Newcastle City Council
Guest View
The following is the letter read by Councilman Michael Alexander to the public at the Special City Council meeting held on August 23 to address the suggestion to eliminate the city police department and allow the Weston County Sheriff to be resonponsible for law enforcement in Newcastle.
Greetings All:
For any city council, it is necessary to occasionally reassess the needs of the city so that the community is best served. The editor-in-chief of the News Letter Journal, Mr. Bob Bonnar, has in his recent opinion pieces brought to the council’s attention an expenditure that he considers unnecessary, and, as those of you who have followed Mr. Bonnar’s recent editorials already know, the expenditure in question is our police department budget.
Knee-jerk reactions to such proclamations are always a mistake, and it is with this realization in mind that the council has considered Mr. Bonnar’s proposition.
Mr. Bonnar had made a number of claims in support of his call for the dissolution of the police department, and to come to our current position, which is that retaining the department is the best option for the city, the council took each of Mr. Bonnar’s claims into consideration.
First, in his July 25th opinion piece, “County Attorney Election is Unlikely to Solve our Prosecution Problem,” Mr. Bonnar contends that the community is “over-policed.” Frankly, this assertion was a surprise, considering that Police Chief Owens routinely reports to the council the frequency of police activity in the community, and there has been no appreciable increase; moreover, this claim is difficult to accept since it is typically the case that only one police officer is on duty at any given time, which makes over-policing somewhat of a challenge.
In this same article, Mr. Bonnar argues that the funds currently used for the police department should be allocated to other needs, and one he suggests is street repair. More specifically, he lays out a plan for the city that entails offering “half of (the) present police budget to Weston County to help provide the resources necessary to ensure the Sheriff’s Office can take on additional policing responsibilities in Newcastle,” and that the “Sheriff would also take over dispatch duties in the county (since) most federal and state funds for communications systems come through the Department of Homeland Security.” This plan fails to account for a number of realities.
First, as was reported at the most recent police committee meeting, Homeland Security simply lacks the means to fund dispatch, which costs over $400,000 per year (Note that the city has not received any money from Homeland Security.) Second, the Sheriff’s Department’s yearly budget is $505,000, which means that if the city were to adopt Mr. Bonnar’s plan and the Sheriff’s Office were willing to take on additional policing responsibilities (Signs indicate this to not be the case.), the county would have less than $100,000 to both “create a county prosecuting attorney position” and make up for the loss of policing that would result from adopting Mr. Bonnar’s plan. It does not seem wise to sacrifice so much for so little.
In entertaining the dissolution of the police department, the council had to consider how such a change would affect the community. For starters, Newcastle residents would experience slower response times; residents who have ever called in a noise complain, safety check, or report of suspicious activity – and the police bulletin in the paper indicates that a number have – can anticipate waiting much longer for a response if the city takes up Mr. Bonnar’s suggestion.
Also worth consideration is the fact that by relinquishing policing to the Sheriff’s Office, the council and the Newcastle residents the council represents lose considerable say in how policing is performed; unlike the police department, the Sheriff would be unable to enforce city ordinances, and as Mayor Piana observed, the council cannot do much to protest any action taken by the Sheriff, but we can direct and discipline the police chief.
Moreover, it is also worth considering our police department families – do residents of the city really desire putting them out of work just so that we can have a few more drops in the bucket that is our street repair budget?
And as far as street repair is considered, the money saved would be drops in the bucket – street repair is extremely expensive, and while, considered in isolation, more funding for street repair is a rather nice idea, the sacrifice Mr. Bonnar is suggesting is just not worth gaining funds equal to a fraction of many of our street project budgets. (For instance, the rebuild project in Saddle Subdivision cost approximately $2 million.)
Mr. Bonnar’s most recent op-ed “Let’s Be Careful Out There,” also necessitates clarification. In this piece, Mr. Bonnar asserts that Chief Owens “suffered no repercussions from the…council on Monday (the 6th) when it was revealed that he violated the state law that requires publication of legal notices in the local newspaper.”
First of all, no violation of the law took place – while it is accurate that the vehicle bid was first published in the Upton paper, it is also accurate that the bid was eventually placed in the News Letter Journal, which happened at the direction of the Mayor and the council.
While there is no statutory authority for the position that such bids must be placed in the newspaper legally designated for publication of the council’s minutes, the council does agree with Mr. Bonnar that it is most appropriate for such bids as the recent vehicle bid to be placed in the News Letter Journal. Since Chief Owens has been made aware of this position and promised to abide by it, more serious repercussions are unnecessary.
The council appreciates input, and Mr. Bonnar’s is no exception. His proposal to disband the police department has been soberly considered, but, as mentioned above, a recognition of what would be gained versus what would be lost indicates that it is just not the most prudent course of action at this time.
Sincerely,
Newcastle City Council