Montville police force report met with praise
Montville — The Town Council, town law enforcement officials and members of the public responded favorably Tuesday to a committee report recommending the town establish its own police department.
Members of the Montville Law Enforcement Feasibility Committee delivered the results of its report to the council at a special meeting Tuesday night.
"The committee did a phenomenal job," Councilman Billy Caron said. "You guys did your job fantastically."
The seven members of the committee, which began meeting in September 2014, said in their report that an independent police department would bring stability and more grant opportunities to the town.
The department currently is overseen by state police as part of the Resident State Trooper program, and the percentage the town pays to participate in the program went from 70 percent to 85 percent of the troopers' salary this year.
The switch to an independent police department, run out of the town's underused public safety building, would add about $300,000 to the Montville police department’s budget by 2018, according to the report, which the committee released on the town's website last month.
The biggest budget increase associated with establishing an independent department would be salaries for several new police dispatchers to operate out of the town’s public safety building, according to the report.
The town’s three full-time dispatchers, employed by the Fire Marshal’s Office, now handle only fire and medical calls.
The advantages would outweigh that additional cost, Wills Pike, the committee's chairman, told the council Tuesday.
Hiring a police chief and running a department out of the recently remodeled public safety building would create a sense of stability and independence, Pike said.
"We have a modern building, we have a modern police force in terms of staff," he said. "Let's make Montville a model police department."
Montville has weighed establishing an independent department and canceling its participation in the resident state trooper for years, rejecting the switch in a 2002 referendum and reconsidering the idea since the construction of the public safety building and the cost increase to the town for participating in the program.
On Tuesday, Montville police Lt. Leonard Bunnell praised the committee's work and voiced his support for a move to an independent department.
"We'd be able to address (the town's) problems and do what needs to be done," Bunnell said.
Montville faces challenges such as substance abuse, domestic violence and traffic, he said, and a police chief in the town would help.
"We will be able to deal with that if we have... a chief of police to coordinate it," he said.
Caron agreed.
"What we need is safety for our town, controlled by our own people," he said.
m.shanahan@theday.com
Twitter: @martha_shan
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