Greensboro officials have dropped the town’s contract with Hardwick police in favor of an agreement with the Orleans County Sheriff’s Department, citing an unfair cost structure and overpayments.
The unanimous decision at a March 10 selectboard meeting came after months of negotiations and will cost Hardwick with the loss of about $250,000 in annual revenue.
“We’ve been in negotiations for weeks, but they’re not answering our questions and not budging on the bottom line,” Greensboro Selectboard chair Peter Romans said, according to minutes of a Jan. 14 meeting. “They seem to expect us to just renew the contract with the same unfair structure.”
Greensboro officials said their decision was about money and is not an indictment of Hardwick’s policing.
Hardwick officers responded to more than 2,600 calls in Greensboro between June 30, 2019, and June 30, 2020, according to this year’s Greensboro town report. Officers made 85 arrests. The Hardwick department has eight officers, plus the chief.
Greensboro’s new one-year contract with the Orleans County Sheriff’s Department will cost $190,000 — a savings of about $78,000. The town will pay it in monthly installments.
Greensboro dissolved its police department more than 40 years ago and for decades contracted for coverage through the Hardwick Police Department.
Hardwick Police Chief Aaron Cochran said he believes his department has been serving Greensboro since April 1980.
The existing three-year contract expires July 1. Under the agreement, Hardwick officers provided 24/7 coverage with no limits on resources.
“If five officers were needed in Greensboro for a particular call or case, then five officers went,” Cochran said.
Greensboro will pay nearly $268,000 for police services in fiscal year 2021, which runs through June 30, according to town records. Costs had been increasing. For fiscal year 2019, the town paid close to $224,000, and the next fiscal year it paid about $244,000.
When the new contract takes effect, sheriff’s deputies in patrol cars will respond to calls between 8 a.m. and midnight Monday through Friday and provide coverage on weekends.
After midnight, deputies will be on call at least five days a week to respond to urgent calls with no extra fees, according to the contract. Those calls include imminent threats to life, safety, welfare, property or animal welfare, the document said. Deputies will routinely patrol the town at “irregular hours” to avoid establishing predictable patterns.
The contract runs through June 30, 2022, and the town and sheriff’s department will meet to evaluate the agreement by Nov. 1.
Meeting minutes from Greensboro indicate that selectboard members thought they were getting a raw deal from Hardwick.
Romans, the board chair, said at the meeting Jan. 14 that it appears when the Hardwick Police Department is under budget for the year, Greensboro doesn’t get any money back, “even though the contract stipulates that we pay a set percentage of the HPD budget,” according to the minutes.
The selectboard estimated that the town had overpaid $125,000 during the current contract period alone, board member Gary Circosta said at the meeting. The overpayments, he said, occurred when the Hardwick Police Department’s actual expenses ended up lower than what had been budgeted.
“This is just not fair to our taxpayers,” Circosta said, according to the minutes.
Greensboro officials met in executive session nine times between November and March to discuss police services contracts, records show. Orleans County Sheriff Jennifer Harlow attended at least three of those sessions, according to meeting minutes.
During a meeting Jan. 13, board members said Hardwick had not answered their questions about the contract.
Circosta said during that meeting that he went into the negotiations thinking the two towns were in a partnership. “However, it seems like we’re just a customer paying a flat fee for a service, and we can take it or leave it,” he said, according to the minutes.
Circosta said that when a Hardwick officer unexpectedly leaves the department and the job isn’t filled immediately, Hardwick saves money, but Greensboro does not.
Hardwick Town Manager Shaun Fielder, who attended that meeting, disputed the claim that his town’s officials did not want to negotiate, the minutes show.
“He said that some of Greensboro’s questions have been answered, and that it’s disingenuous to say that Hardwick is taking advantage of Greensboro,” according to the minutes.
In an interview Thursday, Fielder said Hardwick tried to be competitive in the contract bidding.
“We were trying our best throughout this entire project … to maintain this working relationship,” he said. “But in the end, they’ve made basically some substantial decisions on the level of service they want to be obtaining.”
Fielder said the loss of Greensboro’s contract is “not going to create a catastrophic situation for us” financially, but officials are looking at ways to make up for the gap.
The Hardwick department is currently down two officers — one left and one is on military deployment — and won’t look to fill those roles yet, Cochran said.
In response to Greensboro’s claims about unfair costs, Fielder said all parties agreed to the figures in the contract.
He said Hardwick would be open to talking in the future about contracting again.
“We want to continue to collaborate with this community that is a close partner of ours,” he said.
