Mayor Mark McBrayer recently visited with Sunrise LBK on KFYO to discuss current budgeting proposals and AI data centers in Lubbock.

Keep scrolling to listen to the complete interview.

Lubbock Police and Firemen Proposals

One such proposal McBrayer mentioned is adding 22 new firemen every year for six years.

Now that sounds really strange. That’s a lot of firemen. But what they’re trying to do is move from their current 24/48 schedule which means they work 24 hours on, 48 hours off to what is called a 24/72. So, they’d be off three days and you’d have to add new officers and new firemen in order to do that.

The net cost of this proposal would sit at around $1.5 million for the first year. Another factor is that firemen would not have to work overtime, eliminating that annual cost.

Sunrise LBK’s Tom Collins noted that many firefighters have been pushing the 24/72 schedule for a while given the extreme conditions and hazards they are put through during the 24 hours on the clock.

Another point of interest during the interview was when the Mayor referenced Councilman Tim Green’s views on bolstering the Lubbock Police Department. One proposal was adding an additional 10 new police officers.

McBrayer brought up a common question: Why add so many firemen and so few police officers when crime is still an issue? The Mayor included the argument that Lubbock doesn’t have a fire problem, it has a crime problem.

On any given shift, there are about 24 patrol officers on the street in Lubbock. The additional 10 proposed officers would raise that number to 27 on each shift.

AI Data Centers

On Tuesday, the City Council accepted the results of a petition that temporarily halted certain data centers in Lubbock.

This petition asks for an 18-month moratorium on data centers requiring high water and energy use within city limits.

Because the petition was accepted, the council now has 30 days to vote whether to adopt it as an ordinance.

One key factor to these data centers, Mayor McBrayer included, is that the City Council cannot place an outright ban on their construction. The most they can do is place limitations.

We’re already in the process of drawing up new ordinances that would apply specifically to large-scale data centers that would have an effect on what they could locate and they would have noise controls on them, and all those other constrictions that people are concerned about.

Listen to the entire interview with Lubbock Mayor Mark McBrayer on KFYO right here:

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