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That's bringing the village board meeting May 11, 2026
To order.
And we need the roll call from
The clerk.
Caris.
Here.
Batia.
Here.
Ventrini.
Here.
Washburn.
Here.
DeGroote.
Next item is Pledge of allegiance.
Please join us.
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.
Okay.
We have a couple of presentations straight away.
First is South Shore fire department.
Thank you.
Chief Dustin Ellis.
Thank you.
Sorry.
I gave your firefighters a hard time today.
Thank you.
They were inspecting my office.
No, they weren't.
They weren't inspecting the office.
Yeah.
Good evening.
You're here to go over just a brief summary of our annual report.
I'll say the annual report is a long time coming for the fire department.
It's been a few years since we've done one.
So we're proud to put one together for you guys.
Happy to answer any questions you have of the annual report.
Both here offline.
So just a quick overview.
In 2025, we were authorized for 68 full time personnel.
That's roughly 42 firefighters.
For 2026, we're authorized up to 69 personnel.
That includes the fire inspector that was hired this year.
We covered 38 square miles, roughly 34,000 residents between the two communities of Mount Pleasant and Sturtivant.
And in 2025, we answered 6,378 total calls for service.
From a fire station standpoint, a lot of you know the sorority.
We operate out of four fire stations, three in Mount Pleasant, one in the village's third event.
A little bit about our fleet.
We operate three fire engines, two ladder trucks, four primary med units with two secondary med units,
two wild land vehicles, one special operations vehicle, and we have a boat.
From our call volume from 2025, like I said, 6,378 total incidents.
Of that, 4,986 were EMS related.
That's about 78% of our call volume, which tracks nationwide what fire-based EMS does.
Out of that breakdown, just some highlights, 37 building fires, 333 vehicle accidents, 406 fire alarms,
and 271 other calls.
So natural gas leaks, carbon oxide calls, good intent calls.
If somebody calls a fire house and they need help with a smoke detector, that generates a call for service if we have to go out.
From our EMS runs, here's the breakdown of our primary med units, what they've done for EMS calls.
Again, 78% of calls for service are EMS based.
The good thing about our service delivery model, even if we're out of ambulances due to multiple calls,
all of our fire engines and ladder trucks are ALS capable to provide that service
while we wait for another ambulance from another community.
Again, you can see the breakdown just for our primary med units.
You'll see fire station 10 or med 10 being lower than the restroom considerably, lower than the restroom.
We share that fire station with the village of Caledonia.
So we have a mutual aid agreement that if we're out, say in engine 10,
med 20, who's from Caledonia, will take that call.
So it's reflective of what med 10 actually did in EMS calls, but not reflective of what that station did in EMS runs.
From a community risk reduction standpoint,
the Bureau manages anywhere between 80 to 100 open permits at any given time.
I think right now we're at roughly 90, and that's new construction renovation projects
that we manage from a fire protection system or a fire alarm standpoint.
This is driven by the growth we're experiencing here in Mount Pleasant.
It's been like that for the fire prevention bureau, the community risk bureau for two or three years now
managing that number of open permits.
Out of all of our buildings, we have 1,119 inspectable properties,
which we do annually or semiannually depending on the type of building we come across.
From a public education standpoint, we delivered 95 hours of public education,
so going into nursing homes, going into schools, having fire station tours,
Cub Scout events at the firehouse.
So 95 hours of public education we're working on away in 2026, a streamline,
our visits to all of our schools.
We might invite them to our fire stations in 2026 to try to streamline the number of visits we make out to the schools.
Training, we are a state of Wisconsin EMS training center.
Not many fire departments can say that, so we're able to deliver continuing education,
state-approved continuing education to our EMTs and paramedics in-house.
We have a great partnership with our medical direction.
They provide quarterly training as well.
Just some of the specialty certifications we have, critical care.
We have a handful of critical care paramedics.
We participate in tactical EMS.
Rescue task force, again, kind of goes along with that tactical EMS, mobile integrated health,
and some tactical rescue.
