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Valley View vs. Greenville
Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.
Scott Elliott is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He writes about education, city and suburban issues, politics, business, workforce and consumer issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2010 > August > 08
Sunday, August 8, 2010
Ellen Belcher: How badly can we do law enforcement?
Montgomery County Sheriff Phil Plummer and Montgomery County Administrator Deborah Feldman don’t want anyone to think they’re at war.
But they’re at war.
It takes some doing for Feldman to go public against an elected officeholder, even one who’s not officially her boss. But that’s what happened last week.
Plummer has been giving Feldman heartburn from almost the moment he took office after Dave Vore retired. The most public problem was his botching of the regional 911 emergency dispatch center. When that system went live, calls weren’t getting through for hours, and dispatchers didn’t know that the calls were lost in the ether.
The embarrassment was humiliating to Feldman who had burned political capital, arguing that a consolidated dispatch system would save money and improve service.
Since then, there have been other disagreements, too, generally about money.
This week Feldman matter of factly told the commissioners in a public meeting that Plummer didn’t increase his charges to Washington, Harrison and Jefferson townships for providing police protection, as they had counted on him doing. She was banking on $1 million in new money.
Feldman did not chastise Plummer. She just included him in a list of reasons why the county is looking at a deficit of $800K. Besides his refusal to charge more, the county’s money from the sales tax is coming in lower than anticipated and investment earnings are in the tank.
Not shockingly, Plummer feels singled out. He points to a long list of things he’s done to bring in money. He argues that he shouldn’t be expected to renege on contracts with his customers.
Meanwhile, though, the other county elected officeholders are supporting the commissioners and Feldman. They think the sheriff should be taken to task because, as they see it, he’s making sweetheart deals that are draining them.
Told you: all the makings of a war.
By law, sheriffs are only required to run the county jail and provide court security. But many sheriffs do actual police work, which many voters mistakenly think is their main job. To justify their role in actual law enforcement, the sheriffs cite their legal responsibility to “preserve the public peace” in unincorporated areas.
When money wasn’t a concern, sheriffs didn’t always bill townships for full-service police protection. But that’s gradually changed. Now the fight — not just here, but in many urban counties — is over whether they charge the true cost and whether, in places like Montgomery County, the sales tax that all county residents pay is effectively subsidizing police protection for a few.
Feldman is adamant that, in fairness, an independent consultant should be brought in to do an analysis of the sheriff’s operations and identify where his money is going. Plummer has said no.
This isn’t just a county fight. The question of whether wealthy Washington Twp., for example, is getting a subsidy is a hot issue in Centerville, where the city council wants to merge with the township. The township trustees have campaigned against a merger, saying Centerville has higher costs than the township.
But Centerville believes Washington Twp. is getting subsidized policing — and other services, too — from the county.
It’s not hard to understand why Plummer objects to a consultant’s evaluation. If he’s not charging the full freight, and he is pressured to charge more, he could lose the contracts that increase the size of his operation and get him on TV when there’s a drug bust.
Washington Twp. will never contract for policing with Centerville, but — if prices rose — it could start its own department. Harrison Twp. has toyed with that idea, too.
If we were starting over, no one would create 26 jurisdictions in Montgomery County, almost all of which have their own police department. The sheriff’s office would be the logical place to consolidate law enforcement, provided that the public could have confidence that that individual would be a consummate professional. (In Ohio, sheriffs are elected; not all of them should be in charge of people with guns or multimillion-dollar budgets.)
But today things are going in precisely the opposite direction:
Montgomery County needs to save money, so it wants the sheriff out of police work. Area cities and townships that are paying dearly to have their own police forces are opposing some communities taking advantage of economies of scale because they don’t want the county helping others, but not them.
Meanwhile, Phil Plummer doesn’t command the confidence of people who know that a strapped, mostly urban county is approaching police work in a way that stopped making sense decades ago.
Permalink | Comments (137) | Post your comment | Categories: Columns, Ellen Belcher, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Miami Valley Politics, Montgomery County, Suburban Communities
TweetEditorial: Grand Lake St. Marys deserves better
Gov. Ted Strickland made a splash at the dead Grand Lake St. Marys — not in the water, of course, lest he come down with something deadly.
Just politically speaking.
He brought high-ranking state officials with him, and he promised there’d be new regulations on farms that are fouling the water with the phosphorous that spawns toxic algae blooms.
The day after his July 30 visit, U.S. Rep. John Boehner also met with residents and local officials. He promised he’d ride the U.S. Agriculture Department about contributing money to help mitigate the environmental debacle that has forced people off of the water and is literally destroying a local economy.
You might ask: If this is all it took to get things on track, why weren’t these things done sooner?
Well, this isn’t all it’s going to take, and actually there wasn’t anything of significance accomplished by the politicians stopping by.
The regulations that Gov. Strickland touted aren’t scheduled to take effect for two years. That means that farmers can keep spreading manure on frozen crop land, sending phosphorous-laced runoff into the creeks that connect with Ohio’s largest inland lake. They will be encouraged to adopt practices that control the runoff, but they wouldn’t be ordered to — not yet anyway.
Rep. Boehner’s support for $1 million in emergency funding didn’t take any special effort, and, anyway, that’s not even a down payment on what it will cost to clean up the lake.
It’s an amazing thing to have a lake die and to have an entire community living with the smell of death. This is not a noxious pond that we’re talking about. It’s a 13,500-acre reservoir that has been supporting an estimated $200-million annual tourist industry.
It’s just Gov. Strickland’s bad luck that he’s in charge of the state when this happened. Of all of Ohio’s contemporary governors, he’s been in office the shortest amount of time during the period that this problem has been building. Literally, the state and its regulators have been on notice for years, even decades, about the threat.
While to blame him would be ridiculous, the governor can’t ride into town and suggest he wants to help, but then give in to pleas by agri-business and farmers that they need time to figure out how to install filters and store their animals’ manure.
They have known that this day was coming. They’ve known that nationally the pressure is on to prevent agricultural runoff because it’s threatening the water quality in rivers and oceans. Time’s up in Ohio.
One good thing that’s going on is that people are proposing ideas and reaching out to experts. There are debates about massive chemistry experiments involving alum and other concoctions to counteract the phosphorous. People are challenging the state’s notion that dredging is out of the question (because it’s too expensive), suggesting that it might be part of the solution. Good, hard questions are being asked.
Because people are so angry and scared about the jobs that are drying up, the drop in their property values and the possibility that a stunning resource could be destroyed for decades or even forever, there’s finally a sense of urgency.
But let’s be clear: While the Grand Lake St. Marys community has to do its part to understand the options, to identify technical experts and to have the conversations that promote public education, it doesn’t have the money to pay for any remedies. That will have to come from the very governments that didn’t want to push the farming operations in Mercer and Auglaize counties to stop harming others’ livelihoods, property and possibly their health.
Wait two years to stop the practices that fouled this lake? Allow people to keep doing the very thing that is costing taxpayers money that they shouldn’t have to pay in the first place?
The governor, agricultural lobbyists and the farm owners can’t be serious.
Permalink | Comments (4) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Ohio government, Rural Communities
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