For the next few months, Emporia and Lyon County will be considering whether one head is better than two when it comes to law enforcement.
It’s called consolidation. It’s also called controversial. The last time anyone suggested combining the police and sheriff’s departments was 1972 and that proposal went down in flames at the ballot box.
Now, after a 35-year hiatus, some people are ready to try again.
“Personally, as a businessperson, I’m always looking at ways of doing business better, being able to offer a better service at a reasonable price,” Mayor Jim Kessler said. “To me, it’s just encouraging that we are looking at this.”
He and others will quickly admit there are still a lot of unanswered questions about consolidation. How much would it cost or save? Where would the money come from? How would the county and its cities guarantee that service wouldn’t suffer?
So, in February, the Emporia and Lyon County commissions agreed to a task force. Its job would be to study the situation and make a recommendation by Aug. 21.
“I feel, if we have a good plan and it makes sense economically, we should be able to sell that,” City Attorney Blaise Plummer said at the first meeting of the task force March 1.
How did we get here?
Emporia and Lyon County didn’t originally set out to look at consolidation. It just sort of happened.
It started with a joint committee set up to look at agreements between the city and the county. At the time, the big question was who would pay for ambulance service, a contentious issue during the last budget cycle.
But as the committee got under way, the conversations began to spread out. Some of the members began talking about other ways that the two might work together to save money or improve service. And then, someone mentioned law enforcement.
“The cost of law enforcement and jail operations is very, very expensive,” said County Chairman Marshall Miller, who serves on both the joint committee and the task force. “It’s a big tax-eater.”
The members began wondering if one big police agency might work better than two medium-sized ones.
“It seems from the outside — and we won’t know this until we get all the information — that we have a pair of services doing basically the same thing,” Kessler said.
The city and county commissions agreed to look into it, although City Commissioner Ray Toso wondered if the joint committee had wandered off the reservation a bit.
“The purpose of this committee was not to study city-county issues but to formalize agreements between the city and the county,” Toso said at a Jan. 17 city commission meeting. “And so far, I haven’t seen a lot of what the committee was established for.”
The task force was asked to answer four questions:
F Should the various police agencies be merged and if so, how?
F Will a merger serve the public interest?
F Will it provide adequate and reasonable police protection throughout the county?
F How will it affect the budget and local taxes?
“It’s more than proving that the city and county can cooperate,” Kessler said. “It’s proving that it can benefit the taxpayer, the citizen.”
But those in uniform have questions of their own.
If it ain’t broke ...
Sheriff Gary Eichorn doesn’t mind looking at consolidation. He’s just not sure he sees a burning need.
“I guess it’s good to look at it at different times,” Eichorn said. “My personal feeling is that things work pretty well right now.”
In a sense, the Lyon County Sheriff’s Department already is consolidated. It has a contract to provide law enforcement for some of the smaller cities in the county, such as Olpe, Hartford and Neosho Rapids. And over the last five years, Undersheriff Richard Old said, the department’s budget has only gone up by about 3 percent a year.
But on a larger scale, that doesn’t necessarily work, both Eichorn and Old said.
“When you have two medium-sized law-enforcement agencies, we’re already operating on the same economies of scale,” Old said. “We don’t gain an advantage by combining them.”
It’s not that there’s an unwillingness to cooperate. The two departments have shared costs on a number of items, most notably the Spillman law-enforcement database. They’ve joined forces when needed, such as when both departments helped protect an immigration rally last year.
But put them together and some hidden costs come to the fore. To start with, Old said, there are about 25 commissioned employees at the sheriff’s department— deputies, their supervisors and the like — who average about $18 an hour, compared to $20.59 for the Emporia Police Department. If everyone gets a raise, that’s $134,680 right at the start. That’s without considering the 61 other employees, including jail staff, where there is no police equivalent.
And don’t forget benefits. Traditionally, the Kansas Police and Fire retirement plan has been much better than the KPERS state retirement plan used by the sheriff’s office. Equalizing that would cost as well.
“It may increase services,” Eichorn said. “But it’s going to cost money.”
Old added that policing inside and outside Emporia are two different jobs.
“Law enforcement in the city is much more concentrated, denser and more expensive,” he said. “Law enforcement in the county is more spread out, not as concentrated, less expensive for the taxpayers. If you put all this in one department, the cost of providing police services in the city is going to be spread out among all the rural residents to foot the bill.”
“Consolidation sounds good, and I don’t know what the committee is going to propose,” Old added. “They might have some sharp way to save money. But I can’t comprehend what that might be.”
Wait and see
Acting Police Chief Mike Lopez still remembers the last attempt at partial consolidation, when the police and sheriff’s departments tried to combine their dispatch centers in the mid-1990s. It lasted about three years.
“There were disagreements between personnel about how to dispatch,” Lopez said. “A police officer felt more comfortable with an EPD dispatcher because of their close association. He felt they had more concern for his welfare than someone he didn’t know.
“It was starting to iron out,” he added. “Some of the officers were starting to get comfortable with the system. ... I don’t really know if there were any savings. I don’t think it was long enough to make a determination.”
Would consolidation on a larger scale work any better? He’s not sure yet. A majority of his officers don’t want it, Lopez said. Others are more “wait and see.” All of them have questions.
One of the bigger ones involves manpower needs. Studies suggest that a police department needs about two patrol officers for every 1,000 people, Lopez said. That would suggest a patrol staff of 54 officers for Emporia. The department has 38.
Merge the agencies and you’re now covering 36,000 people in the county as a whole. That would be 72 patrol officers — still fewer than the police and sheriff’s officers combined.
“Historically, small departments have always been undermanned,” Lopez said.
Besides pay and benefits, officers have also asked about how promotions would work, how the rank system would be organized or even who would be in charge — an elected sheriff or an appointed chief?
There could be some advantages, Lopez said, in terms of better communications, greater efficiency, even improved flexibility. But he didn’t see a cost savings, at least not at the start. Not with pay, pensions, uniforms and equipment to work out.
“I’m thinking the initial cost is going to be huge,” he said. “Now down the road, the overall benefits ... will they ever even out, so to speak, from the initial cost into future years?”
Lopez himself is still at “wait and see,” though he doesn’t see much that’s broken about the current arrangement. He’s looking forward to seeing what the study produces, and especially what the tax implications might be.
“It could be minimal,” he said. “Or it could be a substantial increase that people are not going to want to pay.”
Monday: Voters in the early 1970s turned down consolidation.