RANDOLPH — Suffering from a lack of staff, the Orange County Sheriff’s Department pulled out of its 120-hour-per-week patrol contract with the town of Randolph this week.
Now, the town is looking to establish its own police department to fill the void, bringing on staff “as early as Monday,” according to Trini Brassard, the town’s selectboard chair.
“It’s not going to take us a terribly long amount of time,” Brassard said of the expedited creation of a police department. The town hopes to hire four officers and one administrator. In the meantime, Vermont State Police will provide extra patrols, Brassard said.
Randolph had its own police department of six full-time officers up until 2018, but the department died by attrition after its entire rank gradually resigned. Randolph then began contracting with the Orange County sheriff, selling its police equipment to the county-wide law enforcement agency. All that remains of the police department is the former building, Brassard said.
Randolph’s policing situation is part of the immediate fallout from the Orange County Sheriff’s Department’s tumultuous transition. Former sheriff Bill Bohnyak lost his reelection bid to current sheriff George Contois back in November. Since then, more than half the department’s deputies and all of its administrators left the department, leaving some towns concerned about whether they’ll still have police services.
In an interview Friday, Contois said that Randolph is the only contract the department has dropped. He currently has four deputies — down from 21 in November — and recently hired two administrators to help with accounting.
“We’ve made some great strides, but we’ve had some horrible setbacks,” Contois said of the staffing challenge. “Other departments have been trying to poach my people, and some of them have been successful.”
In anticipation of the new sheriff, Randolph officials began exploring the possibility of reestablishing their police department in recent weeks, according to Brassard. “Everybody feared what might happen,” she said. They also got in touch about additional patrols with the state police, who “were pretty clear they don’t have staffing to do this long term,” Brassard said.
“We understand the importance of public safety,” she said. “In today’s world, I don’t think you can be without law enforcement.”
Randolph plans to use some federal American Rescue Plan Act money to pay for police equipment, according to Brassard. The town also plans to ask voters to approve about $600,000 of police funding from property taxes — about $225,000 more than last year. Property taxes inside the town’s central “police district” will pay for about $500,000, and $100,000 will come from the town’s general fund.
According to Brassard, the town has been in touch with potential law enforcement officers, but she would not disclose names, nor would she say whether any of them are former members of the Orange County Sheriff’s Department.
According to Contois, Scott Clouatre, a former captain in the department, left to go join Randolph’s fledgling force. The sheriff’s department no longer has a special investigations unit, and lost its state-funded transport deputy, Contois said.
“We’re just going to take things day by day,” he added.
Due to anticipated budget cuts, the Orange County department turned over some of its dispatching services to the Lamoille County Sheriff’s Department, according to its sheriff, Roger Marcoux. Initially, Lamoille was fielding calls coming in from Randolph, but now that the town’s contract with Orange County has ended, Marcoux said he wasn’t sure what calls his dispatchers were still receiving from Orange County.
“It seems like I’m taking a lot of their office calls,” he told VTDigger on Friday.
Randolph will need to follow certain administrative processes to get their police department back up and running, but it won’t be as difficult as starting from scratch.
For a town to create a police department, it needs to have a way to access criminal records and needs to have a clear hiring process, according to Chris Brickell, deputy director of the Vermont Criminal Justice Council. A town also needs to establish up-to-date police policies, he said.
Towns must follow certain legal requirements and establish the proper technical infrastructure in order to access restricted crime-related data, explained Jeffrey Wallin, director of the Vermont Crime Information Center. Once a town has followed the initial steps, the crime information center ensures the new police department is legitimate, and helps to train and manage the department’s staff, Wallin said.
Like Randolph, the Orange County town of Fairlee worked to get ahead of any chaos brought about by the change in sheriffs.
Fearing the cancellation of its patrol contract, Fairlee hired a former Orange County Sheriff’s Department officer and ended its contract with the sheriff’s department, Tad Nunez, the town’s administrator, told VTDigger.
Fairlee has a 10-hour per week part time police chief, and previously contracted with the sheriff’s department for an additional 20 hours of coverage. Now, former sheriff’s department corporal Wayne Briggs — who once patrolled Fairlee for the sheriff’s department — is a Fairlee town employee, continuing his 20 hours of weekly patrolling. Come March, Fairlee’s current police chief plans to retire, and Briggs will assume an extra 10 hours per week of work, Nunez explained.
The move means that Fairlee’s police services will remain unchanged despite the turnover at the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, he told VTDigger.
There’s “no ill will” toward the new sheriff, Nunez said. “I’ve never spoken to the person in my life.”