We do do quite a bit of training with our partners outside of Mount Pleasant's servant.
We have a great joint academy that is on our fourth joint academy with Racine in Caledonia.
It's been a huge hit for our new people and a way for us to work together to train our newest firefighters and EMTs and paramedics.
You can see our training activity out of all of the hours,
and this is for all of our employees on staff.
We completed 5,790 fire training hours, 2,119 EMS training hours,
707 apparatisen vehicle checks or equipment checks for a grand total of 8,616 training hours.
With that, I'll take any questions.
Mr. President, I don't know that I really, Chief Ellis, I don't know that I really have a question.
Other than to, with all the statistics you're giving us, which are amazing and very important for us to, as a board,
to recognize and look over with the increase just from 2021 to now in volume and calls,
I think it's very important and hopefully our residents will understand why we spend a lot of time in the budget on police and fire.
You guys are, I mean, we see you all over, right?
I mean, I'm out on the road all the time, and what you do is very important.
It's very important to me as a board member, as a trustee of this village,
to help make sure that you're provided with the equipment you need.
We've had trouble getting the fire trucks in the past, and that's kind of caught catching up now.
But in my mind, this report is huge for our citizens to understand.
They want to be taken care of and be able to have assistance at their home,
and it's vitally important with the number of calls you have in the hours of training and all of it that,
you know, we as a board support you financially and keep you running in that regard.
So, thank you so much. This is a great report.
I'll speak to it too. We appreciate the support.
You know, through the organizational study, we always try to keep an eye on how we grow and call.
I mean, you can see that from 2021.
We have to just be smart in how we deliver service moving forward.
So, it's always something we keep on the backboard and keep our eye on.
So, the support, thank you.
Thank you.
Chief.
Oh, go ahead.
I would just say that I think you should go back and rock that mustache and have this picture.
It may make it come back.
Chief, you had a slide that showed the education hours in the schools and all that.
What I'm wondering is, just in terms of visibility, you make it a point to get to various community events,
the concert series that we have, why, you know, when they're doing stuff with the YMCA.
Do you track any of those hours?
Yeah, that's in there too.
It's hugely important for us to be forward-facing in the community, not just out here, but in schools.
When we get requests for Cub Scouts or the Girl Scouts that come into the stations,
it's hugely important for us to be forward-facing in all those events.
We do track those hours.
So, that is in kind of in our public education or community risk reduction.
Bureau is purviewed to keep an eye on.
Not just from a public education, but we stand by for EMS events at those as well.
So, it's kind of a two-pronged.
Yeah, because whenever there's a community gathering, I mean, we see the police out there too,
just making sure folks don't get rowdy.
We're not expecting any fires at those events, but, you know, somebody can get sick.
Yep.
And it's just nice to have you there.
The visibility, I think, reflects well.
Good.
So, again, I don't have any question, but I'd like you to convey to your team the whole fire department.
I've met you on them on a wonderful job they're doing.
I hear only good things.
Thank you.
Both the fire and the police.
We will pass it along.
Appreciate it.
We are very blessed to have professionals protecting and serving our community.
So, thank you.
Thank you.
Appreciate it.
Thank you.
Okay, so now the next batter up are the guys in blue, and here's your chance to shine.
Thank you.
Wow.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you, Cheer.
Thank you, Cheer.
Thank you, Cheer.
Thank you.
Thank you.
All right.
Good evening, everyone.
My name is Rob Botch.
Chief of Police for the Village of Mount Pleasant Police Department.
Thank you for inviting us in order to be able to present this report tonight.
Hopefully we can provide you with some information that is both informative and helpful.
So, we'll start with our organizational structure.
So, the Mount Pleasant Police Department has roughly 56 people at any given time.
The way that they are broken out here in the, let me just move this so I can see a little bit better.
In the structure.
So, we've got the chief, two captains, two attendance, seven sergeants, five detectives, 32 patrol officers, two canine handlers, two COP officers, one school resource officer, and FBI task force officer.
