Monday, August 3, 2026, 2 p.m. (Austin time), Austin City Hall
Committee: Public Safety Committee
The Public Safety Committee approved minutes from three prior meetings, then received a briefing from Austin Emergency Management Director Jim Reddick on the April 23, 2026 Union Pacific train derailment in the Seaholm District, which he described as a "nonevent" that functioned as a coordination exercise. The committee then heard a briefing on the partnership between Austin Police and community violence prevention programs, including presentations by Chief Davis, Dr. Tamara Harold, Office of Violence Prevention Director Michelle Miles, and ATXPEACE co-founders Sean Oliver and Eddie Franz, with members discussing sustainable funding for community violence intervention. The committee also received briefings from Austin Police, Austin Fire, and Austin-Travis County EMS on personnel, overtime expenditures, and strategies to reduce overtime ahead of the FY 2026-27 budget adoption. The only public commenter was the Austin Firefighters Association president, who asked the committee to scrutinize the fire department's budget allocation against labor agreement obligations.
0:04 The public safety committee to order. It is August 3rd, 2026 at 2 p.m.. We are meeting at City Hall located at 301 west second street, Austin, texas. And we have a quorum present with vice chair lane and and Council Member
0:20 kadri. We'll start with public communication and I'll turn it over to joshua.
0:25 Ezekiel, if to see if we have any speakers. Yes, sir. We have one david gerard.
0:34 David gerard.
0:48 Welcome. Good morning. David gerard, president of the Austin firefighters association. I had a prepared statement that I was going to read to this committee. That if I did, would no doubt sound professional and very similar to one that I read to council as a whole just a few days ago.
1:04 But while driving to City Hall, I was forwarded a kxan news article that just
1:09 unfolded this morning that that shined a very unfavorable and unfair light on the Austin
1:14 fire department and its management of its budget and overtime spending. And so because of that, I'm going to forego this and suffer the consequence of speaking at a hawk. It is my participation in the budget process over the last several weeks has been in
1:29 consideration of three principal priorities. And that's to, to safeguard community trust, to build collaboration with our city leaders
1:37 and our teammates within city management and to protect the interests of our firefighters.
1:42 When we pass a budget that underfunds the obligations of our labor agreement and the
1:47 staffing model that this City Council has adopted, it comes at the expense of those three things. It is not ideal that we do not make a mid-year budget adjustment to fully fund the
1:59 obligations of a labor agreement that was passed after the initial budget adoption.
2:03 But it is arguably understandable and even potentially forgivable. My continued participation, with even greater conviction as we move forward, is to ensure that we do not repeat the sins of that past. The Austin City Council has passed a labor agreement with our firefighters that includes
2:20 a staffing model, and that staffing model comes at a cost. And so the current budget allocation, as I understand it, is so significantly less than what our historical spending patterns have been that
2:32 it feels too good to be true and likely is. So my ask of this committee is that you look very carefully at the budget allocation to
2:40 ensure that it, in fact, is not too good to be true and that you share in the same principle priorities that I have in maintaining community trust, the collaboration with the relationships that you have with the Austin firefighters association and its firefighters and protecting their interests.
2:55 So thank you for your time this morning. I'm available for any questions if there's any specific to my position on this statement. But thank you for your time. Thank you. Colleagues, the first action item will be to approve the
3:10 minutes for the public safety committee meeting on April 6th, 2026. The public safety committee meeting on June 1st, 2026, and the special called public safety committee meeting on April 29th,
3:22 2026. And I will accept a motion. Motion is made by councilmember and seconded by vice chair lane.
3:30 Without objection, the minutes are approved. The the committee will not now take up item number two, which is a briefing on emergency response to the April 23rd,
3:42 2026 union pacific train car derailment incident in the seaholm district.
3:46 And with that, we welcome jim reddick, director of Austin emergency management.
3:51 Welcome. Thank you, mr. Chair. Members of council, as always, it's an honor to be here before you. And this time, I will provide a brief briefing on the union pacific train
4:01 derailment as it occurred in the city of Austin. Very brief, because an all intents and purposes, it was a nonevent. From an incident response perspective, but it was a fantastic full scale exercise, if you will, because it forced us to work through some of our coordination, our operational coordination, our public information and the like.
4:20 So is this the clicker? Excellent. Okay. So as you said back on April 23rd early in the morning,
4:29 seven cars derailed out of 230. We, we know that train rail is one of the safest methods to transport different types
4:39 of cargo. And so this could have been worse but, but it wasn't it was mixed commodities. Some medical supplies, but not of a severe variation and certainly no hazardous materials, which well, that was the case.
4:55 We kept asking ourselves, what if. What if there was chlorine? What if there was some type of ethyl methyl death or bi poly mess you up.
5:03 Whatever it is, how are we going to alert the community? And again, we just kept going over that in our notes throughout the incident. And certainly as some follow up items in terms of training and exercises it was a 4
5:15 a.m. Incident. And going back to the, the, the alerts,
5:20 I can't stress enough that folks should not, can not, must not opt out of the I pause the wireless emergency alert system because that is
5:30 intended to get your attention. That's intended to wake you up at 4 a.m. If there is a plume of chlorine heading your way, that is our way that we contact you to tell you to shelter in place with additional
5:41 information on what that means to shelter in place. So that to me, that's one of my biggest concerns. That's one of my biggest takeaways. If, you know, we have to identify folks within a mile of a chlorine spill of this
5:53 magnitude. How are we going to alert them? Will they get the alerts and will they be able to take protective action?
