ק"י קעמפט קעגן פארשיקן די סטעיט פאליס

Emergency services are ripe for consolidation

By Chris McKenna
Times Herald-Record
cmckenna@th-record.com

Monroe – Their first encounter was as awkward as teenagers meeting on the dance floor.
One night last month, three governing boards sat down and commenced the complicated tango that takes place whenever anyone in local government starts talking about sharing costs and control.
The topic was consolidating emergency services and the discussion vague and disjointed. No one seemed quite sure which services they were considering – police? police and fire? police, fire and ambulance? – and which municipalities would be involved in a merger.
But people pushing the discussion have narrowed their focus and are gearing up for a follow-up meeting on April 21. There they are expected to present more detailed scenarios for merging police forces and expanding coverage in Monroe.
Consolidation talk is in the air in Orange County, at least in a few places. And where could there be more fertile ground? This is a county in which 31 of 40 municipalities have their own police departments, 10 serving populations of less than 4,000.
Indeed, 10 towns in Orange have more than one police force patrolling their streets. Montgomery is the king of redundancy: four police departments, one for each of three villages and one for the rest of the town.
No town, however small, wants to give up its police department. But rising costs have prodded some into looking at consolidation, an idea lauded in theory and ignored in practice.
The town and village of Chester have just dusted off the idea of joining police forces to save money, a courtship that began in the early 1990s and fizzled. And to the east in the Town of Highlands, the Village of Highland Falls has waded into a dispute over soaring town police costs by suggesting its own police cover the town for a fraction of the current expense.
No other police departments have merged in Orange County since 1992, when the Village of Warwick force was subsumed by the Town of Warwick department.
Monroe has heard this tune many times – with an added refrain. There, the issue is not only merging the police departments serving the villages of Monroe and Harriman but also whether to expand local police service into the unincorporated town areas, which now rely on state police coverage.
The idea of a townwide force has been kicked around in Monroe for almost 30 years – starting before Harriman even created its first police force in 1981 – but has always foundered in the shoals of cost and control.
"I've been through this so many times; it's so frustrating," Village of Monroe police Chief Dominic Giudice says. "We keep doing this, and then it seems to die."
The latest overture is taking place as municipalities in New York are struggling with skyrocketing insurance and pension costs. The villages of Monroe and Harriman are looking at double-digit tax increases this year, largely because of those factors and higher police salaries.
Consolidating services, police or otherwise, are supposed to save towns money by offering economies of scale. Whether it would do so in Monroe's case and how much it would save remains to be seen. Police and village officials promise to include cost estimates with the scenarios they spell out at the April 21 meeting.
A central question is whether people in the growing areas outside Monroe's villages want to pay for local police service.
Those who fought for it before melted away when told how much it would cost them in taxes. But there are more people today, which might lower the cost per household. And some newcomers from places where local police are a given might be surprised to learn there is no town police department.
"There are a lot of benefits to having a local police department," says Terry Chmel, a resident who started lobbying for a town police force 10 years ago. "For one, they're really integrated into the neighborhood."
Proponents also argue that Monroe, the county's most populous municipality, has gotten too large not to have a townwide police force.
"I don't know how the Town of Monroe is getting by without a full-time agency," says Woodbury police Chief Robert Kwaitkowski, president of the Orange County Police Chief's Association. "I'm surprised that the people put up with it."
But for town officials, adding police service means raising taxes and taking on a large, continuing expense, always an unpleasant prospect. The concept might be especially unpalatable this year with three Town Board seats up for election in November.
"I haven't been in favor of it in the past," Monroe Supervisor Sandy Leonard says. "I think the State Police are doing a decent job, and I think I would have to take a hard look at the numbers before making a decision."
Village officials have also expressed concern about ceding control over their departments and potentially losing some of the close attention they now get – fears that proponents of consolidation will have to allay if the discussion moves forward.
One wild card in the discussion is the Village of Kiryas Joel, whose officials didn't take part in the meeting last month and have sat out past plans to form a town police force. They have a state police barracks just outside the village and a growing public safety department for additional security.
Lt. Alex Melchiorre, who is drawing up consolidation proposals for the Village of Monroe police, says he will present options on April 21 that both include and exclude Kiryas Joel.
Both Monroe and Harriman chiefs are eager to form a town police department. All that awaits, they say, is the will of the politicians and the people.
"We can almost do this tomorrow if they want us to," Giudice says.