And then one metro drug unit officer, and then ten full and part time civilian staff.
As you can see the way that the structure is broken, it's broken down into operations and then investigations and administration.
Much like the fire department, you have different shifts.
So, as you can see the way that it's broken down, you have a first, second, and the third shift.
And then there's an overlap with our COP, which is our community oriented policing officers and one of our canine units.
It sort of takes that whole machine to make everything work.
Especially the units are important because it offloads certain tasks that patrol doesn't necessarily have to worry about, such as the FBI's task force and the drug task force.
Most of our drug and our gang work is offloaded to those task forces and it keeps patrol available in order to build answer calls for service.
Throughout 2025, it was another year of change, so we lost three officers to one left just to go on to greener pastures.
One retired and one took a job as a corporate security in a local school district.
But then we were able to hire four additional's.
Two of those are laterals, Brad Leach and Ryan Reynolds.
The other two were officers that had to go through the academy, so there was a lengthy gap in the amount of time.
So as you can see, they were COCA and Vitalis were hired on July 7th.
They just got off of field training last week.
So it took that long in order for them to get through the academy and then actually out onto their own.
Calls for service.
So as you can see, our calls for service are consistently going up here.
So we have from 2023 to 2025, roughly a seven and a half percent increase.
As of today at three o'clock, we're about 300 calls higher this year than we were at the same time last year already.
So as you can see, as the village grows, the calls for service continue to go up and we continue to be able to answer those with the staff that we have.
Crime statistics.
Some of the things that we chose to highlight in this were some of the anchor calls that would generate statistics through the FBI's incident crime reporting or neighbors.
So this you've got burglarly, robbery, and motor vehicle theft over the last three years roughly.
Burglarly ticked up slightly, but as you can see, robberies are down a good number and motor vehicle thefts are roughly the same.
Frauds, thefts, and embezzlements.
Again, you can see a nice downward trend.
Theft significantly went down.
A lot of those are generated in our local businesses.
So if a business changes a security precaution or if they adjust their loss prevention strategies, it could dramatically increase or decrease the amount of thefts that we handle.
Same thing with embezzlements.
And embezzlements are relatively small.
So if you get one change on a number that is only three or four, it looks like it's significant where in reality it's still a relatively small number.
Forgeries, death investigations and sex offenses, forgeries consistently go down.
Death investigations are up, but that could be a natural death.
Obviously, we've had no homicides.
So these are all deaths that could potentially be an overdose death or they could be a natural causes death.
But with an aging population and a growing population, death investigations could potentially go up.
Sex offenses did go up.
That's because we've done a lot more proactive enforcement in that area of human trafficking and sex trafficking.
So naturally, the more you do on something, the more that those potentially could go up.
That's not necessarily a reflection of sexual assaults going up or things of that nature.
This is more proactive, engaged in, for example, some of the illicit massage establishments that we've dealt with at the Village Board meetings.
Aggravated assaults and other assaults, again, downward trend.
So as our calls for service go up, thankfully, our significant reported crimes continue to be stable or go down.
Traffic safety, obviously, traffic safety is something that is on everybody's mind.
It's actually the number one call that I get from the community is auto speed or reckless driving or things of that nature.
So here are our numbers over the last three years when it comes to a variety of different things.
Accidents, when it comes to a variety of different accidents, are up.
I guess the big thing to see here is that everything is unfortunately going up in the traffic area because we have a lot more traffic that is in our area.
We have a lot more construction that's going on, but I want to call your attention to the fact that traffic stops are up as well.
We're continuing to do more traffic to try and adjust behavior, and that's really kind of our goal with traffic.
It's not to write citations.
You'll notice that our citations are down, but our warnings are up.
We've got roughly a 50-50 split in citations versus warnings because what our goal with traffic is to try and impact or influence a behavioral change, not necessarily to write a ticket.
In this particular case, you'll see a big difference between 2023 to 2025.
In 2023, they had a traffic car, so they had one unit that was dedicated to strictly only traffic.
Unfortunately, we haven't had staffing in order to do that up until recently.
