Madison Village Mayor Sam Britton said a funding crisis, created in part by state budget cuts, forced him to draft a plan that disbands the police department. Now, other small towns and villages could be forced to make the same kind of choice.
The village council will begin the first of three debates on the proposal at Tuesday night’s meeting before they eventually take a vote. If approved, the village would lay off its three police officers and enter into a contract for police coverage with neighboring Madison Township instead. The move would cost less money.
“It’s a choice that has to be made,” Madison Village Administrator Dwayne Bailey said. “I think everyone in this community has the expectation that when they dial 911, someone is going to show up to the door and help them with their problem.”
Republican State Senator John Eklund, whose district includes parts of Lake County, said that kind of efficiency was part of the reason state lawmakers approved cuts to the local government fund, along with other tax cuts, in the last few years.
“If the result of that is that local governments become more efficient, if they think more creatively about how they operate their jurisdictions and how they can provide the services that need to be provided, all the better,” Senator Eklund said.
But budget expert Joseph White, director of Case Western Reserve University’s Center for Policy Studies, said indiscriminate cuts were no way to encourage sharing services.
“It’s nonsense,” White said. “It’s basically an excuse to avoid responsibility for making decisions.”
Senator Eklund disagreed.
“It’s the only way to do it,” he said, “Because we’ve got, you know, 800, 900 municipalities in the state of Ohio, 1,600 townships, 88 counties, and to go through each one and try to make a determination individually about how much to cut from each particular jurisdiction would be a fool’s errand.”
Still, the cuts are painful.
“It’s not popular. It sounds rational and efficient, but it’s not popular and people are scared of it for good reasons,” White said.
Tuesday night’s meeting begins at 7:30. It was moved to a bigger venue to accommodate expected larger crowds. That meeting will be held at the Madison campus of Lakeland Community College.
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