Meeting of March 25, 2025

I do. And so, uh, yeah, good afternoon. It's good to see everybody here. I even see, um, I'm looking at maybe two mayors that are here, unless I'm missing one. But um I appreciate both of them being here um as part of our meeting today. Um just check your cell phones if you don't mind. Uh make sure that they're placed on stun or something and we'll go ahead and get started. Uh this is the March 25th, 2025 Harden County fiscal court regular voting meeting. Let's begin and call this meeting to order. Uh we'll start out with a roll call. Uh sorry. Square Pennington here. Square Clim here. Square Hicks. Yes. Oh, I'm sorry. Square Muse. Different direction. Yeah. Sorry. Squareman here. Square Thompson. I'm present. Thank you. Square Whitehead here. Square Yates here. Judge Tall here. Next, we'll have uh our invocation

by Magistrate Aaron Pennington and Pledge of Allegiance, Magistrict Whitehead. Please bow your heads with me. Father God, we just thank you for today. We just thank you for the opportunity to be able to gather and uh just do your work. And Jesus, we just pray that today um everything we do would be pleasing to you. And ultimately, Father, we just pray for our citizens and our county. And in the information that we learned today, we just pray that it would be heard and understood. And father, we just ask that open minds would uh be willing to listen and uh allow us to be able to best conduct business for our our county. We ask all this in your son's name, Jesus Christ. Amen. Amen. Amen. Please join me in the pledge. I pledge algiance 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. All right. Again, thanks again for joining today. Um, it's great to see all of you. We'll recognize some of uh uh our younger folks here and maybe some of the older ones that lead them. Um, in in

just a few minutes, uh, just going to go ahead and review the agenda real quick. We will, um, approve the minutes from the last meeting. We'll have someformational items after that. Uh then we'll have some presentations um by um a couple of our departments in office of u our detention center. And then we will have our citizens concerns or comments time if anybody has anything to note. And then we have a pretty big uh consent agenda that can go through and discuss what's in that. and uh then our typical comments at the end. Okay, so that's the agenda today and um I'll just go ahead and move on from here. We need to approve the Harden County Fiscal Court uh March 11th, 2025 minutes. Is there a motion to approve? So moved. Second. It's been moved and second. Any discussion? Hearing none. Just a roll call, please. Square Clim. Yes. Squire Hicks. Yes. Square Muse. Yes. Square Pennington. Yes. Square Saltzman. Yes. Square Thompson. Yes. Square Whitehead. Yes.

Square Yates. Yes. Judge Tall. Yes. Motion passes. All right. Next, we'll move on toformational items. And I I did want to go ahead and um uh and discuss the fact that we have a bunch of uh people from Scouting America troop um Lincoln Trail District and um Andrea Siri is the leader. Um could you raise your hand? I guess you're here. All right. Thank you, leader. And thank all of you um scouts that are here uh participating. I believe that you're looking at trying to earn the citizenship in the community merit badge. Is that correct? All right. Well, good. I'm glad you're here. No, it's not correct. So, we have other other reasons. Do you want to go ahead and just tell us why you're here? Communications. Communic communications. Communications. You have to write down the topics about a point of view. Okay. Well, very good. Good luck with that. And uh I'm sure I'm sure you'll have some material to

write. Um so any any other reasons why is that cover it then? Okay. I just want to thank you all for being here. I really appreciate it's a encouragement to see our young people involved in our local government. So thank you for being here. Any other comments by any of the other? No, just other than our county clerk just got a little worried that you was here to take his job. He seems worried. All right. Well, thank you very much. All right. We'll move on then to the next item. Uh we have ESCI, emergency services study presentation, and I believe Jeff Stone is going to uh present for us today. Six minutes. You're on time. That's what you said. I had given 15, but it's up to you. Uh, thank you all. Uh, thank you, judge. Uh, yes, my name is Jeff Stone. I'm here with ESCI. Uh, we're emergency services consulting international. We are the consulting arm of uh the International Association of Fire Chiefs. Um we were u brought on uh back at the end of last summer uh by the county to uh evaluate the emergency services uh here in Harden

County uh specifically the fire departments uh and the EMS system uh that's provided uh for the citizens. Uh just a quick overview of what ESCI does. We have two divisions. Uh we have what we call uh project uh services side uh which is what we do strategic plans, master plans, these uh agency evaluations, uh systems evaluations. Uh and then we also have a human capital side which they do promotional testing uh recruitment. Um they also do executive uh executive uh searches for departments for fire, EMS, and law enforcement around around the country. Uh our business next year will actually be 50 years old. started in Northwest uh in around 1977. Uh so we'll actually be turning 50 next year. Uh our evaluation uh what we went over u we we kind of took it in a phased approach. We looked at the uh governance and resources uh that is provided by the Harden County right now and the 12 uh or excuse me now 11 uh two of those departments have actually joined since we were here at the uh end of last year. Uh but of the volunteer fire departments that provide fire uh services around the

uh county uh and how it's governed throughout the county uh amongst the individuals and through the uh county elected branch here. Uh then we also took a a look at the uh infrastructure analysis uh meaning the fire stations and the equipment that is provided uh to provide those services uh to the citizens of Harden County. Uh and then we dove a little bit deeper uh in looking at uh what we call data analytics uh or service delivery. Uh how how well do these uh entities respond? How long does it take? Are there any anomalies that we can find? And what does that service delivery look like? and we we quantify that uh to be able to show how things are and then we take that and we'll use national standards and best practices around the country um as as our as our benchmarks uh to look at and then then we finally took that and then we move forward in looking at the future of what's going on in Harden County what you have going on right now uh and what are the predictions and things that are come over the next 10 to 15 years uh and out of all those uh evaluations uh we provide some recommendations uh for uh the county and the for the fire departments. Uh we'll meet with all the fire chiefs tomorrow night to go over this much more in depth. We just met with the elected

officials uh right before this meeting and kind of gave them a two-hour in-depth uh view of what the process is. So, we just wanted to provide this to the public tonight. Uh some of the first things we saw was the governance uh and resources. Right now, uh I'm not sure that everybody can see that, but all the little dots that you see there, that's Harden County. uh the kind of darker dots for everybody in the back of the room, those are all the fire stations around there. Uh and then if you see in the middle, if your eyesight's well enough, the little blue dots, those are the EMS stations that are provided by the Hardy County EMS service. Um when we looked at it right now the infrastructure right now there's 12 and again this changed uh when we found out today there's 11 volunteer fire departments around the county that provide fire service to all the citizens uh with the exception of Elizabeth Town and Radcliffe where they have their own career fire departments that they provide those citizens in that uh Harden County EMS does provide uh ambulance service to everybody in the county including Elizabeth Town and Radcliffe citizens. Uh one of the evaluations we looked at uh we looked at all the fire stations amongst all the individual departments. One of the things we found uh most of these stations are not ready uh for a