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 all around our city all of the officers that serve so gallantly and bravely do the duty they do every day.

Day, and we ask this and many more blessings in Jesus name, amen.

I take a motion for approval of tonight's agenda, so moved by Mr. Busker, seconded by Mr. Newton.

Any questions? All in favor? All opposed? Okay, the general approval of any minutes for for a February 10th, 2026, so they move on 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 State, 53,465 to 81 cents.

Moved to the first.

Second.

Moved by Mixed News, second by Busker, all in favor?

All in favor.

All opposed?

All in that form of comment.

And that's 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 Merit Commission interview last night.

We had seven corrections officers that interviewed, all looked 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.

Any questions?

Okay.

Mersey Mayne.

Thank you, Mr. Bush.

So my report is quite lengthy, I'm not going to read it if you guys, I'm going to cover a few of things that I think are kind of important.

Deputy Director's Boardwine attended the Illinois Fire Service Institute and Ripley Police Department's hosting an Active Shooter Incident Command and School Safety Violent Event Incident Training on February 12th and 13th.

It was two-fold. The first day was year 4-1, of course the second day was the school system, then school supervisors. It worked out really well. The training was excellent. Robin was very impressed with that time's well spent.

I think we're going to try to do more of that in the future, trying to do it for Steve's County ERT team and so forth and so on.

Another training that we attended was obviously the annual re-atter.

It was a mass casualty table top drill held at FHN Mercy and Health, put on by Nightpark.

That was on February 25th. That was a bus accident with fatalities.

Table top drill included Sheriff's Office, our office, police department, hospital, Bill, Clyer, 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, 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.

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, Public PSAP, Public Safety Answering Point system, 911 centers, both for the county 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 of Dispatch arrives and types it into their system and automatically email that will let them know. Hypothetically, if we have flash flooding, if we have a tornado on the ground, if we have snow excess, whatever report comes in, and it becomes a report via police or fire, it will go down to the National Water Service. This is in the process of happening, but I think that's going to go. A couple of other upcoming trainings. CNA Railroad, my experience with them has been nothing but professional in my years in the fire service. They're a great organization.

Association. Unfortunately, they did have a derailment up in Norah here this couple months ago. Every year they reach out and they have trainings. There's a couple coming up. Freeport Fire and the Division Hazmat Team is going to be training on a volley charge in Freeport on Thursday, on Tuesday, the 14th of April. And then in the ethanol plant in Lena, they have actually three dates set up for the rural fire departments to attend. It's just basically and, uh, incident response training and car familiarization.

So if they roll upon what they did in aural, it'll be more layer.

And this is really not like a reactive type training.

They offer this every year.

Um, so it's something that CN is very good about.

And I'm glad that they are the only railroad going through our area.

Uh, another thing talking about the EMPG grant and that supplies my, uh, my budget.

I received all of the money back that we've 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, the federal government, for that part, is shut down, so there will be no more monies being allocated.

So, Stevenson 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 IISMA, it's Illinois Emergency Services Management Association.

This is a long-standing organization that's been in the emergency management business for many years.

I am told, I have not found 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 a signed 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.

to do that right now and very similar is the Illinois Institute of Management System, which is another organization.

This one's 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 and send us down there.

Again, we're still looking at maybe a memorandum of understanding would be better suited versus resolution.

But both supplies sample language could not be deviated from, that's the problem.

Well, that's a message to Carl.

Carl may want to make some changes.

I think 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 to pursue this fluid.

And that is all I have.

It's not like you would have been.

Awesome.

You know, Robert and I were talking, December, January is kind of slow, nobody wanted to do anything, and man, February hit, and we've been rolling.

That's good though.

That's good.

Yeah.

Problems with the school, the school shooting training, that done at the school, or do School have any kind of drill school shootings or what yes throughout the county well the city does for sure but throughout the county there's mandatory fire drills in lockdown drills what they what they have and right now I'm doing all the training in all of our county schools for them Active Shooter type of stuff.

Yeah, that particular class was kind of instigated, I believe, by the fire chiefs, rural fire chiefs in the county that want to have some kind of training.

And it was spirited by the City of Freeport Police Department.

And it was good training, good training.

Inquests? All right. Then you found a coroner. Coroner's report. February, there were 49 total deaths. There were six call outs to or six deaths on scene. There were one, 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 and those stats are all down from January which is amazing.

They're down in January?

Yep. Total deaths in January are 59 or 49 in February.

Okay. Any questions?

All right, let's move on. Let me go open this. Any new business? If not, any comments from 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 know if you got 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, it's like towards the weekend, first couple days of the week. Assuming it will be before UCCI. Just before. Yeah, it's like the and then later that weekend is that Sunday is when the golf day happens.

Do you have dates for the UCCI?

Yeah.

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

You want me to talk?

Yeah.

We spoke with Tom Nezhke yesterday, myself, Mr. Bush and Mr. Hadley, we interviewed him.

I'm not really in depth, just kind of got a feel for, um, his ideas and some of the ideas that the board members, uh, wanted to see done in that office.

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

He has been doing that, but once he takes over, uh, full time, uh, 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 a 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 was how serious are you for the position?

I think a lot of times people want to get into a position, they want to get in there by what it's about, then they lose interest. So that was my major concern, you know, was he going to stay?

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 term, I believe. So it'd be 27, the spring of 27. It's 180 days prior to the election.

because this election cycle ends when we'll be discussing April, May, so not until a year from now. I'm active in 28 January.

And I think another question came up far as we're dealing with for his deputy. Increase the NAFTA.

Do you handle that by resolution?

Deputy Pointers?

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

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 and 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 bet between the Chicago Association, which is ISECO, and UCCI, and 14 and 15 is is 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 hotels are going to be gone.

I think Mr. Bush, myself, don't know that anybody else has gotten back to us on it.

Yeah, keep talking about it.

So that's the only issue is hotels will be challenging if you stay the night. On that another piece on in July, we have the annual NACO convention again, that's the 17th through the 22nd. So we can also do the same. Yes, again, we've added more money in case somebody wants to go. You'll see, you probably get a, if you haven't got an email about how they don't do it. So, and then the annual law filing, the annual UCCI event is 26th, 27th, 28th of July. Yeah, so that's a Sunday, Monday, Tuesday. Okay, thank you. So, it's good. So, I like July. It's going to be a busy one. So, that's all I have, I think. Okay.

One other thing that we may take delegation to Washington, D.C., we're looking at doing that. We have just the Illinois delegation of county board members. So, that if you're, if you're thinking you might want to do that, that'll happen probably.

There's nothing else. I entertain a motion to move on Mr. Busker, seconded by Mr. Newton.

Well, go ahead.