vs. the previous year.
• Awards: I’m giving credit to some of our officers that deserve some credit because they got special awards.
• Police Services Survey: Here’s the second slide that I’m very proud of, the overall satisfaction rating from our community
and the ability to screen these surveys as they come in. Day after day, I’m seeing quotes like you see on the bottom of the
screen where the community is praising our officers in our department, and it just goes to show that we’re doing everything
that we can right and the community appreciates what we’re doing.
Captain Petersen said so that was a lot. I’ll stop, take a breath, give you an opportunity to ask questions before I move into our
focus for 2026.
Commissioner Rediske thanked Captain Petersen and asked if there were any questions from the commission. None were
asked. She said I don’t have any questions, but I want to say it’s very, very impressive. The City of Cottage Grove every year has
been impressive when I see these reports, and it just is continuing to trend in that positive, so thank you.
Captain Petersen replied thank you.
Commissioner Lotts said Brad, before you go on, I also want to comment on the number of calls, that is insanity for Calls for
Service considering there’s 45,000 people in Cottage Grove, give or take. So, that’s like more than one per person.
Captain Petersen replied and keep in mind, we’re also tracking things like park checks, business checks, school checks, so
those aren’t all 911 calls, but each of those are interaction with the community and an opportunity for things to go right or
things to go wrong. So, that’s why we track it in that way.
Commissioner Lotts said yeah, I love it. I remember when I first got on the commission, you had mentioned, I think you were
maybe just taking over the program for the metrics and building out this summary of the year, but this is incredible, by the way.
The number of metrics and the story that it can tell is amazing. You don’t even have to literally talk through this stuff, I can page
through here and understand the things; so, if you think about community members that aren’t here to listen to this, I mean
you could literally send this out and they would be able to understand a lot of the things. So, bravo, fantastic work! It’s amazing
to see, and it’s awesome to be able to compare it year over year. So, thank you.
Captain Petersen replied thank you, so that’s the goal. So, we’re going to present this to Council on Wednesday, and after
that, it will be made available for public consumption. So, I’m looking forward to hearing the community’s feedback, and I
appreciate your feedback as well. If there’s anything else that you would like to see in terms of metrics, definitely let us know;
its a working document, living document, and we continue to strive for improvement.
Commissioner Rediske said excellent, thank you.
Captain Petersen said just a brief moment to talk about our 2026 Strategic Priorities:
Our Five Year Strategic Plan is still alive and well, fully relevant, and still in effect, but Command Staff took a minute to digest
2024, 2025 Annual Reports, evaluate where we’re at in that Strategic Plan and look into 2026 and look at what we expect to
happen. For example, we know that we’re going to have some retirements in our Command Staff in this coming year, and so
one of the priorities that we identified is we need to accelerate our succession planning. So, we took that minute to look at what
issues are we having, what do we foresee happening, so what do our priorities really need to be this year. When we did that
analysis, the four things that we identified are: The need to continue to focus on our Core Functions.
1) Accelerate our Succession Planning: As above.
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2) Providing Safety and Security for our Community: We need to continue to manage that crime rate, and just as
importantly, our community members need to feel safe.
3) Traffic Safety: We’ve heard it loud and clear for our community that Traffic Safety is a major concern, so we’re
going to continue to focus on that. One of the things that we’ve done is we’ve added two additional Traffic Safety
Officers whose sole focus throughout this whole year will be managing traffic safety. Maybe in a future meeting I’ll
be able to report how they’re doing.
4) Promote Wellness and Culture: In order for our officers to serve their community at their highest potential, we
need to invest in their training and their wellness and maintain that culture of excellence. So, we’re going to invest
in that wellness and culture. You can read for yourself how we plan to accomplish that, but again, we’d love to
hear your feedback on that and take that into consideration as we dive into 2026.
Captain Petersen said I’ll be happy to answer your questions.
Commissioner Rediske asked if there were any questions or comments from the commissioners.
Commissioner Olson asked is there a specific number of officers you’re looking to hire in 2026? Have you identified that at all?
