Cost, training impede police retention

LAKE COUNTY — As St. Ignatius struggles to rebuild its small police department, the troubles the town is facing are not unique.

“Small communities with a small tax base can’t afford to compete with larger agencies,” Wayne Ternes, executive director of the Montana Public Safety Officer Standards and Training, said.

These are tough times for small agencies and they just can’t keep qualified officers, he said.

“Officers may go through training on a small town’s dime, but once trained they leave for a larger department that can offer more money. Then towns are in the position of having to find another officer. It’s a huge expense for these towns,” Ternes said.

For an officer in the academy, towns not only have to pay tuition, but wages for the officer in the academy, wages for a replacement officer to take over while the other is in the academy, plus money for transportation, uniforms, insurance and equipment, Ternes said.

It’s a huge cost to these towns that just lose that money when an officer moves on.

“The problem most of these small towns are facing is their expenses are rising but their tax base isn’t growing,” Alec Hansen, executive director of the Montana League of Cities and Towns, said.

State law requires that incorporated towns have a police force, and the financial burden of funding a force is hitting many of the small towns in Montana, Hansen said.

The exact number of communities facing compliance issues similar to St. Ignatius (where P.D. Van Hoose and Mayor Charley Gariepy faced criticism over Van Hoose’s training. Van Hoose never completed the basic training course and is not a POST certified officer.) is unknown to Ternes.

“Until we start doing compliance checks, we just don’t know what towns are having troubles,” Ternes said. POST is actively recruiting for a compliance officer/ investigator that will audit every agency — about 165 — in Montana during the next 12 months.

In Lake County, the Polson Police Department was facing similar troubles to St. Ignatius when current police chief Doug Chase arrived.

There was one major pitfall for the Polson Police Department, Chase said.

“We had huge turnover because we didn’t pay as much as the Lake County Sheriff’s Office just down the street,” he said. “When officers can make $4,000 more a year with the Sheriff’s office, it was understandable when they left.”

However, the cost of training a new officer cost the city of Polson around $80,000 every time this happened because of various training, equipment and salary costs, Chase said.

“It was getting to be that our department was a training ground for the Lake County Sheriff,” Chase said. “We never begrudged anyone who left or the agencies that took them. They were excellent officers that we just couldn’t afford to keep.”

What finally stopped the turnover, Chase said, was a safety levy passed by the Polson voters in 2006.

“I worked with [former] Mayor [Randy] Ingram and members of the city council to create a levy that would go towards improving the police department,” Chase said.

Polson voters passed the levy by a 2-1 margin.

The first year after the levy was passed, the police department had about $135,000 to create a new officer position, replace aging equipment and replace an aging police cruiser.

However, the biggest change the levy allowed was to raise Polson police officer’s base wage by $2.30 per hour to match the starting pay for the Lake County Sheriff’s Office, Chase said.

“Since the levy passed, we haven’t been losing officers to the Sheriff’s Office,” Chase said. Polson has lost officers to Kalispell, Missoula and Montana Highway Patrol, but each of those positions are a $10,000 raise and “we just can’t compete with that,”

However, Chase said officers want to stick around Polson because the community is a good place to live.

“We’re a good department because of the caliber of officers we have,” Chase said. “Without the levy, I doubt I would be here. It was just too tough to maintain a quality department with the limited funds we had.”

A levy is definitely an option for these small towns, Hansen said. “Many towns also contract with the county sheriff’s office to provide police coverage. However, counties are under similar financial strains.”

Hansen also said he encourages towns to insert a clause into contract negotiations that would require an officer to serve a certain amount of time before leaving or that officer would have to repay the town for the costs of his training.

“This is something that has to be done at the beginning of the hiring process,” Hansen said. “It can’t be done retroactively.”

State and federal grants are available for small towns, Hansen said. But these grants are very competitive and aren’t a guarantee for a long term solution.

The difficult in passing a levy is the same for any new tax, Hansen said. “It’s a tough time financially and people don’t want to pay more taxes.”

“I think a town would be hard-pressed to pass a levy right now,” Chase agreed.

Ronan attempted to pass a levy similar to the Polson one in 2008, but the levy was rejected by voters.

For St. Ignatius, the issue of whether the town can issue a levy is up for debate. In the Oct. 6 regular town council meeting, during which the P.D. Van Hoose matter came to light, concerned citizens asked the town council whether they could issue some sort of tax for the police department.

Council president Rod Arlint said he wasn’t sure the council could do that under current city ordinances.

This problem doesn’t have an easy solution, Hansen said.

“It is going to be difficult to maintain police departments in these small towns unless some solution — whether it be grants, taxes or something else — is found,” he said.