I am completing this a little early as I leave for vacation on May 1st and will not be back until May 17th. Budget process continues and we have presented a balanced budget. Balancing the budget meant not filling two vacant positions at the current time. The traffic officer position will be pulled back into a patrol position for this biennium unless at least one of the positions are filled.

The hiring process that was started in late February was completed as we anticipated hiring at least one officer to fill the vacant patrol slot. The process was a success and yielded far more eligible applicants than the last time we recruited for an officer. The top three candidates were selected and notified of their status on our list. Since taking those positions out of the budget, no offers of employment have been made to any of the top candidates. We will keep the list active until further notice while exploring other funding options with council.

The records department has nearly completed all the training for the fingerprinting program and we are set to begin in May. Our staff has already begun to take walk ins but the scheduling of fingerprinting will not formerly begin until approximately the second week of May. We are excited to once again offer this service to our citizens.

Finally back from the 275th session of the FBI National Academy. I graduated on March 15th and was able to come back home the same day. It was a long ten weeks of training but well worth the effort.

Recruitment for the open patrol officer position continues and we are in the interview stage of the process now. We have narrowed our search down to approximately ten very well qualified applicants. Our new search process, headed by Sgt. Sean Lundry and HR Manager Angie Welty, yielded over 90 applicants. A significant increase over our last recruitment effort.

Budget process continued as I returned. More to come on that at a later date.

The records department will begin offering fingerprint services soon. Most likely, this will begin sometime in May of this year. There has been a high demand for this service since we stopped offering this to our citizens over two years ago. Now that we have a fully staffed records department, we are able to offer this to the public again. This will provide the police department with an additional revenue stream as well.