September 22, 2026

Machine-generated transcript — may contain errors.

Good evening, everybody. I'm going to call to order our September 22nd Clayton City Council meeting if the city clerk could call the roll. Thank you. The first part of our meeting is if anybody wants to come up and address the city council on a matter that is not on our agenda.

So if you're here to talk about an item that is on the agenda, you'll wait until that particular agenda item comes up. And if you happen to be online, if you wish to speak, always feel free to raise your hand either now during our open forum time or at the agenda item when we get to it. Seeing no one in chambers and seeing no hands raised, We will start our meeting for the first item is a conditional use permit for 6369 Clayton Road. I will open the public hearing and request proof of publication.

Yes, Mayor, this is a public hearing and a request for a conditional use permit for the proposed operation of a drive-through banking lane on the north side of the subject building. Subject property is located at the northeast corner of the intersection of Clayton Road and DeMond Avenue and is zoned M2 General Mixed Use. It is in the Clayton Road Urban Design District. The site is developed with a one-story retail bank.

The site formerly housed Commerce Bank and is soon to be occupied by State Bank. Drive-through facilities for financial institutions require a conditional use permit. and any enlargement, alteration, or extension of the use requires a conditional use permit to be approved by the City Council. The current owner has proposed building alterations, including a reduction in the drive-through capacity from three lanes down to two lanes.

The Planning Commission considered this request at their meeting on August 17, 2026, and voted unanimously to recommend approval of the conditional use permit to the City Council. Staff recommends that the conditional use permit for State Bank at 6369 Clayton Road. Thank you. I'll open the discussion.

Are there any questions or comments from the council? This did go through the planning and zoning in ARB and was approved. There were some alterations. Again, one reduced direct-through spots.

And there's actually a funny discussion about use of AI and submitting the architectural drawings and inaccuracies and paying attention to that. But it was approved unanimously. Thank you. Anyone else?

I was glad to have the building occupied. I'm good. One over here. Is it going to be like a teller or just like an ATM machine?

Do we know? It would be a teller and an ATM. I believe the applicant's present if you have questions. That's all.

Sir, would you like to – and then just make sure at the bottom of the microphone there's a red circle. Just push it so it becomes green. And then just for the record, if you could let us know who you are. Absolutely.

My name is Matt Mayer. I'm with Mayer Design Group, part of the design team for the renovation of the property. The existing bank has currently three lanes with drive-through. We're eliminating one of the lanes, so there'll be two lanes plus then the end brick pier will be an ATM.

So there's actually two drive-through teller lanes and then one ATMs. Is there anything else you'd like to tell us? Okay. Thank you.

Are there any other comments from the audience or online? Seeing none, I will close the public hearing. Council Member Buse. Mr.

Watka, would you like to, do you have a question or comment about the bank at 6369 Clayton Road? Can you hear me? Yes. Yes, I look forward to that facility being reopened as a bank to serve both the businesses and the residences in the DeMunt neighborhood.

Commerce chose to close it and move farther west into Richmond Heights, and I know a lot of our local merchants use that as a depository, and I'm sure they will welcome reopening for financial services. I'm a As for the record, I'm a managing member of the owners of the corner of Clayton and DeMunn across the street. And we have numerous businesses there, Carl's Deli and Brass Alligator and several hairstylists. And I'm sure they'll welcome financial services returning to the neighborhood.

Thank you very much. Thank you so much for your comments. Seeing no other hands raised, I will close the public hearing. Council Member Buse.

I think that sentiment was shared at the plan commission. I move to approve resolution number 2026-25, granting a conditional use permit for State Bank located at 6369 Clayton Road to allow for a drive-through banking lane. Second. Any other discussion?

All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed? The vote passes 7-0.

Moving on to our next item, it is a conditional use permit for 7931 Forsyth Boulevard, Mr. Meyer's Live Lounge. I will open the public hearing and request proof of publication. Yes, Mayor, this property is located at 7931 Forsyth Boulevard.

This is a public hearing and a request for a conditional use permit for the proposed operation of a bar and music lounge to be known as Mr. Meyer's Live and Vinyl Lounge. Subject property is located at the northeast corner of the intersection of North Merrimack Avenue and Forsyth Boulevards. Property has a zoning designation of high-density mixed use, or M3, and is developed with a two-story mixed-use building.

The subject business was previously approved for a tenant space in an adjacent building but did not pursue the lease and the build-out. The bar is now proposed for the subject property and would be located on the ground level. with an estimated 128 seats. The bar would open at 4 p.m.

Wednesday through Sunday. Closing hours vary from 11 p.m. on Wednesday and Sunday, 12 a.m. on Thursday to 1 a.m.

Friday and Saturday. The owner has engaged a sound engineering consultant to provide a sound abatement plan, and a final plan will be reviewed under the construction permits. The business will submit various window coverings to accommodate the location of the stage for architectural review board consideration in the future. The plan commission considered this request at their August 31st, 2026 meeting and voted unanimously to recommend approval of the conditional use permit.

Staff recommends approval of the resolution with the conditions contained herein. Thank you. I'll open the discussion. Are there any questions or comments from the council?

Just to confirm, I believe this is the first floor of the Schlafly building where the second floor is a short-term rental. That is correct. Is that correct? So there really wouldn't be like other residential tenants.

That's correct. Folks coming through. I think they're looking to mitigate the sound inside of the building and provide some kind of buffer there and then between the adjacent buildings. Yeah.

That's great. Thanks. I'm excited to see this coming to Clayton. I was excited in the first location.

This one is even more visible, so probably in that respect, more positive. The obvious concern would be the noise factor, but since the owner is the person responsible for successfully renting the upstairs spaces, I'm sure they will work very hard to make sure that's not a problem. So I wouldn't have any concerns and I think it'll be exciting new use. Was there any discussion about parking and traffic around the building?

Like, did they talk about that at all? Kind of how they're envisioning where people would park, that sort of thing. And with their location, they're not required to have the on-site parking. I know that.

I just was more thinking like... Where will it go? We've got, especially in the evening time, the Forsyth Point Garage is right there around the corner. And there's typically a lot of street parking in that area.

But there is public parking available across the street. And no questions. I'm just very excited that they found a new location that they're coming to Clayton. Same.

I like the visibility of this spot. So looking forward to it. Yes, I agree. And also very happy that they were able to find a new location.

Is the applicant here? I don't know if the applicant's online. Curious if he had any comments, but seeing no comments in the audience here or online, I will close the public hearing. Council Member Buse.

I move to approve Resolution No. 202630, granting a conditional use permit for 7931 Forsyth Boulevard, Mr. Myers Light and Vinyl Lounge. Second.

Any discussion? All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed?

The vote passes 7-0. Next item on our agenda is the consent agenda, which includes the minutes from last time and a liquor license for Tani Clayton. Are there any questions or comments from anyone on the council? Anybody in the audience?

Seeing none. Council Member Buse? I move to approve the consent agenda. Second.

Any discussion? Council Member abuse. I Council Member Patel. I Council Member Gary Feder.

I Council Member Jeffery Yorg. I Council Member Waldman. I also member mailing Smith. Mayor McAndrew.

Hi. All right, moving on to old business. The first item is our property tax levies for 2026. Mr.

City Manager. Yes, Mayor. The public hearing for this item was held on September 8th and closed that evening. There have been two changes as there often are between the first and second reading on the property tax levies after the Board of Equalization.

We do have a one-tenth of a cent increase in the general revenue for residential and commercial. Residential and commercial personal property tax also increased by one-tenth of one cent, as did the special business district tax rate for residential properties. So very nominal changes here that shouldn't have a significant impact on our revenue or on the amount that taxpayers ultimately pay. We continue to recommend approval of the tax levies as they're shown this evening, and we'll need to amend the ordinance in order to pass it with the corrected rates.

Thank you. I will open the discussion. Are there any questions or comments from the council? Do we expect, with the residential going down and commercial going up, that we'll basically break even?

Or do we think we'll make a level on that? I mean, I know all of it's projection. I'm just kind of curious. On which portion of it?

I'm looking at the general revenue. On the general revenue? Yeah. Okay.

It's hard to say. We'd have to do the calculation. We can put that together and send it out, but I wouldn't have... It's probably not...

I mean, the numbers are so small in terms of the adjustment. These are really... Oh, and the adjustment you see this evening, yeah, it's incredibly small. You're not going to see that movement much at all.

Okay. That was just what I was curious if you guys had... Yeah, nominal changes. I thought you meant overall because they're going the opposite ways.

Okay, great. Any other comments? Any other comments from the audience? We're on line.

Seeing none. Council Member Buse. Just to clarify, am I moving this as amended? To approve as amended?

Motion to amend. I move to amend. Bill 7172 by the text of Bill 7172.1. Is that what I heard you say?

That's what I said. And I second it. All those in favor? Aye.

Any opposed? The vote passes seven to zero. Kevin, does that so that amends the and I mean, we don't have to go into it again. Like that's the fully amended bill was passed.

Okay. That reflects all the changes. Okay. Thank you.

I guess do we need We still have to vote on the bill. And that's what I was, that's what I said. So we still need to vote on the actual bill. It needs to be introduced for second reading.

Great. Thank you. Okay. I introduce bill number 7172.1 approving the property tax levies for tax year 2026 to be read for the second time by title only.

Okay. Any discussion? Mr. City Attorney?

Bill number 7172.1, second reading and consideration for adoption. An ordinance levying and establishing the rate of annual taxes for general municipal purposes, police building debt service, general obligation debt service, and special business district purposes to be collected by the city of Clayton, Missouri for the year 2026. Council Member Buse. Aye.

Council Member Patel. Aye. Council Members Gary Feder. Aye.

Council member Jeffery Yorg. Aye. Council members Waldman. Aye.

Councilmember Betsy Meyland-Smith. Aye. Mayor McAndrew. Aye.

Thank you. The next item on our agenda is our fiscal year 2027 operating and capital improvement budget. Mr. City Manager.

Yes, Mayor. So we held the public hearing on this item on September 8th and closed it that evening. It was first read as well. There have been no changes to the operating and capital budget for fiscal year 27 since that time.

So we recommend approval of the ordinance. Thank you. I'll open the discussion. Are there any questions or comments from the council about our operating and capital improvement budget?

For the audience and for people listening online, we do have elaborate discussions and meetings about our budget. This is somewhat of a, you know, something that happens. I mean, we have to approve the budget before October 1, but we do have many discussions before we actually approve it. And I would say anybody that's really interested in getting into the details of it, we had a two-hour long budget work session on August 21st that is posted on our website.

So if you want to go to that meeting and watch it and kind of see in detail what's going on, that's the best place to get it. If there are no other questions or comments, Council Member Buse. I introduce Bill Number 7173, approving the fiscal year 2027 capital improvement budget to be read for the second time by title only. Second.

Any discussion? Mr. City Attorney. Bill number 7173, second reading and consideration for adoption.

An ordinance adopting an annual budget for fiscal year 2027 commencing on October 1, 2026 and appropriating funds pursuant thereto. Council Member Buse? Aye. Council Member Patel?

Aye. Council member Gary Feder? Aye. Councilmember Jeffery Yorg?

Aye. Councilmember Waldman? Aye. CouncilMember Betsy Meyland-Smith?

Aye. Mayor McAndrew? Aye. The next item on our agenda is a contract for our website redesign.

The City of Clayton, for all my MIAC students in the audience, the City of Clayton needs a new website. So we had to go out and contract to be able to do that. So Mr. City Manager.

I'll actually turn it over to Myron Burr. Thank you. So council voted on Tuesday, September 8th to table this item seeking additional information. A long-term cost analysis for the seven vendors selected for interviews is attached for council review.

Implementation and design costs, annual hosting, maintenance and support costs, and additional add-ons are reflected in the year one total cost tab, reflecting a difference from the bid summary. Um, just as a reminder, following analysis and evaluation staff found the proposal from GHD services to best serve the city's needs at the most reasonable price. GHD did not submit the lowest base bid. However, interviews in live demonstrations revealed that the lowest bid excluded several key functions from their proposal that would have required additional costs.

And we try to capture that on the second page of the cost analysis in that Excel spreadsheet. And I apologize for the tiny text. Staff recommends approving the ordinance authorizing the contract with GHD services in the amount of $55,228 plus a 10% contingency of $5,522 for website redesign, development, hosting, and support services for a total of $60,750. And we do have our communications manager here today to answer any specific questions about what is left out.

So the major price difference in what you're seeing, as you look over the 10-year cost, there will be some that are half the price of what we selected. Those did not include everything that we needed for our website in their proposal, which is why their price is less than ours. And anything outside of scope will be an additional $135 to $170 an hour to provide that. So GHD, after we did the live interviews and demonstrations, actually provided the most comprehensive bid for us.

And they have everything that we needed. So the other vendors are missing key integrations, PDF remediation, things that would add up in the long run once we added them to the scope. Thank you for the additional information. I thought it was very helpful, but I'll go around.

Does anybody have any other further questions or comments about? I appreciate how careful and intentional staff was in reviewing all of this, and I appreciate the additional information and the tiny print I can make bigger on my computer. So I got through that too. And you've convinced me it's an investment, and I'm sure that it will be it would be well used.

So thanks. No comment. Thank you. I did ask my friend, Mr.

Google about GHD. It's a very impressive sounding companies. Okay. Sounds good to me.

Thank you. Any other? Myron, thanks for pulling this together. My only other question is I see that's a three-year term with two year renewals.

Like is that an auto renew? Will they come back to us? I'm just thinking how fast technology is moving. And I didn't think about this last time is like, do you know how the renewal process will work?

It is an option to renew, but it will auto renew unless we say no. Okay. And that is our proposed term. So once we get the contract approved today, we will take it back to the company and say, this is what we want.

And they will agree to our terms. Okay. David, how do we, like contracts like this, like how do we track the auto renewals? Do we have a system for that?

