Good evening. I'm Randy Wyrick and I'll be live tweeting tonight's City-County Council Public Safety and Criminal Justice Committee. @mirrorindy @indydocumenters

@mirrorindy @indydocumenters Tonight, agencies will submit their budget proposals to the committee.

@mirrorindy @indydocumenters First up is the Metropolitan Services Agency Emergency.

Their 2025 budget request is $17,494,335, slightly up from last year.

Their overall budget proposal for 2025 is $17, 494,335.

Their telecommunicators -dispatchers - handled 83,000 calls during August.

They average response time when a call came in was between 18 and 24 seconds.

The goal is to reduce that down to 10 seconds.

Some of what’s hampering is inexperienced telecommunicators.

To work as a telecommunicator you have to pass a test and a criminal background check.

One of the hurdles is for candidates getting downtown to the City-County Building in the middle of the day to take those tests.

To address that, they're moving toward doing the testing online.

Candidates must pass a criminal background check, and that also eliminates a few candidates.

Like many of us, they're understaffed, especially with telecommunicators. Right now, they have 53 open positions.

MCCOY - the Marion County Commission on Youth - presented its 2025 budget proposal.

MCCOY is a community youth organization and has been around 31 years.

Kate Roelecke, program director, said their goal is early intervention to keep youth from becoming embroiled in the criminal justice system.

Currently, they work with 2,169 youth.

“We believe that system involvement is the least desirable outcome for our youth. We know prevention works," Roelecke told the committee.

Prevention saves money and lives, Roelecke said.

Incarceration and falling into the criminal justice system saves money and lives, Roelecke said.

Roelecke pointed out the heart breaking irony of presenting her budget request on Wednesday, the day of yet another school shooting, this one if Georgia.

... this one in Georgia, not if Georgia.

MCCOY asked the city for $71,500.

In the Sheriff's Office budget presentation, Marion County Sheriff Kerry Forstal's proposal asked an increase of $11,481,133 over last year.

Some of that increase is in personnel and equipment in the Criminal Justice Center.

They've been aggressively pursuing grants to cover some of that, especially seeking aid for people who are suffering from addictions.

Staffing is also a challenge for the Sheriff's Office. Detention deputies, for example, has a 45 percent turnover rate.

And changes in federal programs could make millions of those dollars disappear.

On the personnel side, racial diversity is increasing. African American staffers increased from 35 percent to 40 percent in the past year.

They work all sorts of job fairs to recruit, They're especially with their partnership with Martin University.

They make up for some of it by deputies working overtime - more than $1 million last year.

Upon further review, the MCSO had to spend $6 million on overtime to cover staffing shortages.

Sheriff Forstal said sometimes deputies work 16 hour shifts.

For now, the budget is a bit nebulous. The MCSO is still negotiating contracts with employee groups.

The MCSO has been short-handed for at least the last decade and a half.

The overall 2025 budget proposal is for $141 million. That would cover 828 staffers. Right now, the MCSO has 801 people on staff.

Chairperson Christa Carlino adjourned the meeting at 7:05.