ST. ALBANS TOWN — The city and town of St. Albans on Wednesday announced a new agreement to share police services and, officials say, resolve longstanding disputes over access to the city’s water and sewer system.
St. Albans Town currently contracts with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office for police services, but town officials said they don’t plan to renew that contract when it expires at the end of June 2024. Instead, under the new agreement, the city’s police department would start serving the town no later than July 2024.
At a press conference announcing the agreement Wednesday, officials were adamant that the town’s decision to work with the city rather than the sheriff’s department had nothing to do with the fact that sheriff-elect John Grismore is facing an assault charge — to which he’s pleaded not guilty — after he repeatedly kicked a man who was in custody last August. The incident was captured on body camera video.
Brendan Deso, a member of the St. Albans Town Selectboard, said officials started discussing the agreement a month before the incident happened.
“It played no role in our thought process,” Deso told reporters. “And this agreement is in no way a referendum on the services that have been provided, and will be provided during the roughly year and a half that’s left, by the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office.”
The town ended an agreement with the city police department in 2021, replacing it with the one it has now with the sheriff’s office. At the time, town officials said they made the change because the sheriff’s department would charge less than the city.
Under the new agreement, the city and town would each pay half of the city’s annual police budget and have equal representation on boards overseeing it. In exchange for the town taking on those costs, officials said, the city has agreed to stop charging a fee to its water and sewer service customers who are located in the town.
Currently, St. Albans City uses the town’s appraisal values to calculate this “affiliation fee,” which it then charges on top of its regular water and sewer rates. The affiliation fee has been a source of contention between city and town officials since it was enacted in 2015, and disputes over water and sewer service go back several generations, Deso said. The two municipalities have gone to court multiple times over the issue.
The affiliation fee will be reduced by half starting in July 2023, per the agreement, and eliminated completely once the shared police services start by July 2024. The city would also stop imposing additional review criteria on new system hookups in the town.
“All of us here today know that St. Albans can’t compete with other towns or regions if we continue to compete with ourselves,” Jonathan Giroux, the town selectboard chair, said Wednesday. “Water and sewer access is critical to our community’s economic vitality, and this agreement provides that access at a fair cost, on a level playing field.”
St. Albans Town is slated to pay about $1.3 million for the final fiscal year of its contract with the sheriff’s department, Deso said. While the costs of the new agreement with the city are not yet final, he said, an early estimate pegged the town’s split of a joint police service at $1.6 million. The town believes that any extra money it pays going forward would be worth it for less restricted access to city water and sewer systems, he said.
Officials anticipate that, like under the sheriff’s contract, the city police department would be able to provide coverage in the town 24 hours a day, seven days a week. The agreement states that officials expect city police to provide similar services in both communities, though the actual number of patrol hours may be different in each.
Once the agreement takes effect, the city police department also plans to end its part-time contract with the Franklin County town of Highgate, Police Chief Maurice Lamothe said at the press conference Wednesday. Lamothe said the department has notified Highgate officials of that decision.
The Franklin County Sheriff’s Office has contracts to patrol several towns in the county, though its St. Albans Town contract is the largest. Incumbent Sheriff Roger Langevin did not respond to a request for comment about the new agreement Wednesday.
The agreement also calls for hiring four new police officers before the shared services begin in 2024. St. Albans City Manager Dominic Cloud acknowledged that it’s a challenge to recruit officers right now, but said he thinks the agreement will make that task easier because both communities would be pooling resources together.
Lamothe said he believes the police department’s staffing “is in really good shape” compared to many other departments in Vermont. He said it has 13 uniformed officers, which is technically enough to meet its patrol needs. But since they aren’t all available to work at the same time — sometimes needing to take time off for training or military service, for instance — the department isn’t actually fully staffed, and would like more people.
The new agreement “allows a lot more opportunity,” Lamothe said. “And we’re hoping that this is a catalyst that brings people to look at our department.”
Officials from both towns plan to formally adopt the agreement later this month.