I've been chasing staffing vacancies for the last two years.
Actually, we are currently fully staffed for the first time in two years as of two weeks ago, which is actually really kind of nice.
Community policing.
One of the things when I came in that I've really tried to impact the culture is balance.
Community policing is incredibly important to this community.
It's incredibly important to the police department.
Along with the last slide, when it comes to traffic enforcement and crime enforcement, there has to be balances.
I think a community demands both.
They want a community that is engaged with their police department, but they also want to know that the police department's out there.
Stopping cars and forcing the law, but doing it in a community oriented way, which is what we've really prided ourselves on the ability to do,
is go out there and not necessarily overwhelm a community with enforcement, but compliment the community in enforcement,
which is what our traffic strategy is, is by trying to get out there and influence and impact behavior,
not necessarily go out and just write tickets.
Our tickets are for some of the things that need to be written, reckless driving, significant auto speed, suspended driver's license,
revoked driver's license, things of that nature.
COP at a glance, obviously, our anchor COP or community oriented policing strategy focuses around the cop house,
but there's so much more than just the cop house.
You know, there's the rest of the village that really kind of demands the same thing.
They want that same relationship with the police.
So we try and get out and do other events such as the National Night Out, the Citizens Police Academy, COP on a rooftop,
the Easter events at the cop house, the Halloween events, the shop with the cop.
We're always looking for opportunities in order to try and engage with the community.
And then our cop house on the east end is also a model.
During 2025, the Chicago Police Department visited the Mount Pleasant cop house in order to see how we're doing things.
We really engage well with the community, and a lot of other agencies are trying to model that,
and not just have a house and a neighborhood, but model the engagement, the ability to get out there, the ability to interact,
the ability to build relationships.
That's what the cop house is all about. That's what the whole program is all about.
These are some of our COP results.
So crime prevention, special events, and building checks.
So crime prevention are opportunities where officers will go out.
They'll engage with different community organizations, community groups, businesses, things of that nature.
And then they'll pull a CFS code, a call for service code, or a CAD call, a computer aided dispatch call.
That's what these are reflecting.
The special events, that could be, that's the National Night Out.
That's the shop with the cops.
That's a bigger type event that they're going to go out with.
And then building checks are opportunities in order to stop out at certain businesses.
So if you're on patrol on third shift, and you do a building check, and you want to log that building check,
for example, case high school.
You want to stop in case you want to check the doors to make sure that everything is secure.
Your time dates are in that check.
Unfortunately, that's not consistent, because different people may pull the number where some are not.
This is one of the things that we're trying to work on in 2026 is consistency among CFS codes
and how some of this stuff is recorded.
One of the things we also try and do is understanding that tax dollars are limited,
but equipment needs continue to grow, is how do you stretch grants and donations.
So in 2025, we went out and sought a variety of different grants for things that we knew were pricey,
and we were looking for alternatives to tax dollars.
A couple of things that we were able to accomplish with that was an incident command post,
where SC Johnson donated us $90,000.
We were then able to use some opioid funds in order to supplement that in order to be able to pay for the entire
command post without any tax dollars at all.
We purchased an outdoor drone, which is a larger drone that spectrum gave us roughly almost $12,000 in order to purchase,
but then we also used donations for another interior drone and then asset forfeiture funds for another interior drone.
So right now our drone program is roughly three brand new drones from last year that we didn't pay anything.
The village did not pay anything for it.
We also started a tactical team last year, and all of the operators needed some level of baseline training.
The state provided us with a $10,000 training grant to allow them all to go through the National Tactical Officers Association training,
which is essentially a higher level training that you can get throughout the country.
It's a relatively expensive training, but it trains guys very, very well.
And then we had some side things that we were given throughout the course of the year.
For example, the fire suppression tool.
That is a tool that you can use in order to throw into a confined space in order to hopefully suppress a smaller fire before the fire department gets there.
We do have a couple of specialty units that we're kind of proud of.
First is the canine unit.
So you've got Grizzly, Aspen, and Kala.
