Greenacres eases into PBSO merger
Residents, officials still adjusting to shift to Sheriff ’s Office patrols.
GREENACRES — In June, inside a nondescript yellow brick duplex on Chariot Circle, Nilda Sheffield did the unspeakable.
Sheffield, 53, killed her 30-year-old daughter and her two grandchildren, ages 7 and 2, before turning the gun on — and killing — herself, police say.
The slayings brought the homicide total to six in Greenacres at the time — more than any other municipality in Palm Beach County. Three more people were slain in the city before the end of the year, bringing the final number of homicides to nine, more than the previous eight years combined.
Five weeks later and about a mile away from that grisly scene, the City Council was in the final stages of making a seismic change most on the council believed would ultimately make its city — and residents — safer.
Or at least make residents feel that way.
They would merge city police with the Palm Beach County Sheriff ’s Office, a shift that would have the city’s officers trading in their dark blue uniforms for the forest green of PBSO. It also would cause heated debate among council members and residents, many of whom wore “Say No to PBSO” T-shirts to council meetings that summer.
At the Aug. 10 meeting, longtime city resident and Palm Beach County School Board Chairman Chuck Shaw called the decision the single most important issue the
council faced in 27 years.
The merger passed 4-1 that night, with Councilwoman Paula Bousquet opposed, mostly because she wasn’t happy with the city’s decision to approve the contract without negotiating the pension plan first. Councilman Peter Noble said he was “adamantly” against the merger, but voted in favor as a sign of good faith.
The move became official on Feb. 1 when 51 officers were sworn in as sheriff ’s deputies. Forty-seven deputies will patrol the streets while four work in specialty units.
It’s been only a month, so the cit y is still adjusting to seeing newly striped sheriff ’s patrol cars roaming the streets.
“Change is difficult,” said Councilwoman Judy Dugo. “We have the same staffing, the same police officers, but more resources so we can serve our citizens better.” Dugo pressed for the move with Councilwoman Lisa Rivera and Deputy Mayor Jonathan Pearce. They had strong backing from the county’s Police Benevolent Association.
More resources
Some of those resources include a full-service crime lab, a K-9 unit, community policing, a SWAT team, a helicopter unit and a narcotics team. The cit y also will get updated laptops and radios. A citizens patrol program, in which the Sheriff ’s Office trains volunteers to be the eyes and ears of a neighborhood, is another benefit, proponents say.
“We could never afford some of the simplest resources,” said Rivera, whose husband is a PBSO deputy in the Delray Beach substation.
Before the merger, Greenacres police rode around with a PBSO field training officer for three weeks to learn more about the PBSO pursuit policy, use of force and firearms training, Deputy Eric Davis said.
“They learn how PBSO does business,” he said.
With Greenacres in the fold, the Sheriff ’s Office now patrols nine cities. The others are Belle Glade, Lake Park, Lake Worth, Mangonia Park, Pahokee, Royal Palm Beach, South Bay and Wellington.
Not everyone, however, was happy with the merger — and the Sheriff ’s Office’s proposal.
Cost fears
“On paper, for a normal day, we’re paying more for the same number of officers,” Mayor Sam Ferreri said. “With that same amount of money, we could’ve hired more officers. It wasn’t the greatest deal, and I always liked having our own police department.”
The city is paying close to $9 million for the first year of service under the 10-year contract, about $131,000 more than what was budgeted for fiscal 2016 if the city had kept its police force, Assistant City Manager Tom Lanahan said.
For contract years 2017 to 2021, annual increases will not exceed 7 percent, the contract shows. There was some concern about rising contract costs, but PBSO Chief Deputy Michael Gauger told the council in August that historically other municipalities have not seen unfavorable increases.
“We work hard and diligently to keep costs down,” Gauger said.
Bousquet said the city moved too quickly with the merger. “It was very rushed, and this was too big of a decision to be done in a hurry,” she said. “But there are three people on the council (Pearce, Dugo and Rivera) who were heavily supported by the PBA, and I guess the PBA wanted to get it done.”
Sandra Bernstein, a River Bridge resident who opposed the move, said she didn’t want to see PBSO deputies patrolling the streets because she doesn’t like how the Sheriff ’s Office operates. “I always think of them as the wild, wild West,” she said. “They shoot first and ask questions later. It scares me to death.”
Former Councilman John Tharp said he was worried about the city’s 23.26 percent tax increase, which Finance Director Thomas Hughes said was, in part, because of the merger. Tharp also balked about having to pay an annual $25 fee to register his house alarm with the Sheriff ’s Office, something residents didn’t have to do when the city had its own police force.
PBSO said 75 percent of the money from those fees goes to the cit y’s general fund.
Still, that didn’t appease Tharp.
“If we’re not increasing the number of patrol officers, what’s the point of the merger?” he asked.
Palm Villas II resident Vickie Hirschfield said she doesn’t have any problems with the $25 alarm fee or the tax hike. “There’s no price you can put on safety,” she said. “I will gladly pay it.”
Cindy Kranz, who lives in the Magnolia Bay development on 10th Avenue, said she’s already noticed a difference. “We’ve seen more deputies patrolling the area and catching speeders on Jog Road,” she said. “We’ve never seen that many officers before.”
Many residents in Lake Worth, Greenacres’ neighbor, rave about PBSO, pointing to, for instance, the “Make The Call Y’all” community program that encourages residents to report suspicious activit y.
Lake Worth merged with the Sheriff ’s Office in 2008. “It was the best move Lake Worth ever did,” resident Greg Rice said at the Aug. 10 meeting.
While Greenacres is paying $9 million, Lake Worth shells out $12.2 million. Both cities are roughly the same population (Greenacres has 38,590 residents to Lake Worth’s 36,423), but the sheriff has 134 employees in Lake Worth compared with 109 in Greenacres.
PBSO also staffs a minimum of four deputies and one sergeant per shift in Greenacres, while in Lake Worth, nine deputies are staffed per shift, according to contracts with each cit y.
Greenacres toyed with the idea of merging with PBSO six years ago, but Ferreri said it would have cost the city about $1 million more for the merger. “We decided at the time it wasn’t worth pursuing,” he said.
Clearly the trio in control of the council at the moment — to the consternation of many residents — believes the move was long overdue.
“I know a lot of people are under the perception that this was costly,” Dugo said. “But this is an investment our city needed to make.”