Like how do we kind of, let's say three years from now, we don't, we're like, ah, they're great, but they're not perfect. And then we've, I don't want to forget and have it roll over for another two years. Like how do we track that in general? Everybody does it a little bit differently in our building, but a lot of people will put that sort of thing in a calendar, like an album thing.

And then it'll pop up with certain intervals to take a look at it in the future. But a lot of these bigger contracts like this, we kind of know what's coming up. Like the trash contract, we kind of got that date burned in our heads. If you're the communications manager, you kind of know the term of your website contract and that sort of thing.

So these bigger ones are easier for us to track. And as it gets closer to that renewal time, that's when we'll really kind of do an analysis on where we're at and how it's working for us. Thanks. I just want to echo thanks for the thorough report and the information.

It was really helpful and made clear why you guys made the decision that you did. So I support it. Thank you. Any questions or comments from the audience or online?

Seeing none, Council Member Buse. I introduce Bill Number 7174, approving the contract with GHD Services Incorporated for website redesign, development, hosting, and support services to be read for the first time by title only. Second. Any discussion?

Mr. City Attorney. Bill number 7174, first reading an ordinance approving a contract with GHD Services Incorporated for website redesign, development, hosting, All those in favor? Aye.

Any opposed? Council Member Buse. I move that the council give unanimous consent to consideration for adoption of bill number 7174 on the day of its introduction. Second.

All those in favor. Aye. Opposed? The vote passes seven to zero.

Let the minutes reflect that the council has given unanimous consent. I introduce bill number 7174, approving a contract with GHD Services Incorporated for website redesign, development, hosting, and support services to be read for the second time by title only. Second. Any discussion?

Mr. City Attorney. Bill number 7174. Second reading in consideration for adoption.

An ordinance approving a contract Council Member Buse. Aye. Council Member Patel. Aye.

Council Members Gary Feder. Aye. Council member Jeffery Yorg. Aye.

Council members Waldman. Aye. Councilmember Betsy Meyland-Smith. Aye.

Mayor McAndrew. Aye. Thank you. The next item on our agenda is the city and council intends to get a presentation from our police chief, Mark Smith, about the latest changes that we have made to Clayton's LPR, otherwise known as Flock Technology.

The way this will kind of work for anybody that's interested, Chief Wilk give us a presentation. The city council will ask questions of chief. Then anyone in the audience is more than welcome to come up and provide a public comment. The public comment time limit is three minutes.

In order to provide a public comment, there is forms for you to fill out. It's just a way for our city clerk to keep a better track for the minutes. If you haven't filled out a comment card, you're welcome to just fill it out you know, sometime before you come up. And when you come up, you can hand it to our city clerk.

So I just wanted to make sure everybody kind of understood what was happening tonight. And if anybody's online, once I entertain time for public comment, you're welcome to raise your hand and we will get to you as we move through everyone. Thank you, Mayor. Thank you, Chief.

Good evening. I'm here obviously today to talk about flock safety again. I'm going to talk about some of the changes we recently made with our access control to the system internally. I'll talk about the new retention period and then the executive order issued by the governor and how we comply with that order.

And then we'll get into discussion on sharing. Sorry, back. So with the access control, we recently made the decision to limit who has access to the ability to search the database internally. You know, you've seen a lot of reports where there's officers and other agencies abused in the system and they're, you know, facing consequence for that.

We haven't. We've been doing audits for several years, and you know we've activated the audit assist feature that Flock came out with in April. We activated that right away. We required report numbers for over two and a half years now.

That's helped us have a very robust audit system. So we haven't found any abuse of our system. However, we wanted to mitigate the risk of that potential abuse or even unintentional misuse of it. So to do that, we've limited who can actually search the system.

So we've created new user roles. We have the administrator role, which would be me and our command staff. They have the ability to change the system settings, to control who has access to it, and we have the ability to audit the system. As far as system settings go, any changes to the system setting has to be permitted by me.

I would make those changes. Our detectives use the system the most. So they have access to the database to do the search. They understand our expectations, the policies and what we can use that system for and what we can't use it for.

Sergeants and corporals. So what we did, we limited mainly patrol officers. They no longer have access to it because they don't use it as much. But in the middle of the night or on a weekend, we don't have detectives around.

And so they may need to make a, there may need to be a search of the system because of a critical incident that will occur. We always have a supervisor working. It's going to be either a sergeant or corporal. So if there's something that happens in a critical nature and it needs to be searched, the corporal or sergeant can do it at those times.

Our traffic, we have two traffic officer positions and they solve a lot of hit and run cases with the flock system. So they can still do a search for their investigations. And then, of course, the patrol officers, we've limited their ability to search it. Again, we haven't found any abuse, but we just want to make sure there's no misuse of it at all.

And they can still receive alerts, though. So if there's a stolen car hits one of our cameras or a car wanted for another crime, they still receive those alerts in their in-car computer. Again, we're just trying to mitigate the potential for any misuse there. A flock is, you know, we had a 30 day retention period that was a standard retention period by flock.

Several weeks ago they they said they're going to come out with the ability to have a flexible retention period they gave us the give you the option of having a seven day retention period. So that just got activated a couple weeks ago we we told our flock rep go ahead and change our retention period to seven days. So now there's only seven days worth of data available for us to search. And that's also available to any agency that we share with.

So they only have the ability to search seven days of our data as well. The governor came out with an executive order on September 16th last week to talk about some flock standards. First of all, the retention period, the executive order mandates a 30-day retention period. Any data older than 30 days has to be deleted.

As I just mentioned, we actually are at a seven-day retention period now. Access is exclusively for the administration of criminal justice and bona fide life-saving efforts. This is all through the executive order. Every query must identify the user and include an active case number or a specific law enforcement justification.

Data ownership. Government agency retains sole and exclusive ownership. Vendor non-law enforcement use is restricted. And misuse is covered.

Personal use, stalking, unauthorized sharing, and improper hot list additions trigger specific accountability measures. And finally, facial recognition. No AI facial recognition integration to automatically screen faces through the ALPR technology. How does that match up to our policies?

As I mentioned, we have a seven-day retention period as opposed to the 30-day maximum period by the governor. The executive order mandates a case number or specific justification. Our special order on block system mandates a report number and specific reason for the search. uh searches are for criminal justice or life-saving use only in the executive order that's the same with our policy um every query identifies the user um in our policy in fact in our system this the search logs provided by flock already do that And there's accountability for misuse.

And then, you know, for us, we have the manual audits, we use the audit assist, and we have a department disciplinary process for any abuse. And then finally, the facial recognition integration. Clayton does not use facial recognition with its ALPR technology, and it's not even offered as an interface with the flock system. So like next steps, we talked about this.

I guess I don't think I've talked to the council about the special order. I talked to the equity commission about it. The special order defined the new user roles. So we had that special order come out September 2nd.

We're waiting for as part of the executive order to The governor is requesting that the Department of Public Safety come out with guidance, best practices within 10 days of that executive order. So I'm anticipating by Friday afternoon we'll have those. And so long term, we would like to update our general order. The general order is more of a long term policy.

We've been holding off. The last update to the general order was 2024 when we mandated the report numbers for every search. And so we've had a series of changes since then, and that's why we covered that with a short-term special order. But once we get these guidelines and talk about sharing, we're going to make some changes to our general order.

First of all, I know I had some questions about... related to the governor's executive order. I know, Susan, did you want to ask those questions now? Because I was going to move on to something else.

I could do that. Yeah. I mean, there are things in the order where we lined up where I think that we were ahead of the game. Thank you for that.

I guess one of the questions that comes up right now that I've been thinking about, and you mentioned it when you talked about we only use the data for legitimate criminal investigations. And when data is cited about how helpful it is with crime solving, it tends to be the more serious offenses, those types of incidents that are cited. And I just wonder, do we limit it to criminal offenses? And then do we have a severity of criminal offenses for which you can access the data?

Or misdemeanors, which can be a criminal offense, are they considered Would we use Flockhammer to handle a misdemeanor? Or do we have a standard there where there's a safety for our community that they're really only used for more serious crime? Yes. So I guess we got ahead of ourselves.

I'm going to get to that. There is some offense-based use, but I just knew you had some questions about the... I guess specifically you asked me, um, do we have consequences for an authorized use? Yeah.

So we don't have a, what they call a disciplinary matrix, you know, where it says, if you do this, you get this punishment. Um, it's basically at my discretion, but I, I know that the, there is, uh, an understanding within our department talking to our personnel that any misuse of it would have severe consequences. And, and again, I have, I think with everyone in this room, most of our community, a lot of faith in our department and, um, And so I hear what you're saying, but part of it too, I think, is something this big of an issue because it's not just flock. It's the whole idea of where we're drawing that line between privacy and surveillance and where do we find our balance?

There's got to be some type of accountability and transparency. I don't know what that would look like because obviously you do investigations and you've got personnel issues, but some accountability back. Like when you started today, you shared with everyone that we have not had any incidences. That's good to know.

But how do we make sure that if something happened, there is a consequence? And how do we have accountability and transparency with our community? I said, that's one thing. If we were to terminate somebody or if somebody resigned before they got terminated, which often happens, you know, in disciplinary actions, we have to report that to the post Missouri's police officer standards and training board.

So that affects their post license. So if somebody resigns under investigation, we get a response from the post investigator asking for that investigation and And we have immunity to provide them that information by statute. So that's happened before. So we would send them the investigation and then there would be consequences for their post license so they couldn't leave here and go somewhere else.

Okay, so let's just say, just a hypothetical scenario, let's just say there were three instances where somebody was tracking a partner or something when they shouldn't have been. Sure. And the department's on top of it and doing something inside. How would the community know whether it happened, whether something happened, whether your systems were working.

Again, that transparency. Yeah, I guess something I have to think through because we wouldn't, obviously if it's a personnel matter, we'd be very careful with that, right? It's a difficult thing, but I think it's important. I've seen agencies locally that they've said, you know, somebody's been terminated or they've resigned under investigation because of this.

And, you know, we've taken these precautions due to this incident. So there could be something like that. Okay. That's something I hope we can think about.

Again, I don't know what it looks like, but we should have somewhere to capture that. Sure. And then you mentioned about the routine, the seven days being a retention practice or established policy. Right.

I think what you wrote, you said a practice. Is it policy? Yeah. It's going to be, again, I'm the only one authorized to make those changes, so I'm not going to make that change, but it will be a part of our general order, forthcoming general order.

Good. Thank you. Chief, can I just follow up to just in terms of I know there's been discussions. Would you imagine that the St.

Louis area chief of police association slack was that would you imagine I know there have been discussions about them coming out with a uniform policy about misuse like If if that were to happen, how would that affect us? Would there would that be something that you would consider adopting? I don't there just have been I know discussions amongst other elected officials about a policy. And that way, you know, the public knows that there is immediate accountability for misuse.

I think, so I mentioned the Department of Public Safety best practices guidance coming out. That's something we're looking at. Not necessarily as the San Jose Police Chiefs Association, but the Missouri Police Chiefs Association. They have a legislative arm.

So they're working with legislators to create a law that aligns with the executive order that creates criminal consequences for abuse of the system. Similar if we had the Regis database. If somebody were to improperly search that, you could be charged with a crime for doing that. They want to make that a similar crime for the flock system as well, for the LPR system.

So I think we're working with the, like I said, Missouri Police Chiefs Association, their legislative arm to create some kind of consequence there. Again, as far as best practices go, I think we're already ahead of that. But I'm anxious to see what DPS comes out with. And if they have some great ideas, we're going to jump on board with that.

Thank you. We had a question come up about our public space cameras. We now have six public space cameras that were implemented earlier this year. And I'll just show you what they look like so you can understand, because there was a question whether AI could be involved in these.

And here's a video from the art fair Saturday evening at 6.04 PM, the art fair. And this is one of the reasons we got these cameras. We can help monitor these special events that we have, especially on this block on North Brentwood here. But as you can see, it gives a very broad overview of the intersection.

It does not have an optical zoom where you can zoom in on somebody's face. And if I play the video here, you can see how it works. I'm going to try to I'm going to I took this and you can see an officer on the left side next to that golf court. That's Corporal Blanford working his detail.

I'm going try to zoom in with a digital zoom here and you can see what happens. It pixelates. So you're not going to be able to get much detail with somebody using the system. Again, there's no artificial intelligence or, I'm sorry, facial recognition integrated into the system.

And you wouldn't be able to take a screenshot and upload that to a system for facial recognition. Just trying to give you an idea what this looks like here. Chief, are those running all the time or do you have to actually turn them on? They're running all the time.

I'm waiting for this thing to move forward here. There we go. For the quality of the picture, is that something that is intentionally... No, it's just that it's a broad view.

Now they make cameras that have, um, they're called PTZs pan tilt zoom, where they have a zoom lens on them. Just like, you know, like a photographer has a big lens. You can zoom in on somebody's face and get great details with it. A video camera could do the same, but these cameras don't have that zoom lens on there.

So you're not able to get in, you know, get great details with It's made for just a broad overview. I just wanted about the chain again, as you asked on the, the website, so It changes over time. Is this what we intend to have or this just has to do where the product is right now? Yeah.

Well, we can definitely get cameras that zoom in. And there is a purpose for that. The problem is if you had those zoom type cameras, you know, you've heard of the term real-time crime center. Major cities have real-time crime centers.

St. Louis City has them. They have them in St. Charles.

Um, they have people that's their job. They monitor cameras, right? Those cameras, when you go downtown to a baseball game or a soccer game, you see those cameras with the lights on them, police lights on them. That's what they're monitoring.

And, um, So if there is a potential problem and they see it, they zoom in on it. Those are, you know, they're beneficial if you have somebody actually working the camera. If you don't have anybody working the camera, you're typically just recording video and in hopes of using it later. There's no real purpose in having that zoom.

