Police merger study gets $40K in state funding

Astudy of the feasibility of merging the police departments of Little Silver, Fair Haven and Rumson is under way, funded by a SHARE Grant awarded by the New Jersey State Department of Community Affairs.

Declan O'Scanlon Councilman The approximately $40,000 grant will be used to study the possible savings that may come from combining the police departments in the three towns. The Patriot Consulting Group, of Monmouth Beach, has been retained to conduct the study.

"Everyone is going into this open-minded," said Little Silver Councilman Declan O'Scanlon. "We're confident that this is worth looking at in our continuous efforts to be more efficient and save our property tax payers money, while still maintaining the exceptional quality of service that we here in Little Silver, Fair Haven and Rumson have come to expect."

"Little Silver is the grantee for a $40,950 SHARE feasibility study grant," said DCA Spokesman Chris Donnelly in an interview via e-mail Monday.

The grant also will allow the consultants to look into combining the police departments of two other towns, Oceanport and Shrewsbury, with the three lead towns in a separate phase or part of the study.

"Typically, the study participants are all studied simultaneously, in a single comprehensive review," said Donnelly in an e-mail interview Monday. "In some cases, local officials may feel a phased approach is more suited to their communities. The program [SHARE] recognizes that local officials know what will work best in their towns and seeks to work with them to realize local goals."

The consulting firm, which helped the towns with the grant application, has already started work on the first phase of the first part of the study, involving Little Silver, Fair Haven and Rumson, and expects to complete that phase in 90 days, according to President and Principal Consultant of Patriot Consulting, Brian J. Valentino.

The first phase (termed mobilization) will look at elected officials, police command and police officers from the three towns.

"[It's] very important for this project to have any legitimacy is for any group that is involved in policing those towns [to be] involved in the decision-making process," said Valentino.

The next phase of the first part is the investigation phase, followed by analysis, then the report phase and then finally the review phase. Valentino said the consultants will be meeting with all the towns individually to answer questions specific to each town.

After the first part of the study is completed, Patriot Consultants will repeat the five parts of the investigation and study the two additional towns, Oceanport and Shrewsbury.

Valentino said the firm will be looking at 70 different items, including: police response time; size of the police car fleet; number of employees; number of police officers necessary to adequately cover the towns; the facilities; how prisoners will be handled; and the maintenance on police cars, in each of the towns individually.

He estimates that for all five towns, consultants will be looking at 350 different items.

Patriot Consulting Group recently completed a study for the Warren-Morris Council of Governments that included looking at seven towns and 70 different municipal services, according to Valentino.

Little Silver, Fair Haven and Rumson formed a Shared Services Committee and when the plan for the study became public in October 2006, officials from Oceanport and Shrewsbury voiced their disappointment and concern at not being included in the study.

O'Scanlon, who organized the three-town committee, said in an interview Friday that Oceanport and Shrewsbury will be involved in the second phase of the study and officials from both municipalities will be present at all of the meetings going forward. He said it was a "logical break" because Little Silver, Rumson and Fair Haven are all "very homologous geographically and demographically."

Since police expenses are one of the largest parts of a municipal budget, the Shared Services Committee undertook the project to see if combining services would save money and work more efficiently and do that without lessening services, according to O'Scanlon.

The state grant is a 10 percent matching grant, which means that the five towns, including Oceanport and Shrewsbury, will have to come up with $4,000, according to O'Scanlon.

O'Scanlon said the consulting firm will be interviewing all the stakeholders, including the police. He noted that "any manpower changes would happen through attrition rather than laying folks off."

The combined police department would total approximately 45 officers, according to O'Scanlon.

"No municipality in the history of the State of New Jersey has ever merged or consolidated their police department with that of another community," according to the Patriot Consulting Web site.

O'Scanlon added that Patriot Consulting would look at the infrastructure and resources that the towns' police departments have at their disposal and that an initial report would be available in the next three to four months, but implementation is still a while away.

"We are excited about the prospect of kind of being on the cutting edge of a concept everyone seems to accept as the next step of government in its efficiency," said O'Scanlon. "We don't know how it is going to turn out yet but we are happy to be leading the way here."