Without layoffs, police merger won’t save Allegheny Valley towns money
The Allegheny Valley communities of Sharpsburg, Aspinwall, O’Hara and Blawnox have been told by the Pennsylvania Governor’s Center for Local Government Services that a study did not recommend that they form a regionalized police force.
The reason: The premise of the study was that no officer could be laid off, even though the combined force could theoretically be roughly half the size of the four departments. Without layoffs, there would be no cost savings from consolidation.
The study’s authors used a police staffing formula developed by the International Association of Police Chiefs, based on public safety incident data. They found that the regional force would require 15 uniformed employees versus the 28 who would be carried over from current
departments.
“It is a basic premise in developing a regional police department that all currently employed full-time officers in the participating municipalities be incorporated into the regional police department,” according to the study.
A statement provided Friday by Sharpsburg Mayor Matthew Rudzki on behalf of the four communities said the free state study concluded, “at this time, moving forward with a regionalized force would not be recommended.”
The study’s recommendation against merging comes down to costs: The overall proposed budget for a regional department is $4.203 million, slightly higher than the communities’ $4.122 million combined police expenses in 2018. The majority of that cost, $3.788 million, is for personnel, including over $2.5 million in salaries for a total of 28 officers.
Any staffing reductions, the authors suggest, should come gradually through attrition, but the study does not include a budgetary estimate for an eventual 15-officer police force. It also does not factor in any potential grants, including the Shared Municipal Services Grant and Regional Police Assistance Grant, both of which the center allocates.
Without any staffing reductions, all proposed funding formulas result in increases in police costs for at least one of the four communities, in particular, O’Hara.
Sharpsburg, which puts nearly half its annual budget into policing, would stand to benefit the most from the proposed regional force.
In 2017, Sharpsburg had the ninth-highest rate of violent crime in the county — 8 such crimes per 1,000 people — and the 34th-highest police budget per capita. That difference reflected a countywide disconnect between public safety needs — at least as measured by violent crime and 911 calls — and policing resources, the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette found in a December report, “Patchwork Policing.”
The state’s review of the Allegheny Valley municipalities is “quite an in-depth study,” O’Hara manager Julie Jakubec told the PostGazette Friday. The negative recommendation “doesn’t mean we won’t revisit this.”
The study does have one recommendation regarding regionalization: “O’Hara should discuss with Blawnox discussing contracting police services.” [sic]
According to the study, Blawnox has only three officers, and both O’Hara and Blawnox have one officer each retiring in 2019, so the combined force if O’Hara absorbed the Blawnox department would be only one officer larger than the current O’Hara department.
The center, which is part of the Department of Community and Economic Development, began conducting the study in 2018 at the request of the municipalities. Municipal officials received the results Tuesday, and Mr. Rudzki presented them Thursday at the monthly Sharpsburg Borough Council meeting.
Earlier regionalization discussions included Fox Chapel, but in April 2018, only the four communities committed to the study.
The statement from the four municipalities continued: “The bringing together of all four municipalities in the study process has strengthened our municipal ties and increased the cooperation and collaboration of all our police Chiefs/Superintendents and officers.”
“Just because this wasn’t recommended doesn’t mean there aren’t other things we can do working together to improve service and reduce costs. The sky’s the limit now that we’re all talking and working together,” Ms. Jakubec said.
Some local police departments in Allegheny County had 10 times more officers per resident than others, the Post-Gazette reported in “Patchwork Policing.” Some of the officers who faced the most daunting public safety landscapes took home the lowest paychecks compared to peers. Officials and experts have proposed consolidating more of the county’s 109 police departments, following models used by the four-municipality Northern Regional Police Department or the seven Ohio Valley communities that contract for policing service with Ohio Township.