Thanks. And then we had a question about the transparency portal. So Flock does offer a transparency portal. It's a rather recent addition to their system.

We didn't activate it. So the first version of it was very like template. You couldn't do anything with it. You couldn't make...

any changes to it. And I didn't like some of the standard language they had. Well, a questioning mayor just asked a question about it. So I looked it up again and they, I knew they were coming up with changes to the transparency portal where we can actually customize it.

And that's actually been activated recently. Cause we just went on there today and I'll show you. So we're sorry. I got ahead of myself here.

There you go. So I just did a screen record with it. So this is the, it's not activated on our system. I want to make some, so I just looked at it today.

I want to have our, hold on, there we go. make some changes to it. But as far as our policies go, be more specific. But what it'll show is like, it shows success stories.

We have those on our website. It shows our retention periods down to seven days. We've done 20 searches in the last 30 days. The number of cameras we have, I'm sorry, that's 20 cameras, 20 total cameras.

Six of them are video cameras, 14 are LPRs. We've done 19 searches in the last three days. It tells you the types of searches, which is interesting. The most common search right now for Clayton was homicide.

One of our detectives was detached to the major K squad investigation at the Chevys and all of that a couple weeks ago. He was using the flock system to investigate that crime. So we had several searches and you can see hidden runs very common up there. And then it shows what agencies we share with on the portal.

So, and then it goes down to policy and trust. These are the things I want to adjust. I think we have more information than the standard language Flock gives you there. So we'll take a look at that and have that up in a couple of weeks.

So now I was going to get into the discussion of sharing here. So one of the things we want to discuss, if we're sharing, do we have a legitimate operational reason to share with a specific agency? Do we have regular investigative or mutual aid relationship with Clayton? Do they have one?

Does the criminal activity affecting Clayton, it may cross municipal, county and regional boundaries? Do we have regional partnerships with these agencies, such as the Major Case Squad of Greater St. Louis or the Gateway Regional Criminal Interdiction Task Force? Those are both organizations that we're involved in and we regularly interact with as far as law enforcement.

And then you can also look at geographic proximity and recurring investigative nexus when we look at these things. Also, another thing we were looking at is accountability. We want to share with agencies that are also doing the minimum standards that have been outlined in the executive order. The executive order is helpful because one of the things I was looking at, a concept I was looking at is do we contact these agencies and find out do they have a policy similar to us?

Do they perform audits like we do? And that executive order is going to mandate that. And eventually, the executive order, if you read it, it's framework for a future law. And so those things will be mandated by all agencies in the state of Missouri if they're going to use ALPR systems.

The order also provides disciplinary proceedings and other consequences for misuse. And I mentioned that DPS is coming out with the best practices for everybody. And then when we talk about limiting geography, I brought this up to the Equity Commission a couple weeks ago, one of our case use. This was the homicide for 2023.

And I showed how – I'm not going to go into great detail. I showed how we identified the license plate of the suspect vehicle of the people who committed the murder leaving Clayton. But we also identified them by searching other – other agencies network. And this, in particular, the cameras that we share with Normandy.

And you can see Normandy is five miles away, 15 minutes by driving. There's a camera right outside that auto body, that auto salvage yard on the right-hand side across from Normandy High School. Our detectives went to that salvage yard, talked to the people who worked there and asked them that Chrysler 300, which we identified through the flock cameras, came by. And they said, yeah, it parked in the parking lot.

There was an image of one of our bird suspects getting out of the car. They go inside and then we were able to identify them because they looked into a camera inside the building. We used facial recognition, put that image of them into a facial recognition program and identified them through a booking photo. And my point being, if we limit too much, we're going to lose opportunities like this.

You know, Normandy is not one of our next door neighbors, but this information was critical in solving a homicide. Also, we're, excuse me, we're talking about, you know, refining what we can search for. We, internally, we limit searches for reproductive health and it's not a state law violation here anyway, so there's no reason for that. But also immigration searches, we limit that.

Flock has come out with a recent update where we can disable searches by other agencies into our network for specific crimes. There's 51 reasons you could search our network. This just happened like a couple of days ago. So today we've limited outside searches of anybody who wants to use it for city planning or traffic analysis.

I mean, you could do that internally. You can look at how many cars come by a certain day. You can count cars if you wanted to with the flock system. So other agencies can't do that with our cameras.

We limited curfew, loitering, vagrancy, minor offenses, gambling, immigration, both civil and criminal offenses. juvenile delinquency, property recovery, secured area access control. I'm not even sure what that means. Traffic infractions and other.

There's also an other category where you can just free text it. That's been eliminated too. So now there's 41 other reasons to use them. Anywhere, anything from theft up to homicide.

But we can, that's one additional way to limit how outside agencies search our system. Okay, so all these 10 that are listed here, they're now disabled. Or outside. We can still search.

Or outside. I'm sorry. We don't search immigration. And I don't even know what secured access control is, so I took that off.

And then property recovery, civil enforcement. I'm guessing that that might be repo and cars. I don't know. But I took that off as well.

Or internally. But we still have the other things. And this gives you an idea. I took 28 days of four weeks of data of other agencies searching our cameras statewide.

As I said, there's approximately 200, I think 12, 13, 14 agencies we share with in the state of Missouri. And you can see what they're searching for. So this is prior to me making the changes on those 10 offenses. But you can see the majority of them are for wanted persons, people who have arrest warrants or fugitives of law by drug investigations, assaults, motor vehicle theft, larceny, traffic infraction, which we took off for outside agencies.

So that's no longer... Agencies are no longer capable of searching that. So you can see the type of... cases they're using our system for.

Another thing to keep in mind with the seven-day retention period, they're only capable of getting seven days of data. Even like just because, I mean, it seems like an incredible number, but chances are if somebody in, I don't know, Columbia is looking for, you know, there was a homicide or there's a missing person, then chances are they're just going to put A camera into a statewide date or somehow, and I'm sure the system would just search every entity. That's right. So you are correct.

It's not like they have to pinpoint Clayton or something like that. Right. This doesn't tell you whether with the Clayton Networks producing results for them. That's supposed to be another flock update coming soon.

You can see in your audit how many times an outside agency was able to find the target vehicle in your jurisdiction that hasn't come out yet. But yes, there might have been close to 7,000 searches for a wanted fugitive. Doesn't mean that those got hits in Clayton. The chances are they probably didn't.

But yeah, you can do a statewide search and then you would search every camera. It doesn't mean you get a result. So just thinking through the concept of how we develop a policy for sharing. So look at selecting agencies with a legitimate regional or investigative relationship.

We can rely on documented searches, auditing, agency oversight, and state requirements. We limit the search reasons available to outside agencies. 10 categories have already been disabled. And of course, you could use geography as another category.

And then, so I guess the discussion is which agencies have a legitimate operational relationship with Clayton? What accountability standards should outside agencies be expected to meet? I think that's laid out in the executive order. For which investigative purposes should outside agencies be able to search Clayton data?

We discussed that a little bit. And how much additional protection should geography provide after those controls are considered? So are you? That's, that's impressive.

So not only are you looking, so you're looking at all those things. So if there's a neighboring city that with whom we have legitimate relationships, will you also then be looking at whether their policy meets our standards? That was, you know, we haven't done that. That was one of the things that was going through my mind.

We're talking about like we're an accredited agency through CALEA and, you know, that's like the gold standard. That's another thing we look at whether they have accreditation. If they have accreditation, they should have a policy in place for ALPR. That's just, that's one of the standards to meet.

But I think the, like I said, the executive order kind of throws that, you know, everybody back into the mix because if they want grant funding right now, the executive order, the only the teeth of it is withholding grant funding. A lot of agencies get like, we got the blue shield grant, um, our traffic enforcement grants, but eventually this is going to be, um, this is the the framework for future legislative legislation that's what the governor says in his special word that's what the police chiefs are hoping for so that not only will uh the you know reduction or the the loss of grant funding be a consequence eventually it's going to be you know criminal prosecution other things involved if you don't follow the order so as far as our current relationships um and i've got to stop talking a lot of people talk um do you uh While we wait on that, while we wait on that order, which we hope will meet our standards and our ethics. Well, let's just say what we if it doesn't meet, I guess we wait to see what comes out and how quickly that happens, because if it's strong enough, it will give you something really to work with. And if not, will we be able to still set our own standard?

Oh, yeah. I mean, this this is always open for modifications. Chief, you had a, I'm sorry, go ahead. A couple things.

I've said it in every session, I think, where you've talked to us, but we started talking about this over a year ago and you've been incredibly responsive and transparent in sharing how this system is used and making changes and improvements along the way. So I just think that's great. I also just want to call out, because I work in IT in my day job, that you're following the principle of least privilege and how you're like allowing access to the system, not to like every person in the department, but based on like their actual need to have access to that data. And that's just a great best practice, like with any IT system or as it relates to security and stuff.

So yeah. That's awesome. I am very interested in us, like, determining what we might have some consensus around or majority opinion around as a council and taking action i don't want to wait for the state government i think it is very likely that they will take this up in the next session and that they will do something but we don't know what that will be and how long it will take um and i don't i don't see a reason that we need to wait um based on what we hear from residents and know ourselves about how this works so um I just want to put that out there. I want us to think about not limiting any action we take, like not using the...

not referring specifically to flock, but thinking about what is the thing here that we're concerned about and that we're trying to secure and protect and all of that. And so it might be something like ALPRs and any other surveillance data that we gather, retain, and allow access to outside of city staff. Like we might define something about how we want to handle that kind of information versus like flock. And the three things that I am most interested in us considering is limiting this, limiting the access.

And I want to be clear that I think cooperation in pursuit of criminal investigation is incredibly important. And we have a huge preference towards regionalism here and cooperating and certainly to help victims of crimes. However, I don't think... that in order to be like a cooperative neighbor, we have to just like open up our data to other people to search.

And so I think, you know, I'm interested in what the rest of the council thinks about and very interested in hearing from the public. So really excited to have so many people here. That, you know, just how tightly would we want to control that? And I'm really interested in looking specifically, partly certainly at geographic because like the nature of St.

Louis County and the size of Clayton makes it such that. It does, you know, like we're so small and we're surrounded by neighbors and people are passing through all the time. And so I'm open to that. But I do think on a policy basis, we should have controls.

For example, I mean, Flock itself. acknowledges that folks might not want to share with federal agencies and might not want to allow searches for immigration enforcement because they're providing like toggles and features to block that. I believe that if that's the policy position of the city of Clayton, we should not be providing unfettered access to agencies that have 287G agreements because the nature of entering into that agreement is such that you are explicitly cooperating with ICE. And so like...

Perfectly welcome to do that. And if you have a legitimate like criminal investigative purpose to want data from our flat cameras, you can give us a call and tell us what the case is and what you're looking for. And we can do that search for you, right? Like someone has a 287G agreement and is investigating a homicide and thinks they might get data from us.

They can call and ask, and we can search, but we don't have to just provide open access to that. I think those are the kinds of ways that we have the ability to still cooperate and have policy-based justification for the controls we put in place. I really am interested in what we can do about auditing the searches from external agencies. And I'm curious, because we saw a couple of different data points here on the transparency page.

there was something that I interpreted as saying that over the last 30 days, Clayton has performed 19 searches. And I'm curious if that's actually the right number or... Yeah, for us, that's internally. Yeah, so over 30 days, we 19 times searched our data.

In less than that time, 42,000 searches. were made that incorporated our data from across the state. And that's wild, that's a lot. Like, I mean, I know there's a lot of different agencies and stuff, but I mean, that is a huge discrepancy.

Like I find that very concerning. I'd kind of be interested in like where are they actually coming from? I know we saw the categorization of the reason given, which is helpful. But I'd really like to understand the volume and frequency, like what data they're providing, like the reasons.

Can we tell if they're actually providing case numbers? How is that all being logged? Well, I'll tell you this. Yeah.

A lot of them come from like the bigger agencies, right? You have the Highway Patrol, Kansas City Police Department using it. So a lot of searches coming from there. As far as report numbers, remember we showed you back in May, not a lot of agencies, maybe, I don't know, maybe 25%.

I'm going to throw out a low number. We're using report numbers. I've seen that go up. I'm going to say more than half are using report numbers now.

That's great. But that's something that's going to be mandated here. It was interesting, in the next week, does that go up even higher? Also, FLOC is about to put that in place where that's also a requirement for them that you have to put a report number in there.

Yeah, that's great. And I think what I'd like to see us do is be clear about what we think is right to do and just start doing it and not wait. And so that's awesome. And then I think the last point that I'm interested in us considering as a council is, what do we do with this data, with the audits that are performed?

How do we monitor this? what's happening. And I want to be clear that I think that it's really important when we're making changes or establishing policy or starting a new system that we establish checkpoints to see how it's going, right? Like whatever we decide, we're going to have some kind of idea about what the impact of that decision and implementation is going to be.

And we should check back in to see if we were right or to see what else is out there, like what other information can we glean that might cause us to make adjustments to what we did? And so I'd like to see some kind of cadence and requirement established for like a transparent reporting of audit findings. And so the volume and frequency of searches, the top reasons, how often were case numbers provided, all that stuff. And so those are the things that I am interested in us considering.

Thanks. Maybe two, just so we, I mean, go ahead, Councilman Gary Feder. Maybe if anybody, before we really get into a policy discussion, I think, I mean, but if anybody on the council, I think has specific questions for chief in terms of just how LPRs and flock works, maybe that's the time to do that. And then we'll provide some public comment just so that, you know, and then we can have a broader policy discussion.

So does that make sense? So, Gary, if you have questions, I guess, about it, just about how things work. Briefly on the issue of policy. I don't have a problem with the council adopting a policy that relating to, in essence, the general order of the police department.

