WHITEWATER TOWNSHIP, Ohio — Sheriff Charmaine McGuffey and Hamilton County leaders are asking three western townships to pay at least $1 million a year for regular patrols in that area.
This is the third time in a decade that a sheriff has asked Crosby, Harrison and Whitewater townships to pay for regular patrols. When former sheriffs Simon Leis and Jim Neil faced budget constraints from the county, both threatened to cut patrols to these townships but eventually relented.
Now McGuffey is tackling the issue for a third time, as she seeks to boost revenue for her department to offset the rising prices of fuel, vehicles and equipment.
“There are good men and women who live in these three townships that have the benefit of our police agency, and we’re simply asking them to step up and pay a fair share,” McGuffey said during a Sept. 20 meeting in which she presented her 2023 budget requests to the Hamilton County Commissioners.
McGuffey is asking for a $15 million increase to her budget from $91 million to $106 million to add six new employees, replace outdated equipment such as tasers, radios and radar, and add dashboard cameras to all cruisers.
So far, county leaders have met with western township officials twice over patrol payments, and hope to collect between $1 million and $1.4 million annually from each one. But township officials say they don’t have that kind of money.
“It is just a matter of fairness,” Commissioner Denise Driehaus said at the Sept. 20 meeting. “I’m glad those conversations are continuing, but we need to tie that up - because that is not only increased revenue, it’s just fair that everybody pays for a service instead of some paying and some not paying. It’s just not fair.”
“That’s how we feel. It’s high on our priority list,” McGuffey responded. “It is our contention that these townships need to step up. Certainly, we understand that there may need to be a step-up type of pay increase, and something like that that we’re very willing to negotiate.”
Eight municipalities currently contract with the county for sheriff’s services: Anderson, Columbia, Miami, Sycamore and Symmes townships, and the villages of Silverton, Cleves and Lincoln Heights. Contract negotiations are currently underway with the Village of North Bend.
But Crosby, Harrison and Whitewater are rural townships that operate on slim margins with limited development opportunities due to lack of sewer systems in some areas. If they put a law enforcement levy on the ballot, township leaders quietly question if residents would vote for it.
“Everybody was pretty vehemently opposed … because they didn’t think they could come up with that kind of money or pass a levy to generate that money,” Crosby Township trustee Dennis Heyob said at a Feb. 14 meeting, in which he described conversations between western township leaders and the county over the cost of sheriff’s patrols to the area.
“The one thing that they mentioned was that this side of town wasn’t paying their fair share as far as expenses,” Heyob said.
Township leaders say the sheriff’s department wants to increase the number of beat patrols to the western edge of the county to improve safety and add backup responders when necessary.
Whitewater Township Board of Trustees President Guy Schaible said he would love to have more deputies on patrol, but the township lacks the $1.4 million the sheriff’s office is requesting for the service.
“When it comes down to it, we don’t have the money,” Schaible said. “We do zero wasteful spending in Whitewater Township … We don’t have the money to have the extra, we wish we did.”
With 5,000 residents and one of the lowest per capita incomes in the county, Whitewater Township only has enough revenue to pay for maintenance and operate a very small fire department, Schaible said.
“Some townships and villages — they have more money, and they have the money to be able to have a (patrol) car … that is designated to just their area,” Schaible said.
Whitewater Township residents make 300 to 340 calls for service each month for anything from a break-in to a barking dog. Sheriff’s deputies respond to roughly half of those calls and only a small fraction of them are serious enough for a written incident report, Schaible said.
But there are also serious incidents, such as a July shooting outside a Whitewater Township bar.
“Sometimes people make it sound like … we just don’t want to pay or we’re refusing to pay. If we had it, we would and we’re not refusing,” said Schaible, who added that residents already pay for basic sheriff’s service through their property taxes. “But we don’t ask for any extra (patrols) though either.”
Tom Losekamp, a Harrison Township trustee, said he met with county leaders twice this year, most recently in June about paying for patrols.
“They presented proposals concerning the services of the sheriff's department. Both times they said they would get back to us in the future,” Losekamp wrote in an email to WCPO. “Nothing was resolved there … We were told not to worry about this year but 2023 would be a different story.”
Heyob wrote in an email to WCPO, “In the two years I have been a trustee, to my knowledge no bill has been submitted to the township, except for the special patrol that the township pays for every month.”
Crosby Township paid an average of $2,500 a month to the sheriff’s office for traffic details in 2022, according to the township's assistant fiscal officer Bryan Carter.
But the county-wide cost of services for each deputy on patrol is $62 per hour, or roughly $124,000 a year.
In a joint statement to WCPO, county administrator Jeff Aluotto and chief deputy Jay Gramke said they have been working with western communities for the past year "on a more efficient and equitable way of providing sheriff patrols ... This may take the form of a patrol district which will allow patrols to be provided across jurisdictions more cost-effectively than if provided on a community-by-community basis."
"Every community needs to pay for the patrol services they receive. The three far-western townships, for their part, have never paid for this service and are now being included in these conversations. The county will continue to work with these communities to find a funding approach that is fair and equitable, and which reimburses the county for costs associated with these services," according to the statement, in part.
A sheriff's spokesperson did not say whether McGuffey would cut patrols in townships that don’t pay: “We are optimistic that it won’t get to that point, and that we will be able to reach a contractual agreement with the townships to provide services to their community.”
At a Crosby Township meeting on Feb. 14, fiscal officer Matthew Wallace reminded the trustees of a visit from a chief deputy under Neil's administration several years ago to discuss paying for patrols. And the message that deputy gave to them at the time.
“The sheriff’s office is obligated by law to respond to calls for service, not patrol it. And they do it … because they choose to,” said Wallace.