Captain Petersen replied so currently we’re at full strength. We’re expecting some retirements to happen this year, and so, any
hiring we do will be backfilling those people who leave through retirement or for other reasons.
Commissioner Lotts said I was just going to comment on how awesome that Public Service Announcement of roundabouts was the
other day. I forget where I saw it, it was on social media or it was in the newsletter, the roundabouts and which lane to be in; I think
people perceive roundabouts the wrong way, they seem to speed up going into them, so that was fantastic to see like you need to
slow down and just calm traffic and not increase the speed. So, yeah, that was good.
Commissioner Rediske said and don’t stop when you’re in the middle of it. All right, thank you everybody.
8. BUSINESS ITEMS
A. E-Bike Diversion Program
Captain Petersen said for about the last year or so, we’ve been talking about E-Bike and scooter safety, and it’s kind of culminated
into this presentation; and I’ll be doing a presentation to Council in a workshop on Wednesday, and hopefully, pending their
approval, we’ll be taking some pretty significant steps forward to address this issue.
I had hoped to give you some more specific information on a new Juvenile Diversion Program related to E-Bike safety; however,
that meeting got cancelled today, so I’ll be meeting with the Youth Service Bureau on Wednesday. So, at a future date, I’ll give you
some actual details on the nuts and bolts of that program. We’ve been working very closely with them, and we’re excited to launch
that program later this month. So, more to come on that.
In lieu of that, I’m just going to take a minute to talk about our strategy for addressing our new Safety Plan and action that we’re
going to take to address this in 2026. If you remember a past presentation, you spent quite a bit of time talking about all of the
different categories of recreational vehicles and mobility devices and E-Bikes. I know I got everybody thoroughly confused, it’s a
challenge to understand that. I think the more time I spend on it, sometimes the more confused I get, so I understand and I can
empathize with our community that this is a really tough issue to wrap their hands around. So, I’m going to give just a real quick
refresher.
• Recreational Vehicles: Think side by sides, ATVs.
• Neighborhood Electric Vehicles: Those are the mini electric vehicles.
• Micro-Mobility Devices can be a lot of things, it’s really a catchall for a lot of different things: E-Bikes, Motorized Foot
Scooters, Segways, one-wheel Hoverboard type things, Electric Assistive Personal Device, etc. Some of these are defined by
State Statute and some are not.
• Motorized Bicycles: Think about a traditional bicycle that has a gasoline engine bolted onto it or an E-Bike that has either no
pedals or is over 1,500 Watts.
• Electric Motorcycles (E-Moto): These can come in all shapes and sizes.
• Pocket Motorcycles
• Traditional Class 1, 2, and 3 E-Bikes
So, State Statute is all over the map, different rules for each of these types of transportation devices. Our current ordinance doesn’t
address a lot of those, so our aim is to amend our ordinance and then educate our public accordingly, and then pending Council
approval, amend our ordinance with a couple commonsense rules to make our community and our riders safer.
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Our Five-Step Safety Plan:
Recommended Ordinance Changes
1) Change the title to “Recreational Motor Vehicles, Neighborhood Electric Vehicles, & Micro-Mobility Devices.”
2) Add and modify definitions for all the missing components derived directly from Minnesota Statute 169.011. There
should be no contradictions between our ordinance and Statute.
3) Require operators to comply with relevant Minnesota Statutes. There are a couple occasions where our ordinance would
be more restrictive or require something in addition to Statute.
4) Permit motorized foot scooters to operate on mixed-use paths (not sidewalks). Think about our bike trails and our walking
trails throughout the City, I’m proposing that we let motorized scooters ride on those. The alternative is we force them into
the roadway because by Statute, they cannot ride on sidewalks. A 12-year-old rider is allowed to ride a motorized scooter
but not on a sidewalk; so, if we don’t let them ride the paths and bike trails, we’re pushing them into the traffic lane, which
I don’t think is a very good idea.
