Police Commission - Regular Meeting

So we will meet with the interim superintendent at some point because that will come with the MOU that we did receive from them. But just wanted to let everybody know that Corporal LaRochelle will be coming out of the school. He's done his three years up there. He's very excited to come out, get back in patrol. And we're putting in Sergeant Sparrow up at the school resource officer. So he'll be putting up the assignment there. He'll be working with Corporal LaRochelle for about two weeks up there, the first two weeks, and then LaRochelle will come back and patrol full, and Sergeant Sparrow will be up there as the school resource officer. So it fits him, it's an excellent fit for the position for him up there, so he's well aware, he's excited about the new position up there the assignment so moving that way so the school resource officer the MOU that we did receive from the interim school superintendent we haven't met with him yet so we're just waiting to do that meet with him go over the MOU and once we get that we'll give you a copy of that any changes that we do make I also had the highway safety grant audit last week, so that came in on Wednesday, so everything went well. We passed that without any issues, got the paperwork back, so we're good with our grants, and I know the select board on the 5th, you guys approved the other grant that's coming in there for October to October, so I'll pull that, get that down to the state, and we'll be good for October of this year coming up, because their fiscal year for 27 starts in October so that will start the new safety grants for their 2027 year Department budget preparation so That is due to the town manager by August 24th so myself chief sherry and communication supervisor lines have been working on a The budgets, getting those, preparing those, going through everything, getting some quotes and some other items that we have to do. The question is, for you guys, is the police cruiser, which is always the topic. We're going for one cruiser. That's not the big issue. It's just where you guys wanna place it. It's always a question. We were gonna put it into the budget. But by the time it gets to the Budget Committee, it always gets pulled out and goes back into the Warren article. Which the Warren article is not a bad position for it, because we can use the detail revolving fund to offset some of the money. So the question is for you guys, where do you want us to put that? Or what's your suggestion on it?

So the revolving funding, is it you cannot put it if it's part of the general budget?

If we put it in the budget, you would have to do a warrant article to use. I think the revolving fund just to use that money to offset it. You could do it separately. You could keep it in the budget and then do a warrant article that we're going to use this money for offset the detail amount. Or you put the whole thing in there and let the town vote for it. As you know, we're only going for one because we ordered two last year. We ordered a third one this year. So we're only going for one cruiser next year.

Where is all your other equipment located? Where's what? Where is all of your other equipment that you purchased located in your budget, right?

Yeah. Yeah, it's in the operating budget.

Yeah.

And this isn't something that we just do a one-time purchase. This is going to be every year. We're always going to have one cruiser at least. So it's what to move forward. We had it in there. We just took it out, I think, in a warrant article. But I figured I'd talk to the chief before I came here. And I said, hey, I'm going to ask them to see what their suggestion is before the 24th to see if we put it in there. Because if you do a warrant article, those don't have to be in until the end of September.

I mean, my preference, having been in law enforcement, although I wasn't necessarily tasked with budgetary issues because I was a subcontractor, a commander from the state police. However, I think it should be in your budget. You're fiscally responsible. Your chief is fiscally responsible. And then there's no question. There's no question that you're getting a cruiser. If it is in a Warren article, you're... We have no idea. Yeah, you have no idea. And I think you want to have positive control over your equipment. like any other piece of equipment that you use. This is just my personal opinion.

Yeah, our officers should be driving newer vehicles. Right.

And arguably, the reason why we got into the issue with being behind in cruisers is because they weren't being approved in town vote.

I think that the last couple of years, as long as I've been on the board anyway, longer than that, there's a disconnect between the budget committee and us. on that issue. I don't know where the selectmen stand, but I agree with Kevin 100%. You know, the chief has a statutory responsibility, right, to manage the budget, make sure he stays under, within the budget constantly. And you have to allow the manager of any agency the ability to manage and move things around as needed. You know, he's responsible to decide, you know, where the priorities are, and he's responsible for those decisions, right? That's correct. It makes sense to me. I just think the budget committee is wrong on it. I held that position before and I still have it. That's why under the state laws, the chief has the authority to move items around in the budget, but he cannot exceed that budget under state statute. The oversight is there. I don't know. So what was the date you said you needed that?

So the 24th, it's due, right, Sherry? Yeah, to the town manager. So he gets back next week. We're really going to finalize somewhat of it to get it into the town manager. And then we'll probably sit with you guys, do a work session prior to the town manager. We usually do that. So you guys can go over the budget. If there is any changes, we can make them when we... Meet with the town manager and you guys too.

Okay, so that would require a work session prior to the- Which would be next week.

