This story by John Lippman first appeared in the Valley News on March 2.
RANDOLPH — Perry Armstrong’s business in Randolph has been broken into four times since November, but one incident, caught on video cameras, stands out as more brazen than normal.
Armstrong, owner of tent rental company Rain or Shine Events, said video cameras — which he had installed because of a rash of thefts — recorded a suspect in the act of siphoning diesel fuel from one of his trucks two months ago.
“He’s out there with one of those red Aubuchon garbage cans and a garden hose stuck in my fuel tank and he had like 20 gallons of diesel in the garbage can. That’s $100 worth of fuel,” Armstrong said while describing the footage.
Armstrong claims such incidents are more common in Randolph since the Orange County Sheriff’s Department stopped patrolling the town. When George Contois ousted the longtime officeholder Bill Bohnyak in the November elections, a mass exodus of deputies and office staff followed, and the department is no longer able to fulfill its service contract.
“The crooks know there’s no police protection now. They get it,” said Armstrong, who noted Vermont State Police respond to calls from Randolph but are often not immediately available for non-emergency calls.
Armstrong, who recently stepped down from Randolph’s Selectboard, is among a group of community leaders who want to re-establish the town’s police department. It was disbanded in 2018 when Randolph contracted with the sheriff’s department — Bohnyak lives in town — to provide policing services.
Voters at Town Meeting will now get to decide for themselves whether or not they want to re-form their own police department, which the Selectboard is proposing via an article on the warrant that calls for budgeting $771,000 to equip and staff a police department in the first year of operation.
Of that amount, nearly $500,000 would be funded by taxes levied upon residents of a “police district” that is roughly contiguous with the village of downtown Randolph. The remainder would be paid by a transfer of money from the general fund and tapping money the town received under the federal American Rescue Plan Act of 2021.
The proposal to re-establish its own police department came after town officials said they were told by Vermont State Police that there are not enough personnel — the agency is currently down 50 officers from a full complement of troopers — to take on work previously handled by the county sheriff, said Trini Brassard, chair of the Selectboard.
Outreach to neighboring towns about sharing police resources yielded similarly negative responses, she said.
That has left Randolph effectively without dedicated police coverage, although Vermont State Police still responds to reports of major crime.
Town officials maintain the lack of full-time police presence has created a dangerous vacuum that needs to be filled.
“I don’t think there’s any debate that we don’t need a police department,” Brassard said.
There are, however, residents vociferously protesting the scope, size and cost of the Selectboard’s police proposal, which calls for four full-time officers, including a chief, plus an administrative assistant with a salary of nearly $56,000 per year.
The debate has been unfolding on the online bulletin board Front Porch Forum, in letters in the Randolph Herald newspaper and at public meetings convened to impart information and get feedback from residents.
Leading the effort to pare back the proposal is Kelly Green, a public defender for the state, and Jon Kaplan, a soon-to-retire program manager with the Vermont Agency of Transportation.
Green and Kaplan say they accept that “policing is necessary in the village” but they contend the current proposal is out of proportion with what is required to keep Randolph safe.
This week, they mailed out 950 flyers to addresses within the police district — where property owners would bear the brunt of the tax burden to fund the department — urging a “no” vote on Article 5 “to let the Selectboard know that we need a right-sized, reasonable and sustainable” police budget.
Kaplan said he’s concerned about how little time passed between when the sheriff’s office served notice in early February that it could no longer fulfill the contract and when town officials put together a plan for a new police department and put it on the ballot for March 7.
“My main goal is two things: The first is let’s put the brakes on this thing so we have time to discuss it as a community. And the second thing is if we’re going to have a police department, it should be for the whole town and the taxes should be spread out among all the taxpayers in town,” Kaplan said.
The town estimates that about 1,500 people live in the police district/village area, which is approximately three-quarters of Randolph’s overall population of 2,022, according to census figures. Under the proposed plan, the approximately one-quarter of the residents living outside the police district would pay a significantly lower tax rate to fund the department.
Green and Kaplan say that a village home assessed at $160,000 will see its “police district tax” go up from $365 a year to $750 a year and that some of the funding, such as the ARPA money, is transitory and likely have to be raised through taxes in future years.
“There is precious little crime in Vermont and Orange County in particular,” Green said. “No one has ever so much as stolen change out of my car.”
Although other residents, such as Armstrong, beg to differ, it does not appear that Randolph is in the grips of a crime wave.
Crime in Randolph has increased slightly since 2018 — the year the town disbanded its police force — in most major categories but has also declined in others or remained flat, at least by one measure.
Vermont State Police data shows 17 cases of theft in 2022 compared with 14 cases in 2018; seven cases of burglary in 2022 compared with four cases in 2018 and nine cases of DUI compared with six cases five years earlier.
The number of aggravated assault cases declined to zero in 2022 from three cases in 2018 and cases involving “drugs” remained flat at one.
But the big jump is in the number of cases of family and domestic assaults, which nearly doubled to 27 in 2022 from 15 in 2018, according to Vermont State Police.
Critically, the data does not include cases under the Orange County Sheriff’s Department contract, which primarily covered the village area.
But in October, when he was seeking reelection as sheriff, Bill Bohnyak, who also is a Randolph resident, said the Orange County Sheriff’s department makes “75 to 100” arrests in the village a year.
Brassard, the Selectboard chair, said the proposed $499,000 to be raised through the police district is actually less than the $520,000 that had to be raised in taxes to support Randolph’s police department during its last year in operation in 2018.
“The amount we’re looking at here is lower than when we had our own,” Brassard said. “We put a very conservative budget together,” she said.
Randolph’s contract with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department, which provided the services of four deputies, cost $320,000 a year for the village and another $25,000 for the rural portion of the town, Bohnyak said in October.
Though Randolph voters have not yet voted to re-establish a police department, town officials have already gone ahead and hired a new police chief, Scott Clouatre, who formerly was a captain in the Orange County Sheriff’s Department and lead officer assigned on the contract, making him a familiar face around town.
The money to pay Clouatre is currently coming out of the budget that was paying for the contract with the sheriff’s department and is still available this year to pay for a level of police service even if voters defeat the article for the town to re-establish its own police force.
“This is not a community that can go without police, the issues and challenges we’ve had,” she said.
Even if voters turn down the proposal, Brassard is undaunted.
“We’d have to make it available somehow, to keep it going until we could get a budget passed,” she said. “We’d come back at it.”