DOLLARS AND SENSE

by Marilyn Stollon

Dollars and sense come to mind when considering our police force and our ongoing exposure to liability.

Quite simply, we have runaway legal and litigation costs for 10 years, in part caused by lawsuits against our police, costs for investigations regarding allegations of intimidation of residents, personnel harassment, and misconduct issues relating to personal information accessed via CLETS. The current board, to their credit, selected someone with moderate rates thus reducing ongoing legal fees; nevertheless, the costs continue due to the multiple appeals of officers and ongoing, seemingly never ending legal issues resulting from Renogate, the Berkeley stop, citizen complaints and now the Saba RICO suit.

My concern is in order to maintain our local “ independent” department with its problematic officers, we taxpayers would need to be willing to shoulder the burden for ongoing exponentially rising legal costs, and resulting increased liability insurance premiums. That means– increased taxes.

Why do I say this? Because, as we know, past actions are a predictor of future actions.
We hire, we are liable; we contract for services, we are not liable because the officers are hired by the provider. It’s on them, that is why the provider controls the hiring process.

Yes, we would pay a proportional amount of legal fees as part of the comprehensive hourly rate configured, but we would not have the major liability and resulting costs. It is a prime reason towns contract out– to reduce legal liability, pension debt and workers comp.

Legal costs from 2015-17 based on the audits including consulting fees for police and district business are as follows:

2017 $274,067
2016 $298,238
2015 $260,110
Consulting fees have included investigations in the past or other legal assignments. It isn’t broken out.
For this budget year Jul 2017-Feb 2018, our fees to date are $78,000 ($33k legal, $45k police).

If you are not in favor of another tax assessment, then please stay open and flexible to review and consider the fact based proposals Matrix will develop for costs and quality of service.

Marilyn Stollon