That is, we support various aspects of what the police is proposing, the police department. If we have things we want to supplement, I think that's fine. I don't think it's up to the city council to basically decide what the police department should do, because at the end of the day, I mean, I think our opinion matters, but at the end of day, the only people up here who I think fully understand this issue is the chief of police. Now that doesn't mean we shouldn't have opinions, but I think we want to be careful where we start trying to tell the police department what to do without considering what the ramifications are.

So I think we need to be, we need to be careful. We don't have a policy right now from the city council. I think if we want to be supportive of the police department and say everything that the chief has suggested so far makes sense to us and shouldn't be changed in the future without coming back to the council, I'm fine with that. But if we ever going to start trying to micromanage this, I think we're in trouble.

Um, One of my questions, Chief, is I think you listed organizations or cities that you deal with at the moment. I think that was on your slide. Sure. And I guess one of my questions is, are there cities that you have looked at up to this point and said, well, let's not deal with this particular community?

Yeah. You know, I've seen some instances of abuse in the news and I don't know their personnel situations, but I do think that some of these agencies that have experienced it have moved quickly to address it. You know, so if that was a matter, just look at the response. You know, that's a good way of telling if we want to continue sharing with them.

You know, I haven't really considered much of that. That's something we could look at if, you know, I haven't done, we've been just bouncing around our concept, you know, whether they have a similar policy to us. We haven't done the research and started asking the questions from the other agencies, show us your policy, show us your audits, things like that. I probably wouldn't ask for the audits, but I just want to know, are they doing audits?

So one question I do have about is sort of reciprocity, which is if we decide to take a particular city and say they don't seem to agree with us philosophically. Yeah. And you could take a city like and it's no big secret was in the paper, the city of Ellisville entered into a 287 G agreement with with ICE and. You know, we could take the position, well, obviously those are people we don't want to deal with.

I mean, I'm not suggesting that, but that could be theoretically what we would say is because we've made it clear on the council and you've made it clear we don't have any interest in being in that kind of agreement. So that could be a point of distinction right there. My concern in part would be if that led us to say City of Ellisville is on our side no share list because they've done that i'm wondering to the extent there are perhaps or other cities like that then we have a situation where a potential crime has occurred in the city of clayton and we have information and we are trying to determine and have other cities in the metropolitan area assist us in trying to come to justice with that. What happens when we request that information from, hypothetically, the city of Ellisville?

Do they, of course, theoretically say, well, you guys don't share with us, so see you later? I mean, we have good relationships with all our partners in the area, and we do work with Ellisville. They're part of the Major Case Squad. I think they're part of the Criminal Interdiction Task Force as well.

And just how complex this issue is, we use the Ellisville cameras to find the guy stalking women in Shaw Park. He hit on a camera at Bluebird Park in Ellisville, and our detectives went there and picked him up. So if you start reduce, like I said, if we reduce our sharing with agencies in our general proximity in Salis County, we run the risk of losing those opportunities to apprehend people, just like we did in Normandy. If you told us not to share with Normandy because they don't border us, then we would never caught that individual, identified that individual at Al's Salvage Yard on Lucas and Hunt Road.

One final question. I notice immigration and claims of immigration violations are one that we do not share. I think the two topics I've heard most of being troublesome, aside from individual abuse, is immigration and potentially reproductive rights. I haven't seen that topic come up yet, but is that since there is theoretically the possibility of violations because one state prohibits immigration A certain reproductive rights person goes to a different state that becomes a crime.

Is that another area in which we would offer some protection from disclosure of information? Well, we don't share our state. So if another state's investigating that because that's a crime down there, they wouldn't get our data anyway. In the state of Missouri, I guess maybe you're saying theoretically that's not going to happen.

But would that be also an area where someone said that's what the case is about and we want information? If somebody asked for that, we wouldn't give it to them. Sure. All right, that's it for now.

Thanks. Just in speaking kind of with what Merritt asked, the question is can you – when we do our audits, like we've talked about how we audit the searches we do. But how does our audit process do – or how does our audit progress work as it relates to external to Clayton auditing our data? Like do we A, see everybody who's using it, and then how do we, if we do, go through and be like, okay, that looks fishy and that looks fishy and we're going to call – It would be very difficult to tell.

I showed you the audit log, and as Becky mentioned, there was like thousands of searches within a 28-day period. It would tell you the agency doing the search, the reasons for the search. They purposely mask the plate of what they're – the license plate they're targeting with their searching. They also purposely mask the officer who did the search.

Um, but it's, um, that information is available if you contact the agency, cause they do give you a reference number. Um, so it would, it just would be a very cumbersome task and to, uh, audit what's coming in. You know, um, one of the things, like I said, I think one of the things that is helpful is that the offense based sharing, um, feature that just came out from flock. Now we know that, um, if they're using it for minor offenses, um, they, they can't hit our network.

Okay. So, but that in fairness, that only works if they're putting in the right code and we have to kind of trust that the police department to be doing what you guys are doing, which is making sure all that stuff lines up. Sure. That was all I have for now.

Just, you know, that's the other question I have. Thank you for all these changes. Just a quick question on the user access. I know you've kind of broken it down by, you know, the different roles.

Like what percentage do you have access to search? Just because I don't know, like the numbers associated with each of the levels. So what percentage of personnel? Yeah.

Okay. So I don't have that for you, but I can tell you that there are... There's five patrol officers in each squad. So that's 20 officers total for the four squads that no longer have access.

And we have a couple of specialized positions they don't need the access to. So you have the three SROs. We have our desk officers. There's 24 SROs.

uh, business office. So probably more than half do not have access to search. So we were in our department authorized strength of 49. We're currently at 48 officers.

So more than half do have access to search, um, the admin, uh, user group. Um, there's six of us in there. We're not doing any investigations. We have the ability to search.

We're not going to investigation. So they're not, that's, you know, not really happening. There's no reason for us. Um, so, you know, About 50 are not doing it.

Well, less than 50 have access to it, but the true number of people using it, we have five detectives, a detective sergeant, that's six right there. Our traffic officers, two traffic officer positions, right now we're at one. They use it a lot, like I said, for leaving the scene. So you're at seven, eight.

And then the... So I would imagine about eight people use it consistently. As I mentioned, now the corporals and sergeants, there's a sergeant in every squad and a corporal in every squad. The sergeant is your main supervisor.

The corporal is like the backup supervisor. Sergeant's off, the corporal's in charge. They have access to it, but they're probably not going to use it that much. They're going to use it if it's in the middle of the night or on a weekend and it's critical.

Okay. So when you audit that, are you able to see like when they're using it? So like you're saying, if it's the middle of the day and they probably shouldn't be doing it, is that something you can tell? Yeah.

Yeah. But it would be, like I said, if one of the sergeants decided they wanted to search it right away because this case just came in and maybe the detectives weren't available, that wouldn't be probably unusual. Okay. And then kind of staying along with like the auditing process, When we're doing it, who is it just you that's auditing and seeing all this or who has access to?

Captain Mark Siegel. He's a he's a commander over the administration, administration and investigations. OK, so just one person. Yeah, one person.

And I can go in there, look at it, too. I can cruise it real quick and see what's going on. If you're seeing anything like going on, how does that? get flagged just by him or is it just the system or is it both so it's it's well so there's two things there's the manual audits that captain siegel does and so what he does is he um Since we require report numbers, he sees the search, sees the report number, and goes into the report and sees that, yeah, this plate was stolen.

And that's why the officer did the search. That's a legitimate search. The audit assist program that Flock came out with back in April, that will flag unusual searches, searches that could potentially be problematic. And I use this example.

I think I showed you at the – if you remember the council meeting – But I showed the Equity Commission a recent flag. Detective Moore, who did the case study on the burglary next to our police building, he showed you how he was able to track the suspect vehicle. He gets flagged all the time because he does our training. He does examples for me.

So when we do those training or we want to highlight how it works, he searches CPD, Clayton PD plates. And so the system flags that. It's like they're telling us, hey, why is this detective always searching the same plate? Remember, the system does not have access to Department of Revenue.

The flock system does not know that those are Clayton PD plates. So it's thinking, OK, this guy is searching this plate all the time. And one of the search reasons says per Chief Smith search CPD, you know. because I was using it as part of my presentation.

So it gets flagged, we know that he's a trainer and there are Clayton PD searches and we put a note in there, this is a legitimate search and close it out. And then he'll search CPD again for another training session and it gets flagged again. There he goes again, he did it again, better check into it. So that's how it usually happens.

We have another detective who has a case That's almost a year old. We, we know who did it. We know the car we're looking for. We still haven't tracked him down.

So he searches that car periodically and it flags it. And obviously it's like the system saying, Hey, this could potentially somebody who's stalking somebody, you know, make sure this is legitimate. Okay. And so like the 19 searches that were done in the last month, those were all kind of would have been audited by him.

Yeah. Okay. And so that's not, that's not a lot of searches to on it. It's really easy to do.

And so like, if there is something that's, you know, found, um, and it's, you know a legit violation of everything, does the public ever find out about that? Yeah. Um, we haven't, we haven't had to cross that bridge yet. I mean, I, I imagine we would, um, you know, if it wasn't the public interest, um, I imagine if, if, um, if they're using to stalk somebody, you would have to contact the person being stalked and make sure they're okay.

And that's what concerns you about people doing that. What's the next step? What are they doing with his dad? What are they going to do next?

Right. Well, I guess when we're hearing from our residents, a lot of concern is that there's going to be abuse. And then if no one knows about it and it just kind of stays internal, I think that worries people. I would like to figure out some sort of way of, you know, can we make some of this public or some sort of like oversight committee?

So it's just not, you know, the Clayton police reviewing it, auditing it and keeping it internal. I just think that I can appreciate that. Yeah, I get that better than that. And then just for of the 19 searches that we did, that was just within our city Well, no.

It was our people using – so the one – you saw that the homicide was the number one reason. I think that detective did several searches, and he wasn't just – he was searching every camera we had access to for that plate. Oh, okay. So, yeah, it's internal searches.

Would that be considered one search, or is he – was he doing, like, multiple of these 19? I don't know the particulars of that case, but with any investigation, you can have multiple plates. So there were several searches – I don't know the particulars, but yeah. Okay.

Yeah. No, that makes sense. And then, so we don't really know the number of organizations we're sharing with right now. We do.

Like I said, it's somewhere between 212 or 214, somewhere around there. Okay. And then the 10 categories that you disabled, there's still 41 left. Is that just at your discrepancy to figure that out?

Yep. Okay. Cool. Thank you.

All right. Wow. Thank you for this presentation. I appreciate it, and I echo what I think is the council sentiment that this has been a really cooperative relationship regarding this tough topic, and I have been impressed and pleased to be partners with you on it.

I'm interested to know a few things. One is... When the executive order came down for the, I hope I'm correct on this, saying that the data retention is seven days. So your searches are limited to seven days of data.

Is that right? Yeah, that wasn't a part of the executive order. The executive order mandates a maximum of 30 days from the government. We decided Flock, I guess Flock heard from our customers, you know, 30 days was their default setting.

And there is, I guess, a demand for some flexibility there. And so now you have 30 days or seven days. Okay. So when that came out, we requested to go on a seven day retention period.

How are you finding that to work for your investigative purposes? So, you know, before we made a decision, we talked about it. And most cases, most crimes are reported within... You know, right away, you know, within a day.

So the critical part is, since we also at the same time reduced who can use our cameras in the past if an officer took a report from a residence in Clayton they had their, you know, their car stolen. Um, they can go back and they can search their, um, search the flock system themselves and go back to the station, search flock and see if they can find any leads. Now that we have, um, seven days, we got to make sure our reports, if the report's not completed on time, they're going to have to notify our investigators or detectives and say, Hey, here's a, um, Here's a case with a good lead. You might want to search this plate and start running it right away, even before you get access to the report that's completed.

So this is all new. It hasn't passed our investigations, but we are understanding that we do need to expedite some of these cases because we only have a seven-day retention period and not everybody has access to the system. And I would suspect that expediting things perhaps leads to faster results. I don't know.

Is that my CFI experience? Sure. identify a lead and they don't live in our town. They may live miles from here.

You have to be deliberate about going to their house. And usually our detectives are trained, well-trained at that. And so, you know, they don't just, you know, take off right away and get it done. So there's, there's always a plan in place before they go and apprehend somebody.

I was very like, surprised, I don't know, maybe I'm naive to see that there were almost 42,000 searches of our system by other agencies compared to 19 that we did have our own data. And I think we started to kind of talk about it, but I really liked that graphic that you had that broke down what the reasons were that people gave. And you said you'd sort of alluded to the other like defining characteristics of a search. But I wonder, could you pull a report that shows a breakdown similar to that of like the agencies that have done the searches?

So that, you know, if 40,000 of those were done by the highway patrol, you know, then we kind of can know. Because talking about auditing, which I have other questions about that, I think that auditing our own usage of the system is really important for transparency for our residents. But I really do think that one of the main concerns that I have heard from residents and that I have myself is regarding the what other people are doing with our data. And so when we talk about, Gary said, Like other communities not wanting to deal with us.

I want to reframe that in us not wanting to deal. With other communities like as saying we're limiting our sharing doesn't to me mean that we don't want to deal with them. It just means that we don't. Want to open our whole, you know, inventory of data about every person that's ever passed through, not, you know, that's license plates of everybody that's passed through our community.

So I think that we, my impression of what we're talking about a little bit when we talk about sharing is just that data. It's not the cooperation piece that we, that we have exhibited and sort of what Becky said about being a regional partner. So I just wanted to clarify that. Going back on the amount of searches, keep in mind you have the Highway Patrol.

I'm not sure what their authorized strength is now, but they have hundreds and hundreds of troopers out there, and they're investigating leaving the scene accidents and people fleeing from them. And you saw the number one search there was fugitives. I was on a fugitive task force briefly, many, many years ago before we had this technology. But we were constantly looking for ways to track those people.