Both Grizzly and Aspen are roughly three years old.
They've been on patrol for roughly two years.
And they're both dual purpose narcotics and patrol dogs.
They're on second shift and the one's on a power shift and then Kala's in electronics detection canine.
What I mean by that is Kala sniffs for phones, SD cards, zip drives, anything that might have a glue to it, that's what she's smelling.
She's smelling the glue from the chips.
And that's how she's detecting that stuff.
But it's used a lot for electronics, investigations, child pornography, things of that nature.
Our drone team, as I mentioned earlier,
we had a drone.
It was an older first generation, probably five years old when I got here.
It was one of the priorities that we embarked upon was to get a good functioning drone team.
Like right now we have three drones.
And one of the things that we noticed that we're actually in the process of implementing right now is it sounds simple,
but we're putting the numbers back on the roof of the squad cars.
We've noticed that through the drone deployments, the drone is up.
And it can say, hey, there's a squad car over there, but they don't know where there is, where we're putting numbers back on.
Another one of the adjacent jurisdictions, when they heard we were doing it, they're like, hey, actually we're going to do that too,
because they've noticed the same thing with their drone team is it would be much easier to be able to see the roof of the cars with the squad numbers on them.
Our joint tactical team, as I mentioned, we have a joint tactical team.
Originally formed for Mount Pleasant, Caledonia and Sturdevan.
When Sturdevan collapsed, Mount Pleasant and Caledonia continued to press forward with it.
It's 18 operators, and they train once a month in order to be more proficient on a lot of the things that are necessary to be safer.
And when you think tactical, I want you to think more tactics, not necessarily guys that have more guns or things of that nature,
because that's really not what it's about.
Being able to use drones, cameras, and tactics to put technology into a residence or into a business or into a structure before you have to put people in there.
But by getting these guys trained, what we're seeing is a ripple effect, where the guys on the shifts are actually being safer,
and more tactically proficient because of the 10 guys that we have that are trained to a higher level.
Is that ripple effect is rippling its way throughout the department, which is, again, safer for everybody.
Last year, we also put out, it's called a protect initiative.
Protect is proactive operations, traffic enforcement, and crime suppression team.
It ran roughly from June 20th through August 31st.
This year, we're going to do the same thing and run it from June 1st through August 31st.
The SRO comes out of the schools, which gives us a little bit more resources, and we didn't staff a temporary detective spot in order to be able to put two people out.
And their job is proactive enforcement.
They do traffic enforcement throughout the summer.
They're in the hotels, they're frequenting bars.
They're trying to get in front of problems.
They're a problem-solving group that just gets out, and they have time to do other things.
Our regular police officers are doing traffic and proactive enforcement all the time, but they're doing it in between calls for service.
They can't strategically do it, where people might complain that they've got speeders on their block.
We might not have a squad that, during normal hours, that can sit on that block because they're jumping from call to call to call to call to call.
Now, in the summer, from June 1st to August 31st, we might have that capability because now we've got a car that we've pulled out to just do proactive stuff.
There's stats and the things that they accomplished are in the report.
Oh, actually, I got it right here.
So, as you can see, about a hundred and close to 200 traffic stops, 13 felony arrests, 35 misdemeanor arrests, 15 municipal.
Canine utilization 18 times, season narcotics 39 times, and three guns during that summer months last year.
So this year, they're going to be out doing some of the same stuff.
And sort of like fire was mentioning training, training is super important.
So on a regular basis, we have to complete 24 hours of training every year based upon state standards in order to keep your certification.
The police department roughly triples that, and we're about 98 hours of training in order to be able to keep our guys proficient in all the different disciplines, not only just regular straight up police work.
And we're at an accredited agency.
So in 2025, we were reaccredited for another three years, which means we're meeting the highest standards of law enforcement best practices.
There's only maybe 10% of the agencies in Wisconsin are widely accredited, but it's a lengthy comprehensive process, but it shows that you're doing things the right way.
Any questions?
Go ahead, Ron.
