Hello Mayor and council members. I hope all of you have had a good month and enjoyed a bit of time off during the spring break week.

Only a few items to report. First, we have completed the hiring process as our last candidate, Scott Jones has signed the final offer letter and has a start date of May 24th, 2022. This means we will have three new officers that will be in training at the same time. It puts some strain on our current training officers. Making it worse, two of our officers that have left our agency were training officers, so we were short to begin with. To offset this shortage, we are sending several of our current officers to training to become certified training officers. The officers chosen had shown interest and have the experience necessary to take on that task.

I have finished placing a new vehicle order. Our last years order was cancelled by the manufacturer because of “supply chain issues.” The problem with this is the new order is with a different manufacturer so we will not see any new vehicles until September of this year at the earliest. We were supposed to have three new vehicles delivered by the end of March of this year but that obviously did not happen. We are doing our best to preserve several of our current older model vehicles to make it through the summer months. These vehicles are all approaching 100k miles and should have been rotated out by now. There was really nothing we could do about it as the problem lies with the manufacturer and product shortages.

Officer Garret Thornton has been promoted to Sergeant and will start his duties on April 24th. You will see him at the first council meeting in May. He will be sworn in at that time by council. Officer Thornton is filling the vacancy that was created as a result of Sgt. Bickle’ departure this last month.

That is all for now. I will see all of you soon. Chief Roberts