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New Miami considering disbanding police department

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NEW MIAMI, Ohio — Cash-strapped New Miami will decide Thursday night whether it can continue to pay for its own police department or if they must turn the operation over to the Butler County Sheriff’s Office.

Mayor Jewel Hensley told the Journal-News “we’re kind of at a catch 22,” because some on the village council don’t want to give any more general fund dollars to the police department, “but with council you never know if they’re going to stick to their guns or if they’re going to change their minds.”

The village council must pass the 2025 budget this week and they are scheduled to choose from three budget appropriation options: disband the cop shop; supplement the operation with $57,000 from the general fund or pay the county sheriff $116,200 for a dedicated deputy. The budget documents show the general fund totals on the three options are $462,000, $519,000 and $595,000 respectively.

The police department consists of full-time acting Chief Dan Bower and three part-timers. The village has a police levy that culls around $81,000 annually — according to the county auditor — and Hensley said this year they have supplemented funding from the general fund and the total police budget is $189,000.

“When I came in I told them with our budget we cannot keep giving this kind of money to the police department and not seeing any kind of results,” she said. “So that’s kind of why we said we’re not going to dip into the general fund anymore to fund this police department.”

When asked about the “results” comment she said when she took office earlier this year she suspected the former police chief Chip Webb — who the council fired in June — wasn’t doing his job and was “falsifying his time sheets” among other issues. She said they have seen improvement under Bower, hence the funding reconsideration.

Webb has sued the village over his termination and the Ohio Attorney General’s office confirmed there is an ongoing investigation by the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation.

Bower has been heading the department for about four-and-a-half months and he told the Journal-News the department can’t operate on levy funds alone, but they are not expecting the village to deplete the general fund to the detriment of other departments and needs.

“We want to operate the department in the least impactful way to the village’s budget and remain good stewards of the taxpayers’ dollar, because it is limited and there’s not a lot of it for the village,” he said and later added. “One of the things that the mayor and council and the police department are working closely together on is a grassroots approach to revitalizing the village.”

He said there are a number of grants he intends to pursue and partnerships with non-profits, substance abuse professionals and other avenues — to help citizens before they need to interact with them from a law enforcement standpoint — if the council preserves the department. He said they can do a lot to improve the quality of life in the village if given the chance.

“It’s a comprehensive approach, it’s not any one thing,” he said. “It’s not if we fix this one thing here then everything is going to be fine and the place is going to thrive and it’ll turn into a little Mason. There is no silver bullet that’ll fix everything, there’s no one key to it.”

Hensley said another option is contracting with Butler County Sheriff Richard Jones for $100,000 annually — a cushion was presumably built into the budget document — and get a deputy assigned to cover the village for 40-hours a week. Or they can “pray for the mercies of Jones” and just rely on him to answer 911 calls as he is statutorily required to do in unincorporated areas.

Hensley said she doesn’t believe they should choose the last option.

“There’s no way we can go without police at all here in this village,” Hensley said. “There’s just too much drugs, too much homelessness, too much crime. There’s just no way we can go without policing.”

The mayor said she met with Jones to discuss contracting police protection and “he will not come in here for anything less than $100,000.” Hanover Twp. paid $206,868 last year — including overtime — for two contract deputies working 40 hours a week. Liberty Twp. has its own fully manned sheriff’s outpost and they are paying $3.3 million this year.

Village Solicitor Jonathan Fox told the Journal-News he is going to recommend they keep a bare-bones operation going.

“To me if you have the money that you can’t use for anything else, you may as well keep an officer 40 hours in the village for New Miami,” Fox said. “It’s $15,000 cheaper than what the sheriff is going to cost and when that officer’s off duty, they (the sheriff) still have the obligation to respond.”

Officials have said asking voters for an additional levy is also an option for the future, but they went for one in 2022 that failed by a vote of 54% to 46% and an attempt also failed in 2021.

Finances weren’t an issue for the village for several years when speed cameras were rolling, the village was flush with cash, but since the cameras stopped rolling in 2019, so did big revenues. Audit reports show the ending cash balances for the village were at a high of $1.66 million 2013 — the only full year of operation of speed cameras because a judge declared them unconstitutional.

The village fought for eight years against 33,000 speeders who balked at being ticketed by standalone speed catchers. The feud finally ended two years ago when the Ohio Supreme Court ended the $3.4 million lawsuit.

The village fined speeders $3 million — the third party vendor that ran the program was paid $1.2 million — and the rest was interest. The courts finally ruled in favor of the village but the state legislature instituted punitive laws that made it virtually impossible for governments to run speed cameras.

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