And if I was on a Fugitive Task Force now, I would certainly be using Flock to track. If I had a serious felon like the felons we were going after, we were going after murderers and rapists, I would be searching any car that that person had access to to try to find that person. So you see a lot of that. You have a lot of these fugitive task forces throughout the state and people searching for those fugitives.

That's one of the main reasons. Yeah. And I think, I mean, I have complete understanding that the system itself likely makes that person on the fugitive task force's job a little bit easier, at least. Makes it more effective.

Yes. And I guess the question that we're asking and that I think is important for us all to consider, and I don't I think that it's an important question for you. And I think that as a community, we need to be considering it is at what cost? Like ease of investigation is really important and solving crimes is really important.

But like this other big, huge piece of it over here is what then happens with the data that we're collecting. So I just want to make sure that we keep that at the front of the conversation. We had a question, we had a word coffee over the weekend and we had a question when you said the traffic officers are able to use it. It kind of triggered that question for me.

Do parking enforcement officers use it? Okay. So they do have an LPR system. And I believe how it works is when you pay into the app that, you know, you put your license plate in there, it goes into that computer system.

So when the parking control guys are coming by with their LPRs, it's, you know, comparing it against who paid. Got it. And so if they read the plate and it shows that you didn't pay for parking, you get a ticket. But if it's a stolen car, they don't?

No, that system's different than our system. It's not attached to the criminal justice system. Yep. Okay.

And my, my last two questions are really vocabulary related. We talk a lot about auditing and we only have 19 searches in our system and 30 days or whatever. So I imagine that auditing in my mind, I can imagine what an audit looks like, but I want to know from you, like what, what do you mean when you say audit? How often does that happen?

and like what is entailed. And then you also have said flag a lot, which I can conjure like what that would mean to me, but can you like clarify what that means too? Sure. Yeah.

So with the audit assist, it flags searches that I mentioned may be unusual or problematic. And I gave you the example of the CPD plates, the Clayton PD plates being searched. So when you open up the system There's the alert. So the admin people like myself and Captain Siegel, they see an audit assist flag and you go read it explains why it's being flagged.

So you can see when you open the system. So the audits are ongoing. I get a quarterly report from Captain Siegel about what he did and just describing the audits for the month. And fortunately, there haven't been any cases of misuse, nothing to report there.

But yeah, it's an ongoing thing. And like I said, as you hit the nail on the head there, 19 is not a whole lot to do. I would say this, back when we first got the flock cameras in 2022, when we had... Right now, we're sitting at seven car thefts for the whole year.

That's not a lot. Mm-hmm. In 2022, we had 61. We had people coming into our town nonstop trying to steal our cars, break into cars.

And we were probably doing a lot more searches back then, I imagine. So right now it's been a, people don't, cops don't like to use the word quiet, but it's been a slow month for us. I imagine things could pick up and we'd have 40 searches. Okay.

Does when someone, when a search is flagged or like say the detective that you were referring to earlier, does it lock them out of the system or can they still operate as per? So that's interesting. You bring that up. Not yet.

I think that's something that's coming out of the flock. So if you have a series of unusual searches, it will lock them out and then somebody in admin has to review them and then put them back in. Okay. Yeah.

I think, you know, we're not talking policy, but I do. I would like to see more. I am mostly concerned about what we're sharing and what is being searched. And so to me, like our internal audits are really, really important for transparency for our community and to demonstrate that we are upholding our values.

And also as we consider or develop policy, I think it's really important for us to have a deep understanding of what is coming into the system as far as outside agencies searching, who is doing it, how frequently, just so that we can gauge whether or not it is effective for us or others. So anyway, thank you so much for everything that you've done. Thank you, Chief. I think you can probably sit down for a little bit at this time.

Well, if there's anybody that would like, I've got two speaker cards. So I know there might be others that want to talk. So there are speaker cards outside the door. Feel free to fill those out.

Just a reminder that there is a three minute time limit. So the time is kept by our city clerk up here. The beeper's a little loud, so don't be nervous about that. But I will just call the first card I have up here is Shelly Tisius.

I'm sorry if I'm pronouncing. And then just when you come up here, just make sure that that microphone is on. It should be green at the bottom. Okay hi i'll talk very fast.

Okay, we go hi i'm shelly tices I have lived here for about 22 years, I also want to thank everyone, I know that a lot of. Time and effort has been put into this and i'm not sure I can say everything in three minutes i'm going to try. I lived in the morelands i've lived in various places in clayton I also wanted to address, I know some of the three big concerns which is misuse from the law enforcement data security and sharing. And then my big thing today really is I just want to make sure we're not restricting our use too much.

Where I grew up, I know I come from, I want to give a little background. I did grow up in a neighborhood that wasn't necessarily really safe all the time. Safety first. even as a young child, was a very big concern of mine.

I did have several instances in my community where I had law enforcement available, and I've always had a very positive experience with them. I've also experienced crime locally, including as a younger person here. Sorry, I'm trying to talk fast. Being followed home one night.

Now I'm also a parent. So I also know what it's like to worry that when someone's trying to locate you, and so I do take the risk of sharing data and all of that very seriously. I do think we need to have strong safeguards, accountability, and things like that. I also know that based on my experience, the cameras haven't been the only means of someone trying to locate me.

And so I don't find them as, I more want to look at them as security. So I haven't heard of an example of misusing Clayton. Obviously, if somebody does have individual abuses, I want to look at that. But I want to be careful that we're not also restricting the public safety tool.

Also, we talked about the rules will be different city to city. So just because we restrict things here doesn't mean it's going to be restricted in other areas. And I understand those broader concerns, which I think could take more discussion. I do support safeguards and accountability.

My biggest concern is I just don't want to restrict our police department unnecessarily. I do feel like as communities we do need to work together. And, you know, I know there were 42,000 searches on there, I'm proud to say, we've only had seven, you know, we have, we don't have a lot of as much crime here I think it's other areas. So the searches that we're doing are probably less versus if you got, you know, 212 or different people looking at it, they may have more crime in their areas and they may be doing more searches so.

You know, what I also like about our department is that they are listening to our community from the start of this, from the Equity Commission, everything like that. They change from 30 days to seven days. I am concerned about further restrictions on the police department because what I want to make sure of is that if something does need to change in the moment, we don't have, we're not restricted anymore. to the seven days.

I am a little concerned about the seven days, but I want them to have the flexibility to make the decisions because they have the experience. So in closing, I have seen the cameras really help solve crimes. My six-year-old even driving to the hospital the other day for his appointment told me that the bad guys were shooting people on the garage. and he told me that the police came, and I thought it was locally, and it was when he was at tennis camp about four weeks ago.

I'm so lucky that that person was apprehended on the spot, but if not, I want our police department to have the tools and reasonable flexibility to protect our community accordingly. Thank you. Thank you. The next card I have is for Arnie CAC.

I'm not sure what your last name is, but that's okay. It's Dinoff. Thank you. So thank you very much, members of the city council.

I'm a state and regional and public advocate, and I'm at the state capitol. I don't know what happened. Okay. I'm at the state capitol all the time taking on issues like this, and this is something that will definitely be addressed in the next legislative session.

You know, this is fantastic involvement, great interaction and opportunities for public testimony. I've never seen this from a city council. You know, you need to teach other entities and political subdivisions. And you set a great example here of open government and getting the public involved.

You should be proud of having citizen input on all the issues. And I know it's being talked about at other locations throughout our region. Flock is an interesting entity. I support the concept, but not Flock.

And there's 16 other options like Genentech, which I sort of kind of support. But there are 33,406 license plate readers across our state. And last night I had the interaction with Ian Leslie, who is a flock representative. And I believe the flock actually sells their information to websites.

And if you look up haveibeenflocked.com, their flock searches have resulted in 4.6 million files and 242 million searches. And it's very concerning that innocent Americans and innocent Missourians and Clayton residents are being followed and have a file created for them. There are 28 documented cases of abuse this year of misuse of data. Brentwood police officer comes to mind the last couple months where he followed his ex-wife.

There was some type of court proceedings, and that person should have been fired on the spot. St. Charles County canceled their contract because a civilian employee was following people. Bob Schuyler of North Manchester, Indiana was harassed and followed by the city police and the sheriff's department there.

And you could look that up on, they tracked him on his vacations, conferences, errands across the country, looking to investigate TV. Indiana Deputy Sheriff Schuyler Thompson, 2,200 searches reported. was charged in the last couple weeks for doing that. There needs to be parameters and guardrails and protections.

The officer needs a reason, a case number, and a charge. a crime charge to be entered into the system. It needs to be signed off by a peer or sergeant, and I guess we're not going to allow patrol officers to have access. So if the sergeant is involved, I think it needs to be signed of by another sergeant or lieutenant.

There needs to be approval from the county RIC, which is known as the Regional Information and Intelligence Center, located in Merrill Heights. which I'm sure your department is involved with. There needs to be a mandatory monthly audit done, spot audits and alerts to command staff when too many entries or searches are being done, and a retention period of five days unless there's a... investigation of a felony has been committed and finally there needs to be a definite misuse and no tolerance termination policy i've talked to lots of police leaders throughout our region and they had that policy i have several police chiefs if it's being misused or violated or they're searching for personal gain they're going to be immediately fired and i think clayton needs to have that no tolerance policy thank you very much for your indulgence madam mayor and i appreciate having the opportunity thank you Before we take anybody else here in chambers, Ben, you should tell.

I think you have your hand up. We're going to. Just one. Thank you.

Yep. Go ahead. Okay. Just one question.

The seven-day retention, what happens after the seven-day retention? Is the material destroyed, canceled, deleted? send to the cloud etc thank you yep thank you ben uh so the system automatically deletes it and if it if the officers need uh to retain it for evidence they can download the information and put into evidence uh the next uh speaker card i have is for cleopatra baino spinos Is it green? Yeah.

Okay. Hi, everyone. I spent my entire K through 12 history in the Clayton School District, and I have many friends and family in Clayton and the surrounding nearby areas such as Richmond Heights. So I'm also here as another person wanting to urge the council regarding serious concerns about the FLOC contract.

I personally would urge the council to put forward a change to cancel the fall contract and for there to be additional measures put in place to ensure there's more community input and auditing review process publicly available before any other future potential surveillance measures are put forward. As one of the other speakers brought forth, there have been very serious issues of misuse, not only in the regional area, but across the state and across the country. A key example was the St. Louis, St.

Charles Police Department employee, who I want to highlight, used it more than 200 times before they were eventually removed. flagged and then fired. And then as mentioned as well, the Brentwood police officer who was accused of using the flock data to stalk his ex-wife. A key aspect of that as well when we're talking about policy catching up to this technology is the fact that they were only able to have the situation addressed for that police department member from the point of a policy standpoint.

So with them being fired, the actual person that was impacted at the time was not able to have a criminal charge regarding stalking applied because the recent updates regarding the state executive order and regional policies weren't updated yet for her to then have the ability to have that impact addressed legally. So I think the key point for my concerns is the question of reactive versus proactive discussion and the idea of what is best practice currently, thankfully, that may be occurring within the department. police department in clayton versus what is actual policy is the seven days going to stay um as the current uh best practice that the clayton police department is doing or can it be finalized and formalized into a policy by the city council um is the no use of ai for the facial recognition um just a best practice currently that they're choosing and electing to do which is great Or can it be formalized into a policy that constituents can see regarding the audits? I think it's great that there is auditing to some degree being done.

But when the police representative was talking about the nearly 42,000 searches being done, he said it would be relatively difficult to do an audit for those searches. It's great to have 19 audited, but 42,000 versus 19 is an insane ratio. And those are the ones that we're predominantly concerned about. And so there needs to be a formal system in place for being able to download a report immediately and have ad hoc auditing as needed.

Thank you. Kathleen Gund. Hello, my name is Kathleen Gund and several people here were at the Community Equity Commission and I spoke there. I will keep my comments really brief.

I just want to say that right now we're talking about flock, but I really think that we need to be talking about surveillance in general and what we as a community feel is appropriate for people who live here, people who come here, people who cross our borders. It's apparent that there's a lot of trust between the residents and the police department and between the chief and the city council. And I think we need to use that trust that's been developed. And we have like a fabulous department, a great chief.

And I think need to have a larger discussion about surveillance in general and what is appropriate for us as a community, what is appropriate for sharing Right now, we are operating under the assumption that the data that is going up into flock is being deleted after seven days. But that would be really stupid if we actually believe that. We've been lied to about our data being deleted or being private. That's a big concern I have.

I would... I would like to say that I think that the FLOC contract should be put on hold, dissolved while these larger discussions take place. Thank you very much. Thank you.

F. Pierce? F. Pierce?

The calendar will run out. Okay. Hi, I'm Frances Pierce. So I've heard Chief Smith's presentation at the Equity Commission, and I sincerely support the efforts of our police department.

I think they're great. However, there are objective studies out there. There's this Atlanta study that came out that said, that show that a lot of these cases could have been solved with just good, you know, gumshoe work. police work and not surveillance.

So where do we stand? This is unchecked AI surveillance. Make no mistake about this. This data goes somewhere.

And during the Equity Commission, I made this analogy. This is a bit of the iceberg problem where we see the top, which is what our police department is doing, the police abuse, that sort of thing. And those could maybe be resolved with policy. What we don't see is below the surface where this data actually goes.

This is valuable data of all of us. And each of you have a responsibility to safeguard our personal stuff. This is your responsibility. It's a weighty responsibility.

and measure that against security, I guess. So is this really worth it? That 41,000 or 44,000 checks that really are unchecked is of great concern. Once again, these companies like Flock, who's owned by Palantir, is owned by Peter Thiel.

These companies doge, you know, very doge-like in their collection of data. They live in the shadows. They have owners who live off the grid, like Peter Thiel, who lives in Patagonia somewhere. We have no idea where any of this information is housed.

We have no We're told it's deleted in seven days. We have no idea of checking. And a small municipality like Clayton is not about to hold Flock to account on this. We're not about to sue them.

