LETTER: With no need for dispatchers, police station hours can be cut

To Ozaukee Press:

Trustee Sue Meinecke’s letter to the editor in last week’s Ozaukee Press accused five Grafton Village Board members of “taking it upon themselves” to consolidate Grafton dispatch with Ozaukee County.

She accused those trustees of disregarding “a room full of Grafton residents,” implying that no one in the community supported consolidation.

She failed to mention that many of the people who spoke against consolidation at several board meetings had their own personal interests, including Grafton dispatchers, none of whom are Grafton residents.

She ignored that there were also people at those meetings who spoke in favor of consolidation, including Pam King, executive director of the Grafton
Chamber of Commerce, who stated that the business community stood fully behind the proposal.

Grafton has been discussing dispatch services for more than a year, and the board members who backed this did so by listening to all of the residents who elected them.

Every single resident that I spoke to outside of those meetings agreed that it was the right thing to do.

Let’s remember why this was done.

The Village Board voted unanimously to implement Emergency Medical Dispatch, but the working relationship between the medical director in charge of the EMD program and the PD personnel in charge of implementing it had deteriorated to the point that Aurora terminated the arrangement. So the board had to go elsewhere.

The majority of the board agreed that consolidation was important because EMD would lead to improved medical outcomes for those with emergency medical needs and was fiscally responsible because it could result in a significant tax savings.

This was not an illogical or self-serving decision.

As the May 9 Ozaukee

Press editorial observed, “The trustees in the Village Board majority that voted to transfer emergency response dispatching to the county deserve credit for not only acting to give Grafton residents access to better first response medical service, but also for saving village taxpayers money.”

Whether it is necessary from a public safety standpoint to keep the police department lobby open on a 24/7 basis is a question that the board is currently considering.

But Trustee Meinecke’s attempt to equate lobby hours with the crime rate is nonsensical.

The question is whether taxpayers should continue to fund having an administrative clerk at the lobby on a 24/7 basis at times when there may be very little need or demand.         

The police department itself would continue to be a three-shift/24 hour operation.

Data collected over the past 21 months reflect on average only 1.2 visitors to the lobby during 11p.m. to 7 a.m. shift.

Can the board justify spending over $100,000 a year for an administrative night shift position with so little traffic?

In transferring local dispatch services to centralized dispatch, many communities have found they can tailor police lobby hours to better serve their communities for less money without jeopardizing public safety.

We need to determine whether there is an actual public safety benefit versus customer service in staffing the lobby 24/7.

Lisa Uribe Harbeck
Grafton
The letter writer is a member of the Grafton Village Board.