Okay.
Again, Chief, I don't have any question, but my comment to Chief Alice also applied to your team.
Congratulations.
Thank you.
And thank you for keeping us safe, and please extend my compliment.
I do want to make a, I do want to comment you for two more items that, in your slide.
Number one, one of your slides said that the Chicago police came to, to learn from the Mount Pleasant for the best practices.
Great testimonial, probably one of the top three or four or five police forces in the country are coming to Mount Pleasant to learn the best practices.
So great testimonial.
And the other one is that I'm very impressed too.
And I believe the reason is like one of your slides says that your training is about four times what the state required.
So keep it up and thank you for your service.
Thank you.
Chief, I just wanted to echo my earlier words where I was talking about the fire department and how important it is to be visible and the different programs that they're involved in to remain visible.
And I just wanted to say the same thing regarding what the department does as well to remain visible.
And if I can just use a small example, a number of months back we lost a firefighter and I was part of the funeral procession, which was very long and it went through multiple municipalities.
And what I was noticing is in the other municipalities, the officers would be sitting in their warm card drinking coffee because it was a really crummy day.
But when we got to Mount Pleasant, I noticed to a person, every patrol officer was either actively out in the intersection, directing traffic or standing at attention, not saluting attention, but alert and paying attention and showing respect to the motorcade as it went past.
And it's not glamorous work when your shift supervisor says, hey, go traffic this intersection.
But it just proved to me again that if our people are doing the small things and paying attention and doing them right, then we know that they're out there doing the big things right too.
I just wanted to let you know that the visibility matters and they should be proud of themselves.
Thank you.
Thanks, Chief.
Thank you.
All right.
Public comment.
Members of the public are welcome to provide comments on any matter.
Please fill out a comment form and the President will recognize you.
Use the microphone and state your name and address for the public record.
Comments are limited to three minutes.
Anybody signed up for public comment?
Nobody signed up going once, going twice.
In that case, we'll close public comment and we'll move on to the consent agenda.
Mr. President, I make a motion to approve the items and consent agenda presented.
Second.
So I hear a motion and a second.
All in favor signify by saying aye.
Aye.
Aye.
Opposed?
So the consent agenda is approved.
It's not approved.
It's not approved.
So let's.
It was.
It was tonight.
The big deal was last meeting.
Thank you for showing up to the consent agenda.
A discussion possible motion to approve resolution 8-2026 authorizing the redemption of the note anticipation
notes.
Series 2028 dated March 15, 2022.
Mr. President, I'd like to make that motion to approve resolution 8-2026 authorizing the redemption
of the note anticipation notes.
Series 2022A dated March 15, 2022.
Second.
Claude or Kathy or both are neither of you.
If you just wanted to touch on what we discussed in the calm meeting and why this is coming
to approval today.
Certainly.
As the resolution states, this is a prepayment of the 2022 borrowing that we received in the
amount of $20 million.
This was a note anticipation note, which it was anticipated.
We would be bonding for this in the future.
We do have enough reserves in our 10-5 accounts in order to prepay this and pay it back here
early.
Tremendous news.
Tremendous.
You know.
So.
Yeah.
If the news media is paying attention.
Anytime the.
The village gets to pay off a debt obligation early.
That's good news.
It's because we have healthy teds and we have the means and ability to do just that.
And by paying off early, what sort of savings are we seeing?
Somewhere between five and $600,000 will save in interest costs.
Wow.
Given more compelling.
Thank you, Kathy.
Front page use.
Yeah.
Very good.
Yeah.
So on that note, because it is a resolution.
Oh.
Yeah.
We'll do a roll call.
Caris.
Aye.
Batia.
Aye.
Ventrini.
Aye.
Washburn.
Aye.
Pollock.
Aye.
DeGroote.
Aye.
The motion carries.
So.
One last motion.
No.
No.
I'll make a motion to adjourn and we'll see if it works.
If we're ready.
Second.
So your motion is second.
All in favor signify by saying aye.
Aye.
We stand adjourned.
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