6:01 Obviously, union pacific was involved in the coordination as well as Austin fire, who were first on scene. We got engaged and we were able to pull together some additional supporting departments. And of course, Austin police, they have their response mechanisms as well. Not only from traffic management but also their commercial vehicle
6:19 enforcement, which was actually new to me. So again, there's more agencies at the table than I originally knew.
6:25 And this was an opportunity to get more familiarization with all the capabilities that we have, as well as with txdot department of public safety. And and so we had some follow up discussions with union pacific,
6:40 and it was the brass from the city manager's office. Aye pd. I know chief davis was there a fdate ms and my shop and we really just kind of
6:51 talked about how we can nurture this partnership with union pacific and be able to
6:56 work all together better for the next time. So there are hazardous material trainings that they're offering to our firefighters. And we incorporated union pacific into our three year training and exercise plan,
7:07 not necessarily to have derailment specific exercises, but incorporating them into all of our exercises in which that would just be one
7:16 component. So again, we're not trying to simulate anything. We are trying to make sure that we are forced to communicate, collaborate under all types of conditions. And that's that's been our path forward since then.
7:31 Previously when I presented to the committee, I talked about different core capabilities. And that has been our marching orders, whether we're talking about uasi funding, urban area security initiative, homeland security grant funding, or our plans, we're going through all the different core capabilities to determine what metrics we should be able to meet, meat to to satisfy the mission.
7:51 And by defining that if we're not able to to meet that, then that's that gives us the pathway to have prescriptive requests that we can request those resources, whether it's from the state or ultimately the federal response. So again, that's been a fantastic roadmap for us.
8:06 And using the core capabilities and the precursor, the target capabilities, we've been developing our plans and posting them online. We promised several plans, including our emergency operations,
8:18 basic plans. If anyone goes to Austin, texas.gov/em plans,
8:23 they will find them there. We have at least six, seven plans on there, including our protective action plan for wildfire or any other type of incident that talks about sheltering, talks about evacuation and shelter in place.
8:36 So while we continue to develop our plans with the community, with a lot of the committees that and commissions that are in existence and some other advocacy groups throughout the community, we are posting them there, as well as the opportunity for the public to not only review, but provide recommendations to make it better.
8:53 In fact, we challenged the community to poke holes in it as best they can so we can have
8:57 the best plans moving forward as a community.
9:02 Mr. Chair, that is my briefing on the derailment. I'm happy to answer any questions. Thank you. Director. Colleagues, do we have any questions? Excellent. Thank you very much, director. Thank you sir. Colleagues.
9:14 Now the committee will take up item number three. It's a briefing on the partnership between Austin police and our community violence prevention programs.
9:21 We have chief davis, michelle miles friends and sean oliver.
9:29 Welcome.
9:40 Thank you, committee chair. We also have doctor tamara harold, who's going to be part of the presentation as well. Before I hand it over to her, I just wanted to say you know, I've been in this business for a very long time.
9:52 And certainly as I look at reducing violence you know, in my prior prior role in cincinnati and then here as we move forward nothing gets that
10:02 accomplished without collaboration. And these partnerships are so incredibly important. And I want the office of violence prevention to know how much I value their work and the
10:12 work that their team is doing. And I look forward, quite honestly, to more partnerships and how we're going to address violence here within the city of Austin. So I'm going to turn it over to doctor harold. You've met doctor harold here before.
10:24 She does phenomenal work with us. This is just one of the many things that she she's doing here. And I can't wait for this committee to hear others when it comes to our frontline supervisors and things that we're doing. But her work here and then being able to study
10:38 this work is very important. It's important to kind of look at the research behind these things and how we're doing, as we move forward. So I'm going to turn it over to doctor harold. Thank you chief, and good afternoon.
10:50 I'm tamara harold. We've met before. I'm a I'm a crime scientist and a professor at texas state university. And I work with the Austin police department on violence prevention strategy. I'm going to take the first part of this briefing, and then I'm going to turn things over to miss michelle miles and her team over here at the office of violence prevention.
11:08 So first, I just wanted to point out, and I think, does this work? Thank you know, is that it? Okay. Excellent. So this is our agenda. We're going to talk a little bit about what's happening nationally. I'm going to give you the overview. I'm going to turn it over to the office of violence prevention. At peace is going to talk as well.
11:26 And then we'll talk about next steps moving forward. Excellent. So just to sort of give you a picture. Violent crime in Austin is tracking what we're seeing nationally. So violence continues to trend downwards.
11:39 And I just wanted to point this out first, that gun violence represents a very small
11:44 fraction of the total demand placed on Austin police. And this is a graph produced by oksana ferrin, an excellent analyst manager at the Austin police department. But fewer than 1% of all incidents are violent gun crimes,
11:59 and about only 0.13% roughly one tenth of 1%,
12:04 involve shootings. But small percentages do not mean small consequences,
12:09 and shootings have devastating impacts on families, victims, neighborhoods and first responders. And that's why focused crime prevention remains so important.
12:20 Apd's mission to keep you, your family and our community safe is straightforward. But when chief davis began leading the department, she identified community trust and crime prevention as central priorities. And as you know, those goals are closely connected.