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Show PG Council Discusses North Pointe, DARE, Dispatch, CART, VIP's and More The City Council work session, held on October 12, spotlighted local departments that serve North Utah County; Coun-ty; North Pointe, North Utah County Animal Shelter and the Pleasant Grove Police Department. Depart-ment. In an effort to better acquaint ac-quaint the council with the various services available to the city, a different entity will give an overview of their business busi-ness or service throughout the year. North Pointe is the local solid waste facility and has served all the cities from Orem north, including Fairfield since 1994. Each city is represented with an additional three at-large at-large members which make up the board. Unlike a landfill, North Pointe is a transfer station which collects waste from citizens citi-zens and ships it to a landfill in Tooele or a recycle facility in West Jordan. Processing the roughly 186.000 tons per year translates into 1 .3 tons of waste per person in the district with a cost of $29 per ton. It is estimated that 30 percent of this waste could be recycled which would be a significant cost savings for the district. Whereas they pay $29 for every ton of solid waste, they pay nothing for recyclable materials. This waste is transferred to a larger truck and taken to West Jordan where it is sorted, separated, bailed and shipped off to a recycle re-cycle processing plant. Two hundred and fifty tons have gone to the center since Pleasant Pleas-ant Grove began recycling earlier ear-lier this year. North Pointe has recycled electronics for the past several years and allows one computer or other electronic devise per load without charge. A $10 fee is charged per item after that to cover the $.20 per pound cost of recycling. The facility does concrete recycling at the transfer station, handles construction con-struction demotion waste (not from companies) and also has an annual "household hazardous hazard-ous waste" collection day. Another discard that could be recycled is green waste with the national average indicating in-dicating 20-25 percent ends up in the landfill. Orem and Lehi have green waste pickup which goes from the curb to the sewer plant in American Fork for composting. North Pointe welcomes input and operates with the focus fo-cus of serving the community. The PI. Grove Police Department De-partment was represented by Chief of Police Tom Paul, who outlined the services rendered to the city. In his visual presentation, pre-sentation, Chief Paul jokingly projected the Chief Wiggins character from the Simpson's as how the public may perceive per-ceive police officers. He then showed the Iron Man character, charac-ter, indicating this is how the police perceive themselves, but in reality, they fit somewhere some-where in the middle. Besides the administrative staff, the department operates the following divisions. Patrol answers calls 247 while the investigation division follows up on the calls. Traffic division divi-sion consists of one man who responds to places that may have specific traffic problems including accident investigation. investiga-tion. The department has two motorcycles which are mostly used in summer months. There is only one school resource officer who covers all the schools in Pleasant Grove, who also teaches the NOVA classes, formerly the DARE program. Two members of the force are members of the County SWAT team which is a benefit to the department. The Reserve program allows al-lows officers to volunteer at the department to maintain their certification and when there is an opening, the replacement re-placement comes from this group. They also belong to the County Sex Crime Task, with officers who investigate sex crimes, specifically against children. Major Crimes Task Force has one officer who opted opt-ed to stay longer than the two year limit as he is involved in some important work he wants to see through. 'CART - Child Abduction Response Team is a recently started program that concentrates concen-trates on mobilizing searches in the first three hours after a child is abducted. The department de-partment is looking into cross-training cross-training members of the CERT team to assist in CART. Communications or the 911 Dispatch Unit is owned by the department and has been highly effective. There is a wireless system as well as hard wiring and mapping. A recently installed hyperlink hyper-link allows instant access to up-close views of all Pleasant Grove, including floor plans of schools. Other monitoring services allows a direct interface to UDOT cameras so all traffic situations can be monitored. City Watch is a program where a recorded message could be sent out city-wide or to a specific area, whether wheth-er emergency or public announcement. an-nouncement. For instance, if a snow storm is anticipated, citizens can be alerted to keep vehicles off the road to facilitate facili-tate snow plows. Support Services include traffic school, victim advocate, advo-cate, school crossing guards, fingerprinting, records department, de-partment, honor guard, and BSA merit badges. The real goal is a Citizen Corp and Volunteers which makes the city eligible for grants, allowing more programs pro-grams to be funded. All volunteer programs must be under the umbrella of the Citizen Corp. These include Neighborhood Watch, CERT (Community Emergency Response Re-sponse Team) which currently current-ly has 200 volunteers, VIPS (Volunteers In Police Services), Servic-es), CART, and the Honorary Colonel program which was recently incorporated in the city. The philosophy is that each member of the Pleasant Grove Police Department deserves de-serves a feeling of ownership in the division and the forward for-ward thinking ideas of each staff member is valued and encouraged in their short and long-term planning. It is their desire to maintain a environment environ-ment of absolute trust in their association as team members of this organization. The mission statement is to ensure that each citizen, the community and members of the department are happy, effective and productive. |