Three months after the disruptive police chief controversy in Hinesburg and Richmond, officials in the two Chittenden County towns are renewing efforts to share police services.
The two towns in April renewed a contract to share a police chief through March 2026, ensuring a continued cooperation that began between the two departments in 2023.
Now, a police committee formed in April, made up of officials from Hinesburg and Richmond, is aiming to hire a new interim police chief to replace Anthony Cambridge, who departed Hinesburg under scrutiny and was later sacked as Richmond’s police chief hours before his start date.
Hinesburg police officer Frank Bryan has been serving as the interim chief since Cambridge’s departure, overseeing both the Hinesburg and Richmond departments.
It may not be easy to find a candidate willing to take on the job. But town officials hope to find a candidate who could help fulfill a long-held objective to fully merge the two departments and pool resources amid a slim labor market for police officers.
“It just doesn’t make sense to me anymore to have a single department town by town,” Hinesburg Selectboard member Mike Loner said at a recent police committee meeting. “I’m really hoping we can find somebody who has a lot of experience in an organizational background to help us figure out what are the hurdles to a merger and how we’re going to get around those.”
Both police departments were facing staff shortages when they signed an inter-municipal contract in 2023. Under that agreement, Richmond paid Hinesburg an annual fee for contracted patrol and general services.
The agreement later evolved to include the sharing of police chief services, with Cambridge acting as the de facto chief of both departments. In January, Cambridge announced he was leaving Hinesburg’s department for Richmond but would remain the chief of both departments.
But those cooperative efforts hit a snag earlier this year when Richmond backed out of a plan to hire Cambridge as its police chief.
In the weeks leading up to his departure from Hinesburg, Cambridge came under scrutiny by town and police officials there for allegedly deleting police security footage and shredding documents. He left Hinesburg weeks before his scheduled end date.
Richmond then withdrew Cambridge’s job offer after twice delaying his start date.
Both towns have been mum on the issue, while Cambridge has maintained the allegations were part of a smear campaign.
He later said in a social media post that his relationship with Hinesburg Town Manager Todd Odit broke down and there were persistent efforts to undermine his “ability to effectively act as chief.”
Since then, town officials in police committee meetings have plotted a renewed effort for cooperation with Richmond. To help guide the hiring process for an interim chief, the committee heard from Jim Baker, a police consultant in Vermont and former head of the Vermont State Police with decades of experience in policing.
Baker cautioned the committee that “going out for a police search right now … is going to be very, very difficult” but noted it would be “a fool’s errand” to try and find a police chief for each department.
He told the committee it should focus on bringing in an administrator to help finalize an arrangement to merge the departments.
Baker, who lives in Arlington near the New York border, pointed to the merged police department shared between Cambridge and Greenwich, New York, as an example of a success.
“I think you have an opportunity to recreate what safety will look like between those two communities,” he said. “What I’m really proposing here really hasn’t been done in Vermont.”
Town officials are optimistic that Hinesburg and Richmond could take the first step toward regionalizing police services. Bard Hill, a Richmond Selectboard member, said in an interview their efforts represent “the point of the spear on how we can share services across towns in Chittenden County.”
“How many different police departments do you need for towns of 4,000 or 5,000 people?” Hill said. “There’s an economy of scale and efficiency, especially for towns that can work together effectively and have some similarities.”
But merging departments “has some subtleties and complexities” that will make it complicated, Hill said.
“It’s a somewhat awkward developmental stage, because you still are operating as two separate departments with separate policies and separate data sets,” he said.
Officials were faced with a wrinkle at the most recent committee meeting Tuesday. While the towns’ police chief contract has been renewed, their contract for patrol services ends June 30, and Odit said during Tuesday’s meeting that Hinesburg officers are hesitant to proceed with a contract that isn’t reciprocal.
Hinesburg currently has three officers, including Bryan, the interim chief, while Richmond has just one. It’s an unequal relationship, with Hinesburg officers covering both towns while getting little in return.
“I’m just going to be pretty blunt. I know from Hinesburg officers’ position, continuing with a contract that’s not reciprocal is not tenable to them,” Odit said Tuesday. “It may be that there’s a pause in that contract while we figure out what we do.”
Richmond Town Manager Josh Arneson said the town has budgeted for four police officers and the town is actively trying to fill those positions.
“But hiring police officers is very challenging,” he said. “There’s not a large pool.”
Committee officials are mulling an offer from Baker to search for an interim chief for both departments, but it remains to be seen whether the towns will renew their patrol services.
“If we don’t end up with a services contract, you know, are we going to find a chief that wants to manage two departments that aren’t working together?” Odit said in an interview. “It all feels up in the air now.”
Still, officials feel that proceeding with some type of a merger remains a worthwhile pursuit.
“Everybody seems to think it makes sense, it’s just who’s going to do it, and how are they going to do it?” Hill said in an interview. “You have to be clear about what you’re trying to achieve and persist in achieving it, and I’m crossing my fingers that we have that combination of factors between the two towns right now.”
