Montville — After voters rejected an independent police department 1,531-949 at Tuesday’s referendum, town leaders on each side of the issue are uncertain what the future may hold. 

The referendum’s result was a victory for those who claimed that leaving the resident state trooper program would drive their taxes up.

“People are struggling to just pay what they have now,” Ellen Hillman, a former town councilor, said Wednesday.

Hillman wrote a 2002 ordinance that would have created an independent department in that year.

But on Tuesday, she voted "yes" to overturn the 2016 version of that ordinance.

“For me it was a heart-wrenching decision,” she said Wednesday.

Hillman said voters on both sides made their decision based on fear.

“The biggest reason that people voted ‘yes’ was that they wanted lower taxes,” she said. “The big reason people voted ‘no’ was that they thought the state police would be pulled out from under them.”

Town Councilor Joseph Rogulski, one of two town councilors who voted against the ordinance that was the subject of Tuesday’s referendum, said the town needs more time to digest the proposal for an independent department.

“It’s time to work together and figure out what needs to be done,” he said.

For people like Town Council Chairman Joseph W. Jaskiewicz, who has pushed for an independent department for decades, the referendum was a clear disappointment.

Jaskiewicz arrived just past 8 p.m. Tuesday at the Fair Oaks building, and while he was conciliatory toward voters who had again rejected the independent department, he had little to say.

“If people said ‘we’re fine with the status quo,’ fine,” he said. “That’s what it’ll be.”

Hillman said Montville voters could one day accept an independent department.

She said voters heard this year that the independent department would require the construction of an impound lot at the public safety building and hiring new officers, a records clerk and additional dispatchers.

That can all be completed while the town remains in the resident state trooper program for a little while longer, Hillman said.

“To take and dump it on the taxpayers and do it all at once was just not going to be fair," she said. "It's a learning process for the taxpayer.”

Montville Police Lt. Leonard Bunnell, the department’s highest-ranking officer, is less optimistic.

After the second time in 15 years trying to plead the case for an independent department with Montville voters, he seemed resigned to their resistance.

“There's no way to convince people,” he said Wednesday.

Bunnell said he is “angry, as a taxpayer” that the town effectively wasted $6.5 million on the state-of-the-art public safety building on Route 32, which houses several unused rooms and pieces of equipment.

Voters approved a $6.5 million bond request in 2010 that paid for the 17,000-square-foot building that Bunnell said was built to one day house an independent department.

“We’ve wasted $6.5 million,” he added. “We're not going to use the building.”

Equipment in the building — the evidence laboratory and an interview room, for example — will go to waste, he said.

“They’re going to have to be mothballed, and there’s nothing we can do about it.”

He said he thinks the ordinance failed because opponents of the independent department spread “untruths” about how much it would cost.

“They were claiming that increase in taxes and scaring people,” he said.

Bunnell’s department budget, which he already has submitted to Mayor Ronald McDaniel, will not change as a result of the referendum, he said.

His budget still includes a request for two more officers, which would bring the total budgeted number of officers to 28.

He said the town’s decision to stay in the resident state trooper program won’t solve the problem that Montville is used as a training ground for new officers that quickly move on to other towns with independent departments.

It also won't stop the increasing cost of staying in the resident state trooper program that state officials have warned the town about, he said.

But, he said, neither more time nor the chance to observe Ledyard’s recently incorporated department will be enough to convince people to switch to an independent department.

“We've already come up with all of the details,” he said. “I don’t see waiting and sitting back and looking at anybody. We have all the facts, and people didn’t want to see it."

m.shanahan@theday.com