We have absolutely no leverage. If the federal government comes knocking... and ice comes knocking, we will absolutely open up this data to them. Because I've had this situation come up before where we just don't have the guts to stand up to the federal government because we're concerned about tornado money, other things like that.

So I think we need to be very realistic here as to what we're willing to stand up for for and against. And for example, facial recognition, this is just a small step forward. I think of license plate readers as totally basic. I mean, a perpetrator, anybody who wants to do something nefarious can easily get around this.

They're smart, as are tech bros. So at the end of the day, none of you and I can really check this technology that moves faster than the speed of light. You know, we have no way of holding them accountable, nor do we have real checks on people who want to commit crimes. So the residual is all they have is our information, where we go, what we do, that sort of thing.

So access control is a nice improvement, but my concern is not with the police department. Phlox or Axiom or any of these things have no accountability. And like I said, as a tiny municipality, we have no way of holding them to account. So if Ron DeSantis in Florida, of all places, can say no to this, we can say no to it.

I say we cancel this account. Thank you. Thank you. Luciano Perman?

Hello, everyone. I'm Luciano. I'm a senior. I participate in MIAC, and I have had the pleasure sometimes of going down to the Menards that exist on Hanley, and I've seen the many tools they have to offer for construction and other things.

Now, one of these tools happens to be a chainsaw. Now, I can think of many uses for a chainsaw, cutting down trees, splitting wood, etc., I don't look like the type who would do any of those things, but I understand its usage. However, you would not use a chainsaw to, I don't know, cut a Thanksgiving turkey, maybe open your car door, or have a person stand on the side of a crosswalk staring at you with a chainsaw. This is not rational usage for this tool.

Flock cameras and ALPRs in this way are these sorts of tools. We're seeing their misusage within the status quo, and we're seeing many... cases of misusage and many worrying effects happening already. There's a serious concern about privacy, and just how many would be uncomfortable with a man with a chainsaw standing on the corner watching them as they slowly walk or drive down the street.

Many are uncomfortable with these cameras in the area. I'm deeply concerned about the 42,000 usages outside of our municipality, even with those who disagree with our values, and those who could possibly share this data with ICE or the federal government. I love that someone mentioned that we do not have any leverage over the We are basically holding the police department to a guarantee of sorts that they will delete this data after seven days and reprimand will come, but we have no guarantee of this. A system that checks itself is one that is inherently unpowered and overpowered.

This is not fair to the people in Clayton to have no say in these decisions, and I strongly urge the city council to vote for reforming the situation. I'm concerned about incidents such as the one that happened in Wisconsin where a man legally bought marijuana in Michigan and then a flock cameras tracked him all the way to his home in Wisconsin. And please promptly arrest him for a misdemeanor that was not such in the state over. If these kinds of things happen, we do not have the leverage or the necessary means to prevent these things from happening.

Cancellation of our flock contract is also incredibly important. This data is fed into an artificial intelligence owned by a billionaire who does not believe in the continuation of the human race or and believes in something called libertarian monarchism. I don't know what that means. That seems antithetical to Clayton values.

I feel like we should cancel our contract with people who believe in those things. Also, there is a greater conversation about surveillance that we should meaningfully be having. What is the balance between civil liberties and surveillance that we must draw as a community? I believe this is a very easy way to show the difference between those two things.

I'm concerned for our community. I speak for all of us when I say we're very terrified of what can happen and what will happen in the future without reform and with unchecked power brought to the police and these artificial intelligence companies, and furthermore, the federal government and those within. Thank you and I hope you consider policy reform. Have a good night.

Thank you. Adam Watson. Hello, my name is Adam Watson. I'm a senior at Clayton High School.

I'm also part of MIAC. I'd like to thank you for your time, and then I'd also like to thank Chief Smith and the Clayton Police Department for their efforts to try and address the concerns of the Clayton community about these flawed cameras and about ALPRs in general. Despite the good work that they are trying to do to address these concerns, I believe that the risks that are... posed by this technology are too great to allow them to continue in Clayton.

I don't believe any number of regulations or rules or anything that the government passes will be enough to dissuade improper use by bad actors, which I think is, we've seen instances across the country, just to name a few. There was an instance in which the police department followed a journalist in Kansas who was critical of the police department. There are instances individually of police officers following spouses, following partners, following people for inappropriate reasons. And then also in Wisconsin, there was an instance of a Navy veteran who filmed a traffic stop and then was flocked hundreds of times by the local police department.

I believe this use of this technology is completely unacceptable. And I believe that... Whenever you have a system such as this that allows for people to surveil the citizens of the United States to this degree, I believe there is always going to be abuse of the system. And I believe that the abuse of the system and the threats that oppose are far too vast to allow it to continue.

There is also, I know one point that has been discussed over and over tonight is who has access to Clayton's data. And while I know we already only share within the state and we are looking at possibly reducing that list of people we share with, it is fairly easy for other departments to get around this block. So for example, if ICE were to or any other police department were to call up an officer or somebody who has access to do searches in the flock system who we share our flock data with, While they would not be officially allowed to get access to our data, unofficially, if this is a friend of this officer or a friend of this chief or whatever, they could then give access to our data or they could run a search through Clayton's cameras of specific license plates. So there is workarounds to get around blocks and allow agencies we don't want to see our data to get our data.

Lastly, I think this poses a great risk to our constitutional freedoms. There has been numerous discussion about how this is a likely violation of the Fourth Amendment, which protects against unlawful searches and seizures. And there was a lot of language in a recent Supreme Court case which would likely apply to flock cameras, which prevents the government from using geospatial data from phones to track us. And there's a lot of language that would apply to this.

In closing, I would ask that the City Council consider revoking our FLOC contract as well as preventing any other contracts with companies that handle things similar to FLOC. And then I would also ask that we join St. Louis in adopting a CCOPs rule, which would require police departments to publicly disclose, debate, and obtain City Council approval before engaging in any other kind of mass surveillance of the city population. Thank you for your time.

Thank you, Adam. And I just want to make sure that Rosie Lang provided us with a, I think she might be online, but she did provide us with a written comment, which has been provided at everyone's dais. And then I think the last person to speak or the last speaker card that I've gotten is Sarah Rangwala. Hi, my name is Sarah Rangwal.

I'll be quick. I grew up in Clayton and I've lived here for most of my adult life. I'm also here to ask that we consider canceling the FLOC contract. And my main concern is FLOC itself and companies.

I mean, it's a private company. They have a huge collection of our data now. We've seen in the past few years examples of like companies DNA related companies that purported to collect our data in order to help us, you know. Discover Ancestry, stuff like that.

And are now discovering that selling our data is much more profitable. I can very much see that happening in the next few years with Flock. So my main concern is with the companies, the private companies themselves, Flock and other companies like them. I do appreciate the fact that we have such a transparent police department.

And the presentation today was very reaffirming of that. But just inconsistencies with flock itself um the aclu in massachusetts my paper but there's a quote off their website that said something to be effective even districts who opted out of sharing have discovered that their data is being shared because of the vagueness, vague language of the FLOC contracts. So things like that are concerning. It has been stated there's not a lot of regulation of these companies.

And so I think that that needs to be considered before we start partnering with them. Thank you. Thank you. All right.

Thank you, everybody. We certainly sincerely appreciate everybody that came this evening and spoke. I think at this point, I think it is important for us as a council to, I think, perhaps have a broader policy discussion. I totally understand everybody's concerns about surveillance, surveillance in general, which I think is certainly a broader discussion that we as a City Council need to have.

I think how we talk about and how we deal with surveillance in Clayton is something to think about it. Certainly, I share everybody's concerns about it, but I think we're here tonight to really talk about LPR technology and what we can do from my understanding to provide certainly more transparency to our residents. I would like us to consider finding ways to limit access. I share everybody's concern with the 40 plus thousand access that other entities had of our data.

So I'll just start out with the discussion that I I believe that LPR is at least the way that our police department is using them today is really a crucial law enforcement tool. So I would be uncomfortable at this point in canceling our contract, but I would like to look at ways to limit access. I don't know if other members of the council feel differently than that. I'd certainly like to hear that if that's the case, but I would There are certain, I'm talking too long.

There are certain policy things that all of us on the council would like to see. I think we need to certainly discuss that. Yeah, so I'll just start out with that. I don't think we need to go around.

Anybody can jump in with their thoughts on how you'd like to move forward. And I would like to just echo everybody's, we have a wonderful police department. We're very lucky in Clayton. So Chief Smith, thank you for your presentation tonight.

So I messed up and did my policy statement when we were supposed to ask questions. I have one question that I hope David can answer. Our current contract is set to renew when? I think it's next year.

Check with Chief on that. It was a five-year contract approved in 2023, December 2023, so 2028, December. Okay. Great.

Thanks. And I guess, Chief – oh, go ahead. You know, I kind of – when I spoke with Chief about thinking about access, that was something that all of you have talked to me about, finding ways to limit access. some of the things, and I appreciate those points that you had up where thinking about not just geographical boundaries, because maybe that doesn't necessarily make sense.

Thinking about partners that we work with, you know, whether it's the major task force that I know our detectives work on. Thinking about the partners that we share dispatch with, which we don't always share geographical boundaries with. So that's where I kind of wanted to, I'd appreciate your input and thinking about, and maybe that's not a decision that you make tonight, but thinking about what entities you feel like really are a crucial partner that we still, that I think, you know, as long as they share the values that I think we've all talked about tonight, thinking about how we could limit access to some of those partners rather than continuing to share access with everybody in the state of Missouri. And I do think it's valuable to think about, like, if the Missouri Highway Patrol is really the ones using, you know, searching our...

There are 38,000 hits, you know? If that's the case, then, you know, maybe these other entities aren't searching our data as much as we think. But... Um, but I know, I know that you don't necessarily have access to that information tonight, but, um, that's where, cause I think as Gary made an important point, I don't, we don't, you live this on a daily basis.

Our officers live this on a day basis. So while we might say, yeah, we only want to share with university city, or we only want to do, I don't think that that's necessarily helpful to you and to our department. So I think I would appreciate At least your thoughts on how we could potentially limit access. That's just my opinion, limit access, but limit access in a way that's thoughtful.

That's not just us picking our geographical boundaries. Mm-hmm. You want that tonight? No.

If anybody else has any thoughts on that, I'd love to hear it. My biggest concern is that as we go forward, that this be a joint effort between the council and the chief and the police department. My point earlier was, I don't think it's up to us to tell the chief, these are our priorities and we want you to implement them. I'm happy with saying to the chief working together, these are things we believe you're doing that make sense.

And to me, the ultimate question is if we make a particular suggestion, we don't want you to do this anymore. I would wanna know if that is what you are being asked to do and you do it, will it have a detrimental impact on public safety in the city of Clayton? Because if your answer is, well, it might, we probably can't be quite as effective in terms of public safety, if that's what you're asking me to do. If that's the case, then I'm undoubtedly not in favor of it.

So my point earlier was, I think everything you've done so far in terms of your general policy are all things that I personally think are good things. I think the council agrees with all of them. The council has not formally in writing said we agree with them. These are all things the police department has developed.

I think it'd be helpful for us to say, here's everything the police department has done so far. We agree with those things and we don't think those things ought to be changed in the future unless you come back to us. That sort of addresses the issue, which is if we have a different police chief four years from now. And that police chief says, well, I don't want to do some of this stuff.

I want him to come back to the council. So, I mean, I think we want to basically put all those things in place. That's point number one. Number two is if there are things that haven't been addressed so far, then I think we ought to suggest to you what those things are and get your reaction to them.

Are these things, if we in fact want to have a stronger policy, we have folks we don't want to share information with. I want you to tell us as a practical matter, what's going to be the impact of that? Because I am concerned about, okay, we don't give the information to this particular community. I want to know, does that have an adverse effect when we want information from St.

Louis County communities? If you tell me that's probably gonna be a problem for us, then I'm concerned about it. If there are issues that we haven't, you haven't really addressed so far, if we have a policy that we have no interest in being involved in the 287 program, that's something I think could belong in the policy. That's a city council decision that we don't want any part of that.

We've informally told you that. We haven't put it in writing. So I think those all help. But at the end of the day, my point is the policy should reflect the fact, as the mayor said, this is an important tool for public safety.

I think people in the city of Clayton are concerned about their safety and police enforcement. but that doesn't mean we don't care about all these issues about dissemination of information. We are concerned about those things, but what I hear from most people that I talk to is come up with a balanced program, one that allows you to continue to effectively protect the citizens, but at the same time protects inappropriate dissemination of information, that's what we ought to achieve, that's what our policy ought, if we ought to have one, that's what it ought to say. just to push back on that a little bit, I do think that we do have a responsibility to kind of have oversight on this, you know, whether that is looking at the audits or, you know, you were saying that you like just pick the 10 categories to be disabled and there's 41 left, just like, I don't even know what those are, you know?

And so I think that we do need to know these kinds of things. I do think that should have, you know, oversight in the policies that we are, you know, using the system, I do hear a lot of fear of it. So I just think the best that we can do, if we want to use this as a tool, is just to be as knowledgeable and knowing of what it's being used, how it's being used who we're working with. I mean, 214 organizations, like, that's a big number.

And like, what does that mean? You know, I don't know who that is, you know, and I think just, you know, sharing with the whole state of Missouri, or, you know, whatever it is, I just think that we we do need to know what those, those organizations are. And I think that you know, as we represent the public. I think that's important.

So I think there needs to be some oversight. Yeah, I agree. I mean, I'm new, the newest, I guess. But, you know, I think that's a pretty critical piece of why we're here is to take feedback from the residents and then to sort of weave it into how we govern in the city and all aspects of our public life.

public life. But I'm not suggesting that we would tell you how to run your police force on a daily basis. I think that general guiding principles as it relates to this really tough and complicated thing. I mean, I'm hopeful that it seems so far to have been a really collaborative process.