5) Require operators to exercise due care and operate at a reasonable speed. I know that this is going to be difficult to
enforce, especially if we put a number on it. If I said nobody can ride at >25 MPH, that’s going to be very difficult to enforce
as I’d have to have officers out there with radar and lasers. I think a better approach would be to say all riders need to
maintain a reasonable speed, you can’t endanger the public and you can’t be a nuisance. It gives the officers the ability to
make a judgment call and use their best judgment given all of the factors and the totality of the circumstances if their speed
was reasonable or not; we’ll let the court sort it out, ideally it will never go to court, it’ll end up in a YSB diversion, which will
translate to safer ridership.
6) Require operators to yield the right of way to pedestrians. A lot of our complaints come from walkers or joggers when
they get buzzed by an F16 going past them, that’s never fun or safe.
7) Prohibit the operation of neighborhood electric vehicles on sidewalks, mixed-use paths, and bicycle paths.
8) Omit 6-5-3(B) permitting vehicles to be left unattended.
9) Require all operators and riders under the age of 18 to wear a helmet. This is probably the biggest recommendation here.
10) Establish violations of this ordinance as a misdemeanor. Our goal is not to have these result in citations, most of these will
result in a conversation and/or diversion.
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Commissioner Rediske said thank you. Any questions or comments for discussion?
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Commissioner Rediske asked if there were any other comments or discussion or questions.
9. COMMISSION COMMENTS - None.
10. STAFF REPORTS AND MATERIALS
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Probably the big announcement for us is our Spring sweeping, which starts April 6, weather permitting. Hopefully, all of the snow
melts and it will give us time for the boulevards to dry off. We typically run 7:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. if we don’t get any rain days, we
can usually complete it in five-to-six days. We bring in four contracted-out sweepers, and we use two of ours, plus we do hit all the
trails and sidewalks with the little machines, so that’s a big one. Again, during that week of April 6, if residents can keep vehicles off
the road, it helps us get by in one pass. I just want to kind of remind everybody we see a lot of people wanting to blow all their
debris, leaves and everything, into the street, but that’s not permitted.
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going through Fire School right now, and will hopefully be finishing that up here going into Spring, and she works with the crew as
well. She’ll play a big role in our Community Outreach programs as well.
11. COUNCIL COMMENTS
A. Council Agenda
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obviously to apply for a grant to help add to the Fire Department because I think it’s definitely needed and hopefully this grant will
come through, and we can hire some people and they can get them going next year. So, we look forward to that.
12. ADJOURNMENT
2025
Fire Department
Annual Report
Fire Department Leadership Team
Director of Public Safety Brad Petersen
Fire Chief Jon Pritchard
Deputy Chief Nick Arrigoni
Deputy Chief Peter Fischer
Strategic Plan
By the Numbers
Major Accomplishments
Responded to over 5,300 calls for service
Initiated 5-year strategic plan
Completed Standards of Cover and authorized to pursue staffing grants
Expanded Community Paramedic services
Promoted FAO/Inspectors (new specialty positions)
Established a Special Operations Team (water, haz-mat, technical rescue)
Improved ISO rating from 4 to 3 (improved!)
Developed a peer support network with holistic wellness support
Implemented a Fire Cadet program
First 2 Paramedics certified with Firefighter/EMT to Firefighter/Paramedic
program
Authorized joining East Metro Training Facility (EMTF) JPA for live fire training
facility access
Standards of Cover Findings
Call concurrency – high risk to cottage grove
Over 40 percent of calls overlap = no fire/EMS coverage for Cottage Grove
Increasing demand
Change to PSA options – study shows that Cottage Grove without Newport and
St. Paul Park still has high risk and requires more resources
Aging fleet – accumulating fleet needs and vehicles falling behind
replacement schedules
Central Fire Station meets current demand, yet 2nd station will be required
for southwest portion of city – timeline is not determined right now
Sunset part-time firefighter program
Looking Forward
Pursue SAFER grant for staffing adds
Add over three years if no SAFER grant
Bring up to 24 Firefighters = additional crew 24/7
Continue Firefighter/EMT to Firefighter/Paramedic pathway Capital
replacement plan with engine as priority
Pursue grant to replace SCBAs (must replace by 2029)
Plan for second fire station in the southwest part of city
Continue all-hazards training and response
Questions and Discussion