Town may contract with village for services of marshal

The fact that the Village of Fredonia has a marshal’s office made a recent inquiry from the Town of Fredonia tough to answer, Marshal Eric Leet said last month.

Town staff had requested Leet look into the possibility of the Marshal’s Office contracting through the village to enforce town ordinance violations.

Leet said his research into similar agreements quickly hit a snag — the situation of a Marshal’s Office contracting its services has never before come up, as far as he can tell.

That’s partially because marshal’s offices — an anachronistic law enforcement agency designation with functionally the same powers as a police department — are rare, he said.

Leet said he thought Fredonia may have the only marshal’s office in the state until he saw the Facebook page for the Village of Ridgeway’s Marshal’s Office in Iowa County, which erroneously claims the designation “Wisconsin’s last marshal’s office.”

The only difference Leet said he could find is that as marshal instead of chief, he can impound livestock.

“I don’t know why I would ever do that. I don’t have any interest in doing that, but I can,” he said.

Even with the “gray area” surrounding the marshal’s office designation, Leet said, he “feels comfortable” inking an agreement with the town. He asked several state agencies and none said there would be an issue.

Leet said the state Training and Standards Office told him the Fredonia Marshal’s Office is actually listed as a police department in their documents.

Town Clerk Christophe Jenkins said the town is seeking help from the Marshal’s Office so it can have an enforcement arm for ordinance violations.

Currently, violations are enforced via attorney’s letters and issues resulting from them come before the Town Board, Jenkins said, adding the only recourse the board has is to fine through property tax collections.

“It lacks the teeth of actual enforcement,” he said.

But if the town contracted with the Marshal’s Office, those violations could go to municipal court, he said.

Jenkins admitted he doesn’t know what would happen if the town was challenged on a violation letter or what body would have the final say about the current process.

It’s a testament to the good nature of the town that the problem hasn’t come up before, he said.

Leet and Jenkins said the details of how the Marshal’s Office contract would work have yet to be figured out, including whether Leet and his deputies would investigate or simply enforce violations.

“And when I say, ‘investigation,’” Leet said, “the investigation could be driving past a property and saying, ‘Oh, there’s an abandoned car.’”