And my vision of whatever we would sort of try to put in place would 100% involve you and any other broader research that we can come up with to take our best swing at it, to sort of respond to what the community wants. I've said this before and maybe in our discussion session or like a strategic planning session that this feels a lot like, you know, like social media a little bit for me. The, the parallel is that we all thought it was really great and super helpful and awesome to be able to talk to our friends and to see everybody's wedding photos and to get the newest recipe and some weird dance on Tik TOK or whatever. But like, we did not realize that to the iceberg analogy, like what was happening underneath.

And so I think that it, you know, as much faith as I have in your ability, like what I also tell my kids all the time is like, it's not you, it's the machine that's behind the tool that is a little scary. So yeah, I hope that you feel like we are working here and hoping to be collaborative and supportive of your efforts because you're doing a great job, but there's a lot to this. And I think it would be more than a full-time job to try to figure it out. So I think we're better off working on it together.

The discussion has been completely reasonable. I appreciate it. So many thoughts. I kind of divide us into two categories.

First is what we've really talked about, which is what do we do with the data? How do we control? And that kind of goes to limit the info collected. And I know historically, and I don't know where we are now, but the cameras that you originally proposed to get and that we had were kind of the envelope around Clayton, strategically placed to limit the surveillance to where you really needed it for the work that you do.

With that, I know certain neighborhoods have purchased their own cameras and there's so collaboration there. I think we have to really watch how that happens so that we only collect data that we actually need, not an excess, not a cushion. So there's limiting the collection of data, limit with whom it's shared. We've talked about that to a pretty good degree.

Highway Patrol is big, and Highway Patrol has a 287G agreement, just FYI. And if we do that responsibly, looking at – and I don't know where that's going. We talked about that a lot already tonight. I won't do much more.

And then limiting what we share. You talked about that as well. And I don't know – where that line is but i think that even you know broken tail lights um expired tags those things shouldn't or if somebody comes with a warrant um at what point do we say that's we're not sharing that information we have to be very very clear on that there's also the point made um policy into into practice into policy that we that we capture that so that it's actually there so that's what we can do with the system that we have the bigger Scary, scary concern is what's been brought up by the people in the audience many times is it's Flock. Flock is a private company collecting really valuable data on each person sitting in this room.

And we asked this before, and my tech skills are questionable, and I said, but I thought that data never disappears, that once you have it in the system, that's what I always told my kids, and there was a presentation that, no, actually now we can make data so the data no longer exists, and this is what Flock does, blah, blah, blah. And then I did my little spot check outside of that presentation, and that was kind of verified, and that made me feel better. I don't know if we can, but it's really, we have lots of examples where we're told one thing, and the data is still there, and the data in hands that I don't know that I really would want it to be in, because it is everybody's data. And I do think that we are represented to be the voice of each person sitting here.

And so what we hear from our community is our responsibility to then take to the level of what we do as a city. So I don't know if we can control that data. It is an iceberg situation. And that's where it really gives me pause.

I think that we could get the controls into place. You've done it already. I mean, you set the standard of what people should do. The inside is the easy part.

It's the outside, right? But the reality of gathering this type of information that may be going way beyond where we think it will ever go, and technology is moving so fast right now that we don't know where it's going, that part should really, really give us pause. So... I don't know, at a minimum we need to put in every protection we can.

What's collected, to whom it's shared and whatever else I said. But we really have to talk about whether we want to continue in the agreement quite honestly, what the benefits are and what the risks are. We're hearing from our community and not just in this room but otherwise people are paying attention and it's a big deal. So, and even over that, it's a whole issue of privacy.

Privacy and surveillance and privacy and safety and where's that balance? And this all comes under that. Yeah, so that's where I am. I don't know.

And maybe we need further discussions on whether we continue this. So are you asking if we should... talk tonight about canceling the contract? Oh, I don't think that I'm in a place tonight to talk about canceling the I would like more information on, I guess, this whole concern with what happens to the data that's collected.

Do we have any assurance? I don't know how we ever get an assurance that it's actually deleted. But with that data, they do know. They do know where each of us goes for grocery shopping and everything else if somebody wanted to misuse it.

Yeah. I mean, I guess I'd like to, I'd like us to kind of talk about what we can actually control, you know? I mean, I, yeah, I mean, you're right. I mean, But, however, I can't necessarily, but what I can control is potentially a policy that talks about who we share our data with.

with. Right. And I agree. And I'd like to think about what that might look like for us.

Right. And maybe that's not a decision we make tonight. Maybe that's a decision that, you know, chief hones in on if somebody wants to limit that access and somebody has a set of cities tonight that they want to talk about, that's fine or entities. Um, but I, I don't know if that's practical.

So we were having internal discussions inside the police department. And one of the things we're, we're just trying to wrap our head around, which, um, you know if we limit agencies we you know we're looking at past experience where investigations have taken us and where it's been beneficial and so we just haven't had like you know since this we started discussing this potential limiting um the ability just to um you know look at all the evidence if i come back in like two meetings with a proposal something that you can look at and say we like that or you don't we want further restrictions would that help I would like to see, yes, I think that would help. Two meetings, I can understand that you need time to do it. I just, I do feel like a sense of urgency.

I mean, there are signs on all the flock polls in our neighborhood alerting folks to the fact that they're being surveilled. So I think it's a, you know, the community is becoming even more aware of it. Yeah. But, you know, as part of that investigation, I imagine you might do what we talked about or what I mentioned earlier, which is understand who's searching the system.

I think that information would be really helpful when you're trying to make those decisions or recommendations. And it would be helpful for us to see. And I think it would be helpful probably for the communities to see because, you know, a lot of this is like, you know, we're creating the story in our mind because we don't have all that information. um so i do think that like becky becky said three things earlier limiting access so that's what we're talking about the audits of external searches which is also what we're talking and then the third piece is what happens to the data and you know to your point like i we we all maybe need to be asking that question and doing some research about that but I don't know that we can write a policy about what FLOC does with our data.

So short of canceling the contract, we can't influence that at this point. That's actually what I was trying to say. There's two categories. We have to get what you're just talking about.

We need to get the policies where we want them. And you've made great strides and you've heard where we are tonight. That would be great to come back with that as soon as possible. But we as a consul have to continue this conversation and looking at what we want to do with this type of surveillance.

I'm not asking us to do something tonight. It's just that this is heavy stuff, and it's moving fast, and we can't afford to sit back and say, oh, yesterday we were fine, so I'm sure we're fine tomorrow. I just want to add, I know like there was some discussion of what does the word audit mean? So like my second request or recommendation is that we, I said audit searches by external agencies.

I certainly don't expect the detailed level of auditing that you described that we conduct on our website. So I just want to be clear, but I think all like whatever data we can get about what are those searches? What is the volume and frequency? Where are they coming from?

What are the reasons? Like whatever data we do have, almost like trends and things like that for us to be able to understand that. And then my third point was actually about like not about whether we can verify that flock does what they say they're doing, because I don't, I'm not aware of whether that's possible. And I, I don't think we should assume that it's happening.

But that what but my third point was about having kind of what Kami was referring to related to oversight. So I don't think we stand up a whole new commission. I think we're the oversight for now, at least while we gather more data and see more and then find out from you like we decide what some controls are and then we hear from you about what the impact of that was on the department's efficacy. And we also look at whether like how these trends of searching are modified, right?

So, I mean, that's, I don't know. I feel like that's, and then in terms of like, what, how do we actually like limit it? I mean, I really believe we should not share with folks with 287G agreements. That's a very clear policy distinction that an agency chooses to take that differentiates them from us.

I believe we should still cooperate with them on like... lawful investigations of criminal activity, but not give them access to the system. And I think we should really consider not having the Highway Patrol have access to it. I mean, like I think St.

Louis County or, you know, I would really love to see how that breaks down, but I don't feel like we need... Question. If the highway patrol is like looking for a fugitive, serious crime, fugitive, they're searching for that plate. Do they put that plate on a hot list?

And is it the hot list that would flag us if that plate came through Clayton? So potentially, if the vehicle is wanted for a crime or it's stolen, it'd be on the hot list and it would alert our officers that it came through our town. Yeah. So I think that's a way for us to point out, like when the Missouri State Highway Patrol is looking for a serious fugitive and they have information about plates that that could be driving, they put them on the hot list.

If it flags, we're going to follow up on it. Yeah, we still get the alerts. Yeah. Because the alerts go.

Oh, we're not like again, it's not not cooperating. It's not providing ungated access to data. Oh. Councilman, you are.

Do you have any comments? No. OK. Any other comments or questions?

I'd just like to raise one question. I have no problem with this process as we've suggested it getting more information. What's the impact But since a number of people have talked about canceling the contract, which I think among other things is inappropriate in a general discussion, because I think those are things to be discussed in executive session. But if that were even considered, it still seems to me I gave an answer that I thought you would give.

But I think the public should know, in your opinion, what would be the impact if we stopped using flock cameras and we did not replace them with any other similar license plate? Or what do you think would be the impact? on public safety and your ability uh as the police department you know we're in a period like i said we've only had seven car thefts for whatever reason the uh that crime's low but you know going back a couple years when when car thefts were rampant we were getting notified on a regular basis every night a couple times a night and we were going into neighborhoods finding these stolen cars enabled to try to pull them over and we were thwarting other crimes happening right? And so you lose that if we for some reason to get a spike in car theft, we lose that potential to stop that sort of crime.

And as we know, like I mentioned, I keep leaning back on that homicide. We've solved the homicide with the flaw cameras that started off with car break ins, right when people are breaking into cars, they're carrying guns with them. It's a it's a dangerous crime. And so we would lose quite a bit of effectiveness knowing when when when the car thieves are coming to town, I think it would have a great impact on our public safety.

And my point simply is, since we all are talking about how we represent citizens and we look out into the audience and say these are our citizens. You know, there are about 17,000 citizens who are not here tonight. And if we told them that we are going to eliminate these cameras altogether and we're not going to replace them and they heard what you just said would be the impact. they would be horrified.

Now, those are the same people who would also say, I want to make sure that this information is not disseminated for the wrong purposes, that it's not used in connection with immigration, that it's used in connection with reproductive health. So all I'm saying is we need to do both of those things. We need to recognize that the vast majority of our population cares very much about their safety and the ability of the Clayton Police Department to be effective They also are concerned about dissemination of information, individual rights. And our goal should be, if we really think we're representing the citizens, is how to accomplish both.

And if we're going to talk about one and not the other, then I think we're in a very serious position. Thank you. So I think moving forward then, if everyone's all right with this, you will come back to us in a couple of meetings given kind of, I think what some of the comments that we've made tonight with a policy that then we can, you know, I guess pick apart or approve or disapprove or whatever, have a, which I know prolongs the discussion, but I think trying to come up with limiting restrictions access tonight i i think i appreciate everybody's discussion i think we had great comments tonight but i think that will give us a chance to actually look at a policy um that we can further refine if needed so does that sound right with you mr David Gipson yeah that works we'll get to work It is three weeks until our next meeting and five weeks until the second one after that. I'm only saying, I'm only saying cause I'm unavailable.

I'm not around on the 15th or 13th. I can make Captain Thune probably be upset with me if I made it. Okay. All right.

Well, we will see you then on the second meeting in October then. Well, nothing stops me from actually implementing it and let you know what I did. And you can always give me more feedback on it. Right.

Okay. Great. Thank you. So we do have a few more business items.

But I'll remind our my ex students, you're welcome to stay, but you will get credit if you Yeah. The next item on our agenda is the appointment to the board of directors of the Danielle community improvement district. Yes, this is the replacement of one member. Tracy Rucker had a term expire on February 12th, 2025.

The CID is requesting the appointment of Joanne Garcia to take that spot through February 12th of 2028. Staff recommends approval of the ordinance. I'll open the discussion. Are there any questions or comments from anybody on the council?

I have a question. How many CIDs do we have in Clayton? Two? Currently we have three CIDs.

Anecdotally, I feel like we approve a lot of changes to the Danielle Community Improvement District. And I'm just kind of curious if I'm noticing that correctly. They have to be employees. So I think it's just turnover.

We have little say, no say actually, but I think it's within their corporate structure, they keep having turnover and putting different people on the board. But we do have other ones, and they just don't have as much turnover. They tend to serve their entire term. Danielle, Danielle.

Thank you. If there are no other questions or comments, Council Member Buse. I introduce Bill number 7175, approving the appointment of Joanne Garcia to the Danielle Community Improvement District to be read for the first time by title only. Second.

Any discussion, Mr. City Attorney? Bill number 7175, first reading, an ordinance of the City of Clayton, Missouri, approving the appointment to the Board of Directors for the Danielle Community Improvement District. All those in favor?

Aye. Any opposed? Council Member Buse. I move that the council give unanimous consent to consideration for adoption of bill number 7175 on the day of its introduction.

Second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed?

The vote passes seven to zero. Let the minutes reflect that the council has given unanimous consent. I introduce bill number 7175, approving the appointment of Joanne Garcia to the Daniel Community Improvement District to be read for the second time by title only. Second.

Any discussion? Mr. City Attorney. Bill number 7175.

Second reading and consideration for adoption. An ordinance of the City of Clayton, Missouri approving the appointment to the Board of Directors for the Danielle Community Improvement District. Council Member Buse? Aye.

Council Member Patel? Aye. Council member Gary Feder? Aye.

Councilmember Yorg? Aye. Councilmember Waldman? Aye.

CouncilMember Betsy Meyland-Smith? Aye. Mayor McAndrew? Aye.

Thank you. The next item on our agenda is an amendment to the 1995 agreement between the City of Clayton and the Trustees of the Hillcrest Subdivision. Yes, in 1995, the City entered into an agreement with the Trustees of the The agreement limits the city's responsibility for entrance structures to routine maintenance and minor repairs only. This framework differs from the other maintenance provisions used in similar agreements throughout the city, which state that the city maintains these structures and may determine, in its discretion, the method of repair or replacement.

