North Stonington — The number of resident state troopers in town will soon be reduced from three to two after the Board of Finance voted Wednesday to deny additional funds for the town's third trooper.

Voting 4-2 against the motion to appropriate the additional funds were Board of Finance Chairman Tim Main III, Charles Steinhart IV, Tim Pelland and Emil W. Pavlovics.

Carolyn Howell and Mustapha Ratib voted to increase the appropriation.

Following the decision, First Selectman Shawn Murphy sent a letter on Thursday to the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection and Troop E requesting they immediately withdraw the third state trooper from town — but noted in a phone interview that personally he thought that it was the wrong decision.

"It's my opinion that they voted against supporting public safety in the town of North Stonington," Murphy said.

Main, however, said the timeline was the main issue: he felt it was a lot of money to spend given the building projects the town will soon be paying for.

"Basically a lot of the ... back and forth was (that) we knew about this early enough end of June, early July. We should have been up front early on," Main said about the additional funds.

The reduction was set in motion by a change in the local funding formula for resident state troopers passed by the state legislature in June.

The new formula increases the town's share of the cost of first two troopers from 70 to 85 percent, and shifts the entire cost of additional troopers onto the town.

Voters at the June town meeting approved $434,768 for the resident state trooper program with the original budget in mind, leaving a shortfall of $124,700 to cover the third trooper and other additional trooper services.

While removing the third state trooper will cut the shortfall, there are still additional services and overtime that will be axed due to insufficient funding.

According to Murphy, this means there will be no DARE program in the school system and no troopers at school functions, unless the time can be accommodated by the trooper's regular schedule.

The reduced funding is in effect through the end of the fiscal year on June 30, 2016.

Last week, Murphy and Selectman Nick Mullane as well as a representatives from other towns with resident state troopers met with the commissioner of the Department of Emergency Services and Public Protection as well as Lieutenant Cooke of Troop E to discuss the cost-sharing agreement between the town and the state.

They raised questions about the agreement, such as whether troopers could still be pulled out of town for state business if the town is paying 100 percent of the cost, however, there were no immediate developments from that meeting and Murphy was pessimistic about the outcome.

"I had a feeling it was a one-way meeting, that we didn't get adequate feedback on our concerns and whether we were really heard or not: I don't know," Murphy said at Wednesday's meeting.

n.lynch@theday.com

Twitter: @_nathanlynch