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Town board meets with police
By Stephanie Salmons
The need for increased communication between the Sylva Police Department and Sylva leaders was a major concern during a recent special board meeting.
Sylva town board members met with SPD personnel Sept. 16, and board member Maurice Moody posed a set of questions to the law enforcement officers.
One question asked how information flowed through the organization and what changes could be made to improve communication and whether officers felt they “had a voice” to express ideas and concerns.”
“I realize that under the council-manager form of government, that the manager is the boss and communication flows through him to the board,” Police Chief Jeff Jamison said. “I don’t know if it’s even possible, but I do know in the past that when the committees would meet with the department heads, that was a good form of exchange in communication.”
That served as the Police Department’s link to the board without having to go through an intermediary, Jamison said.
“I would like to see that re-established a little more with the committees taking a more active roles in some ways because in the past, with the Public Safety committee, we would have regular meetings but we got away from that and I always thought that was a good thing,” Jamison said.
Board member Harold Hensley pointed out that a mayor-council form of government would work that way, but procedures are different for the manager-council form that Sylva changed to around 2001. With that form of government, anyone who works for the town goes through the manager who then reports to the board, Hensley said.
Mayor Brenda Oliver said that if the board chooses, it can adopt whatever policies members want.
“Fine,” Hensley said. “But that needs to be known up front. Is the manager going to manage the town or are the committees going to manage the town?”
According to Oliver, the committees serve as advisory committees.
“With the manager-council form of government, my communication is through the manager, and I do feel as a department head sometimes that I’m not being able to freely communicate with the board and get communication back from them,” Jamison said.
Board member Stacy Knotts said that it was helpful for her to hear directly from the departments.
Moody said he believes in the chain of command, but he said communication is not contrary to that.
“If we took action and tried to bypass the manager, I think we would be violating his trust because the manager, if he’s going to be the manager, he has to have the opportunity to manage,” Moody said. “But if we hear communication directly from our employees and know what they’re thinking, as far as that goes, it would be good (for the manager) to hear those as well.”
Oliver said that committees have not disbanded with the change to a manager-council form of government, but that committee meetings have just become less frequent.
Hensley, a member of the public safety committee along with Moody, said that he has not had requests for committee meetings.
Jamison said committee meetings help him know what the board is thinking.
“I just feel like I haven’t had as much communication with the board as I probably would have liked to have on certain issues because we were following the manager-council form of government,” Jamison said.
Detective John Buchanan said that when former Manager Richard McHargue was in charge he saw board members conversing with Jamison more often than when recently-discharged Manager Jay Denton was manager.
“There was more interaction then, and I think it’s going to follow to who you hire as the manager and what they want to do,” Buchanan said.
Sgt. Davis Woodard also indicated that his main concern is the communication between the board and the police department, and Jamison suggested that meeting at least twice a year would be a good start.
Moody also asked members of the department whether they felt like they had the tools necessary to do their job to the best of their ability and what changes could be made to better equip officers to do their job.
Woodard said that they “have the tools but not the facility.”
Jamison told board members that was a concern of some officers.
According to Moody, a conversion of the bays behind town hall into a new police department is on a list of capital improvement projects and is slated to be considered for the 2010 budget.
“So that’s not just an idea being formulated by (former town Manager) Jay (Denton), that is something the board has looked at and discussed,” Jamison said.
The project is in the town’s long-term budget and is “definitely up for consideration in 2010,” Moody said.
Woodard also thanked town officials for hiring a new police officer. “It was a long time overdue,” he said.
Members of the police department include: Chief Jeff Jamison, Assistant Chief Tammy Hooper, detectives John Buchanan and Aimee Watson, Sergeants Woodard, George Lamphier and Jason Owen and Officers Rick Bryson, Mark Bennett and Curtis Lambert. Officers Caleb Harris, Matthew Rathbone and Daniel Peoples are the newest additions to the department, joining the staff in July and August.
Bryson said that morale is better than it was six months ago and that hiring a new officer was a “big relief”
Officers also expressed concerns about the cost of living adjustments received each year.
“Of the last three years, it just seems that I’m struggling more and more,” Woodard said. “I feel that the cost of living raise that we’ve gotten is not really a cost of living raise.”
A 2.5 percent COLA and a 2.5 percent merit increase is only 5 percent, Woodard said. “Five percent isn’t going to cut it,” he said.
“Everyone is in the same boat because of current economic conditions,” Hensley said.
Buchanan said taxes on seized drugs used to go into a special fund, which helped provide an additional source of income for the department but that now all such money goes to education.
The Alcoholic Beverage Control Commission gives the town a certain amount of money each year, and Buchanan said he’d like to see a certain amount of that placed into the fund on a yearly basis to provide money for undercover operations and drug operations. The department’s special funds are slowly getting depleted, he said.
“We’re not getting anything to build back up with,” he said.
Knotts said half of the ABC money goes to the county, and that she made a request for the 2008-09 county budget that some of those funds come back to Sylva. That request was denied, she said.
According to Jamison, when he was hired, the town contracted with the county to do drug enforcement within the town and soon after being hired, he asked if the department could stop that and have the funds for that put into a special account.
“At one time, they gave us $10,000 to get the fund established, then we used the tax money that came from seized drugs to keep the fund up, and that was the only tax money that ever was initially put into that.”
Since all that money is going to education, the fund is going down, he said.
“We just need some money there to make sure that fund stays healthy so we can continue to run these under age campaigns,” Jamison said, adding that no additional funds are coming into that account.
By getting $1,000 to $2,000 a year for that fund, the department could complete a number of operations and keep the fund at a healthy level, Buchanan said.
Knotts suggested Jamison help her submit another request to the county to get a portion of the ABC money returned to the town.
According to Oliver, the town typically gets more from ABC revenues than is budgeted, and that extra amount goes into the general fund.
Oliver said town officials could see if that’s a trend and whether some of those “extra” funds could be designated to the police department.
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