It will be up to Pittsfield residents on Town Meeting Day whether to axe two positions on the police department – including a school-based resource officer – after the select board this week turned down a one-time $75,000 donation that would have required the town to keep the jobs.
“(It’s) an amazing gesture. But it is not necessarily the responsible way to run a municipality – based on generosity of some citizens for this year. We can’t count on that going forward,” Selectman Jim Allard said before voting against accepting the donation offered by Gef and Rob Freese, lifelong Pittsfield residents and co-owners of Globe Manufacturing.
The vote, split right down the middle, came at the conclusion of an often rancorous meeting on Tuesday night, where many residents packed the town hall’s meeting room to urge the select board to accept the funds and keep the police officers.
Selectwoman Carole Richardson joined Allard in voting against accepting the donation. Select board Chairman Larry Konopka and Vice-Chairman Gerard LeDuc voted for it.
“I’m very disappointed with the board that it’s come to this,” said resident Rick Anthony earlier in the meeting. “For a private citizen to have to step up to do that to protect this town is unconscionable.”
Pittsfield school district superintendent John Freeman also came to urge the select board to accept the funds, telling them national research suggests that having police in school increases feelings of safety, brings disciplinary incidents down, improves community relations with police, and increases the likelihood students will report school-based crime.
“We’re only in our first year so I can’t report a lot of significant impact yet, but I think we’ll be able to do that a year from now,” Freeman said. “But we know that the presence of the officer helps with school discipline.”
A mother and substitute teacher in the district, Cara Peterson, said the officer had been a great addition.
“I feel safe knowing that he’s there,” she said. “I know that my kids are safe. And my kids actually really enjoy him, so they’re now comfortable – they look at police officers very different than they used to.”
Many argued that in the context of a rising drug epidemic, the town, though small, couldn’t afford to lose an officer. Merrimack County prosecutor Marianne Ouellet told the board last month that Pittsfield was the busiest of the five towns she oversaw, and that the court had dedicated an entire day – Fridays – to accommodate cases from the town.
David Simpson, a town firefighter and resident, called the Select Board’s proposal to cut two officers “appalling,” and said the police department was critical to his work.
“Our police department is by far our best ally on the field. We go into a lot of hairy, hairy situations – we need our officers,” Simpson said. “We go into domestics, we go into overdoses. If we cannot send an officer into secure a scene, we do not go in.”
But not everyone agreed.
“It’s a very generous offer, very kind, but we’re living way above our means,” said resident and budget committee member Noreen Rollins. “Accepting the money ties the town’s hands.”
In a bid to hold the line on a tax rate creeping ever upward, the select board pitched cutting two positions from their police department last month.
The move would eliminate the town’s new school resource officer program – just introduced this year – and move the officer currently splitting his time between the elementary and high school back into regular policing. A vacant position would go unfilled, and one officer would be laid off, based on seniority.
The wrinkle? Because the school resource officer was paid for with a three-year federal grant that’s conditioned on the police department maintaining a certain headcount for the life of the grant, it’s unclear how much – if anything – cutting the positions now would actually save the town, at least in the short-term.
The loss of the grant would mean $72,000 less in revenues from the grant next year, according to police Chief Jeff Cain. And reneging on it would also require the town to pay back what it had already received.
At the meeting Tuesday, budget committee Chairman Robert Schiferle first told the room the move would save taxpayers $8,000 next year and $56,000 the following. But Cain argued that didn’t account for lost grant revenue.
After the vote, Schiferle revised his calculations and said cutting the positions would cost the town over $60,000 in the first year, and be wash in the following. In an interview Thursday, he said the budget committee had again revised their numbers, and that cutting positions would probably cost taxpayers an additional $31,000 in the first year. The implications the following year were still unclear.
“What we’re doing is diligently working on getting exact figures,” Schiferle said, in order to present the public with scenarios at the committee’s public hearing in February.
When last revised on Tuesday, the select board’s proposed general fund operating budget for next year stood at $4,093,362. The projected town tax rate is currently $12.72, a $1.78 increase from this year.
The budget committee’s next regularly scheduled meeting is at 6:30 p.m. on Wednesday at the Pittsfield Town Hall. Once ready, its proposed budget is scheduled to be presented for input at a public hearing at 7 p.m. on Feb. 8 at the Pittsfield Middle High School’s media center.