This commentary is by Stephen Whitaker of Montpelier, an author who has worked for 30 years on integrating planning, government transparency and accountability, public records access and more recently utility networks resiliency.
Public safety in central Vermont is dangerous — meaning not at all safe, transparent, accountable or well planned.
As a prime example of critical lack of planning and equally deficient oversight, Montpelier Police Department, doing business as Capital West Dispatch, is pursuing grant funding from the Vermont Department of Public Safety to expand its dispatching services.
This might involve taking over from Vermont State Police the dispatching for the Berlin and Northfield police departments, and also dispatching for municipalities now dispatched by the state police in the Northeast Kingdom, Rutland County or elsewhere, well beyond central Vermont.
The stated aim is to offload demand on Department of Public Safety State Police Dispatch, which has an ongoing staffing crisis and wants to be out of the free dispatching business.
These plans, aspirations and some misrepresentations were all made in documents recently acquired through public records requests and in testimony before the Senate Government Operations Committee this past April 1, and are clearly not an April Fool’s joke.
Barre City and Montpelier, in a mutual back-scratch, are both supporting each other’s vague plans, neither having been documented, studied or debated by either City Council, nor has there been due diligence conducted of the costs and benefits (or disadvantages) to be shared among existing served municipal customers, those whose contracted services and costs will surely be negatively impacted.
False assurances were made by Chiefs Brian Peete and Doug Brent regarding the current failover capacity of Barre City and Montpelier dispatch and their ability to handle the other’s traffic were either facility to be taken offline.
Current wish list aspirations of Montpelier and Barre City officials are to continue to sabotage and eventually dissolve the Central Vermont Public Safety Authority, secure an additional $3.4 million for a new regional radio system, expand the base of contracted municipal and state agency captive customers, and further lock in the regional dispatch monopoly under the pretense that the Capital Fire Mutual Aid System adequately represents the interests and due diligence of the town selectboards that remain, for the most part, in the dark on these crucial matters.
At the same time, the Montpelier Police Department has submitted a separate Homeland Security grant application to convene regional SWAT training, soliciting a few officers from each of the Montpelier, Berlin, Barre City, Barre Town, Northfield and Capitol police departments to join in the training.
Central Vermont towns are already paying high and unsustainable costs for dispatching services, currently budgeted (obscured) though their fire department budgets, then paid to the Capital Fire Mutual Aid System, which skims a percentage off the top, then paid to Montpelier Police Department at about $400,000 annually. These captive towns have not been informed nor have they agreed to further dilute this expensive dispatching capacity to the benefit of Berlin, Northfield, the state police or to the financial benefit of Montpelier.
Nor have these captive dispatch customer towns ever been informed of the frequent delays, mistakes, deadly errors, missing financial records or plans, or capital costs required to maintain and expand consoles and radio systems for these monopoly dispatching services, again to the benefit of Montpelier’s governance.
The many millions of dollars paid over the years by surrounding towns since the 1990s to support Montpelier Police Department Dispatch operations are in no way accountable.
Public records requests have revealed that the Capital Fire Mutual Aid System, as straw-man collector of these funds, admits to having either lost or destroyed all the financial records prior to 2013.
In the same vein, the contractually agreed to “Operations Committee” supposedly overseeing these dispatch operations — composed of Montpelier’s fire chief, police chief and city manager and a few from the Capital Fire Mutual Aid System — has not warned a meeting, kept minutes or even met once, formally, in decades.
Absent an established, accountably governed, municipally representative, regional public safety authority, both the dispatching expansion and the informal SWAT team are recipes ripe for disaster akin to Uvalde, Texas, where seven tactically trained officers from different departments stood around in hallways for more than an hour, debating who was in charge, while 19 children and two teachers were blown to pieces by a troubled teen with an assault rifle.