The proposed amendment aligns Hillcrest with other agreements in place. The city also has the authority to remove any deteriorated entrance structure elect not to replace it consistent with the practices used in other neighborhood agreements the city will incur future maintenance costs associated with public entrance monuments if this ordinance is approved any major repair or replacement when undertaken will be programmed through future public works budgets or capital improvement plans the current estimate for future work in hillcrest is fifty thousand dollars and staff recommends consideration of the ordinance thank you i'll open the discussion are there any questions or comments from uh the council Just a question. Are there active trustees in Hillcrest right now? Yeah, one of them's here.

There are active trustees and they've provided a letter of support. Thank you. Great. I'm just grateful for the consideration of consistency across our neighbors.

And as a resident of Hillcrest, I will abstain from the vote. I don't have any problem with it. I guess I'm sort of curious as a Davis Place resident, it seemed to me somewhere around 1990 Davis Place gave up its status as a private subdivision and turned basically everything over to the city. There's obviously a difference between like Davis Place and Hillcrest.

Hillcrest still seems to have certain degree of autonomy. And Davis Place does not. I'm fine with everybody being treated equally, but I'm still a little confused as to the difference between these subdivisions, just using those two as an example. So when Davis Place was dedicated over to the city, the city took full responsibility for all of the entrance monuments around Davis Place.

So we maintain all of those. If they need major repair, if they need to be reconstructed, that's on us to do. The differences in Hillcrest, the way the agreement was written is we're only responsible for minor repair and the subdivision is responsible for essentially major repair to those monuments. That's different than all of the other neighborhoods that went from private to public where we clearly took full responsibility for the monuments.

Hillcrest is the only one that has this minor versus major repairs. And then the question always is, Well, what's a minor repair and what's a major repair? And do you need a major repair now because the minor repairs weren't performed? That sort of thing.

So what we're really trying to do here is align Hillcrest with all the other neighborhoods. Got it. I have no problem with it. Do we know if there's any monuments out there that we don't control after this, like Clavarack, Moreland, Polo?

Okay. So how are we – so if I hear you right, is there a distinction here because it's minor versus major problem we're trying to clear up? I'm just thinking through the precedent that sets for all the other ones we currently don't. yeah what we're trying to say is if the monuments are dedicated to the city we will take full responsibility for the monument consistent with all the other neighborhoods where they've been dedicated and those neighborhoods where they still may have private monuments we have no responsibility whatsoever but this makes it clear for all of the monuments that have been dedicated over time that we're responsible for the full maintenance so if someone wants to dedicate to us more monuments we would then have to There's an argument we could make that there's a difference here between what we're doing here and what could happen down the road.

That's correct. It also sounds like, it doesn't sound like there's any major maintenance on them now, but do we know if the Hillcrest community understands that they're going to lose the ability to fix it when they want, that we'll fix it on our schedule? They may not care. I just don't know if they...

I would have to let the neighborhood speak to that. We have communicated that we'll put this in, as I just said, we'll program this in future budgets and we'll get to it when we get to it. We also reserve the right, though, in some instances if monuments fall down and we don't have the ability to repair them, we don't need to replace them. That's a standard provision in all of those ordinances and agreements that we have in place with other entities.

But it sounds like, from what I think Susan said, that we've got, or at least asked, that we've let us support all that understanding, the community, that Corral Crest is okay with it. And again, there's a trustee here this evening that may be able to speak to that. I said a question like what is like the current state of these are they like totally fine or do they need to. Work we estimate about $50,000 for the repairs there we don't have that programmed obviously right now because we we.

felt we didn't have the responsibility to do the major repairs and it's definitely a major repair that needs to be undertaken. So we'll look at future capital improvement plans and see where we might slot that, but we don't have a place in mind right now or a date that we're going to go in and make the repair. Did we know like why this was set up originally like this? No idea what they were doing in 95 or why this differed from all of the others.

They were all done at different points in time. You had different elected officials. And the monuments were never just dedicated by themselves. It came along with the streets and the curbs and all of the other items that were dedicated.

So the monuments tend to be the thing that we're talking about quite a bit because we have a lot that we fixed here in recent years. But I do want to be clear that when we accepted these monuments, we also accepted the streets and all the other infrastructure at the same time. Okay, so the only thing that was left off from 95 was just the monuments. The monuments were in the agreement, but we had this weird major versus minor repair.

Okay, and so just the $50,000 is just to get them up to standard, and then that's not going to be like a yearly thing? No, the $50,00 would be the full repair, and you're probably going to get out of masonry, minor repairs like that in excess of 25 years. Okay, great. Thank you.

um I did get a speaker card um Ian Hagman make sure the lights on all right thank you for the opportunity my name is Ian Hagerman I'm one of the current trustees uh representing the three of us uh first we went to collectively one of the others was here had to leave In light of the time, I wanted to express appreciation for the council and staff for considering this issue. I think the discussion has been very thoughtful, and we've always had a great interaction with City Hall over this. We don't know either why this was put in place in this way. Our suspicion is that it had to do with control.

After hearing that the city could demolish the monument at its disposal, discretion. The trustees of the time may have said, you know what, we'll keep that. We'll agree to the situation where the city owns it but doesn't maintain it. And that over time has not necessarily resulted in the monuments.

It's really at Dartford and Wydown, those two monuments there receiving the maintenance that they need. They're not ruined. They do need these repairs. If you want to see a ruined monument, you can come to Arundel and skinker and see the tornado's handiwork, and we'll address that one way or another at some point.

That's a monument that is in St. Louis city limits and that we control and may either rebuild or demolish. The last thing I wanted to say is that the residents of Hillcrest would welcome this amendment, and we haven't received any opposition among the neighbors, and so we encourage the council to adopt it. I'm happy to take any questions.

Thank you. Are there any other comments or questions? I don't see anybody online with their hands raised. Council Member Buse.

I introduce Bill No. 7176, approving an amendment to the agreement with the trustees of the Hillcrest subdivision to be read for the first time by title only. Second. Any discussion?

Mr. City Attorney. Bill number 7176, first reading and ordinance approving an amendment or amendment number one to the 1995 agreement between the city of Clayton, Missouri and the trustees of the Hillcrest subdivision, authorizing execution of the amendment and other actions related thereto. All those in favor?

Aye. Any opposed? Council Member Buse. I move that the council give unanimous consent to consideration for adoption of bill number 7176 on the day of its introduction.

Second. All those in favor? Aye. Any opposed?

The vote passes six to zero. Let the minutes reflect that the council has given unanimous consent. I introduce bill number 7176, approving an amendment to the agreement with the trustees of the Hillcrest subdivision to be read for the second time by title only. Second.

Any discussion? Mr. City Attorney. Bill number 7176.

Second reading and consideration for adoption. an ordinance approving Amendment No. 1 to the 1995 agreement between the City of Clayton, Missouri and the Trustees of the Hillcrest Subdivision, authorizing execution of the amendment and other actions related thereto. Council Member Buse?

Aye. Council Member Gary Feder? Aye. Council member Yorg?

Aye. Councilmember Waldman? Aye. Councilmember Betsy Meyland-Smith?

Aye. Mayor McAndrew? Aye. The next item on our agenda is the task order agreement with Hugo plus architects for the Hanley house.

Yes, before the Council is a task order agreement not to exceed $10,000 which you go plus architects llc and existing on call engineering service provider for the city of clayton. The agreement authorizes the firm to conduct a study for the Hanley House exterior renovations project and prepare the necessary construction and bid documents. Over the past year, multiple requests for bids have been issued for the project. However, staff has received either no bids or an insufficient number to advance the work.

Vendors have indicated the absence of engineered drawings has prevented them from submitting responsive bids. JUGO Plus Architects Task Order will produce the required documents so that the City may successfully reissue requests for bids and move the project forward. Funding for this work is included in the City's capital budget for the Hanley House Exterior Renovations Project. Staff recommends approval of the ordinance authorizing execution of a task order of agreement with JUGO Plus Architect's LLC.

Thank you. I'll open the discussion. Are there any questions or comments from the council? Yeah, my initial question, the $10,000 is already in the capital budget.

It wasn't anticipated. This is an additional expense so that you weren't anticipating, correct? This will just be taken from the overall budgeted amount for the Hanley House project. Now, it will probably reduce some of the costs because the contractor would have been responsible for preparing the drawings themselves.

And so that's what was... dissuading these contractors from wanting to bid on it was the fact that the drawings would be their responsibility. So we're going to produce the drawings up front and then go out to bid and get the contractors afterward, which is typical of most projects. With this one, we have multiple aspects of the building that need to be dealt with.

And so we were trying to package it together and it just wasn't working. So we're gonna get the drawings and then go out for the specialty contractors after that. Okay, and then that all makes sense, but I do just have to comment one more time. It would be great to have a long-term plan for the Hanley House.

Expenses are going to continue to come, and they're not small expenses, and we kind of go back and forth on how this will be handled in the future, and that's something that we need to address relatively soon, I hope. I would just say quickly, I agree with that. And CCF did have a successful fundraising push with the Hanley House. So I think another conversation with them is in order to talk about phasing and where that money could be applied.

Great. Thanks. Any other questions or comments about this item? Nobody on the audience.

Council Member Buse. Introduce Bill Number 7177, approving a task order agreement with How do you say it? Hugo. Hugo Plus Architects LLC for the Hanley House Exterior Renovation Study to be read for the first time by title only.

Second. Any discussion? Mr. City Attorney.

Bill number 7177, first reading. An ordinance approving a task order agreement with Hugo Plus Architects, LLC for a Hanley House Exteriors Renovation Study. All those in favor? Aye.

Any opposed? Do the council give unanimous consent to consideration for adoption of bill number 7177 on the day of its introduction? Second. All those in favor?

Aye. Any opposed? The vote passes 7-0. Let the minutes reflect that the council has given unanimous consent.

I introduce bill number 7171, approving a task order agreement with the Yugo Plus Architects LLC for the Hanley House exterior renovation study to be read for the second time by title only. Second. Any discussion? Mr.

City Attorney. Bill number 7177, second reading and consideration for adoption. An ordinance approving a task order agreement with Jugo Plus Architects LLC for a Hanley House exterior renovation study. Council Member Buse.

Aye. Council Member Patel. Aye. Council member Gary Feder.

Aye. Councilmember Jeffery Yorg. Aye. Councilmember Waldman.

Aye. CouncilMember Betsy Meyland-Smith. Aye. Mayor McAndrew.

Aye. The last item on our agenda is our collective bargaining agreement with our local union that represents our fire department. Yes, the bargaining representatives have met discussed and agreed upon a collective bargaining agreement which contains a resolution of the issues that affect the wages and terms and conditions. Of the Union members employment, the fire union members have ratified the agreement, and it is being presented for city council approval.

The agreement has an effective date of October 1, 2026 with a term of three years ending on September 30th of 2029. Key provisions of the agreement include an updated salary structure, updated provision related to the use of medical marijuana, updated funeral leave provisions to mirror the city's personnel policies and procedures, The city has agreed to further discussions about long-term disability benefits within the pension plan, subject to participation by the represented police employees. And finally, the city has agreed to the provision of a post-employment health plan to be funded with unused sick and vacation time. Staff recommends approval of an ordinance authorizing the city manager to enter into a successor collective bargaining agreement with the International Association of Firefighters Local 2665 and other required administrative actions that may be required to comply with the intent of the ordinance.

Thank you. I'll open the discussion. I will just say, I just want to say that I really appreciate staff's time. David, I know this is a lot of work for you to go through the negotiations and so really appreciate all your time with this and all the other staff time.

We had a great, I know, employment attorney who was helpful as well. So thank you for all your efforts and thank you to the union and our representatives with the fire department. Are there any other questions or comments from the council? Seeing none, Council Member Buse.

I introduce Bill No. 7178, approving a collective bargaining agreement with the International Association of Firefighters, Local 2665, to be read for the first time by title only. Second. Any discussion?

Mr. City Attorney. Bill number 7178, first reading an ordinance approving a collective bargaining agreement with the Clayton Fire Department shop of the International Association of Firefighters, Local 2665. All those in favor?

Aye. Opposed? Council Member Buse. I move that the council give unanimous consent to consideration for adoption of bill number 7178 on the day of its introduction.

Second. those in favor aye opposed the vote passes seven to zero let the minutes reflect that the council has given unanimous consent i introduced bill number 7178 approving a collective bargaining agreement with the international association of firefighters local 2665 to be read for the second time by title only second any discussion mr city attorney Bill number 7178, second reading and consideration for adoption. An ordinance approving a collective bargaining agreement with the Clayton Fire Department Shop of the International Association of Firefighters, Local 2665. Council Member Buse?

Aye. Council Member Patel? Aye. Council member Gary Feder?

Aye. Councilmember Yorg? Aye. Councilmember Waldman?

Aye. CouncilMember Betsy Meyland-Smith? Aye. Mayor McAndrew?

Aye. We have come to the end of our agenda. I believe we do need to go and do executive sessions. So, Council Member Betsy Meyland-Smith.

I move that the Council hold a closed meeting with a closed vote and record as authorized by Section 610.0211, 2, and 3, revised Statutes of Missouri relating to legal issues, real estate, and or personnel, negotiation of a contract pursuant to Section 610.02.112, RSMO. and or proprietary information pursuant to section 610-02115, and or information related to public safety and security measures pursuant to Section 610.02118 and 19 RSML. Second. Councilmember Buse?

Aye. Councilmember Patel? Aye. Council member Gary Feder?

Aye. Council Member Jeffery Yorg? Aye. Council Members Waldman?

Aye. Council members Betsy Meyland-Smith? Aye. Mayor McAndrew?

Aye. Thank you. Thank you to everybody who came tonight and stuck around.