Well, you could do it next week or we could pass it in and then still have a work session. And I think you could probably still tweak the budget a little bit if we had to. We would just have to go through them to do it and tweak anything. We can get it to you by next week to review.

Yeah, I agree. Okay. I didn't want to. No, I appreciate it.

You want to take a vote on it now so they have that solidified? Sure. I'd make a motion then that we guide the agency in that direction, that they put a new one cruise in the next year's budget, not as part of a long article.

Do we have a second? I second that. All right. All in favor?

Aye. Aye.

Aye.

Passes unanimously.

Thank you.

Answers that question. And then that gets to the budget of this year. So I sent you the budget. I didn't have any work done on it, I noticed when I sent it to you. So it's just a blank sheet with numbers.

Wow, what a budget.

But I did do it on this feedback. So we should be at 57.69%. So the budget's looking really good. The items you look at is overtime always, PD, communications. Communications is not over. PD is over due to the fact of we don't have a full staff yet. We're still down four officers. So that takes around the shift. So if you look at it, we're 4.8% over what we should be right now, which is not bad. Really comes out to, if you look at numbers, 7,000, just over $7,000. So it's not really that bad. We're underspent for PD by 4.5%. Communications, 2.0% underspent. Animal control, as we do know, we don't have so many in that position, so that really hasn't been spent at all. And overall budget is 4.34% underspent. So there is no issue with the budget, with our budget right now moving forward. There you go. I know he gets at least a clap out of somebody. So that looks good. Any questions with the budget thing moving forward? I do not. So I also gave you, we did the radar report, traffic study on Troughton Track Road that came out for the last month. Nothing really crazy shined out of that. Nothing like Forest Road with 79,000 vehicles that passed by. This was about 11,000 vehicles, which is understandable, especially that's a cut-through to get away from the town to go through to get over to Pine Hill, and you can get in a tough bar that way without going through town. And then you get the nick coming in there, too. So it's a pretty heavily traveled area, and that's only one way. So 11,000, nothing crazy on the speeds that we saw. A few high ones, but that could also be a police cruiser going by there. Or we always get somebody that wants to race the radar and see how fast they can go with the screen. So we always get one or two of those within that area. So recommendations were given out. Officers were given it. Same thing that you guys got. The supervisors will look at that and move on from there. Recruitment, we had an oral board. with two sergeant and a community member that helped out. The candidate was not picked, so it did not move forward. We have another one on the 17th, which is Monday. So we have a certified officer that's coming from Connecticut. He's got six years of experience and he's going through the oral board on Monday. So I'll give you more on that probably in the next meeting and go from there. Other than that, You guys saw the packet that I gave you with the incidents and arrests. As you see, the arrests were up. A lot of those were an underage drinking party that we did attend. Not voluntarily, but we were called to. So a few arrests came out of that. That's why the spike in the arrests that we did have.

Thank you, Captain. Any questions for the Captain?

Yeah, I just want to circle back to the driving track report. Yep. Last month while you were on vacation, we heard the report on the Forest Road. Oh, yeah. Audit or whatever you want to call that. Analysis. Anyways, one of the things, we're currently working in that area and it hadn't really come to my attention until I started going down there a little more frequently this summer. But the area in front of Cary Beach. Yes. Is a 20 mile an hour zone. Yellow. Yep. It starts a few hundred feet before and it ends a few hundred feet past. I'd be surprised to think that any of the vehicles I passed throughout the summer were going any slower than 30 miles an hour.

Yeah, so the yellow... I'm sorry?

And... whether or not you've got the ability to do it, whether you could park somebody down there a little more frequently, just to try to encourage people to slow down. Because you've got a congested area during the summer with kids, especially. But they do. They fly back and forth. And they're certainly not doing 20 miles an hour.

There is somebody generally in that general area that actually has a radar that's So I followed up with them too. And she was getting some speeds that were pretty good coming around there. So somewhere in that general area. But yeah, we are well aware. I was pretty shocked at how many cars, but shocked but not really shocked because of how much construction goes down there, landscaping. just the general area, how many houses actually are there during the summertime. But when you see 79,000 vehicles go by in one way, it's within a, I think that was a four-week period. It's a good amount of traffic, especially for that road for a dead end. It's not going anywhere unless you're going to the water.

A lot of houses down there.

Yeah, so we still have directed patrols. That's a recommendation to go down there. They're still in that general area. They still go down there and Visibility is is huge.

So as you mentioned And enforcement action visibility and enforcement act correct. I Just leave it at that. Yeah any other questions? No, no Okay, moving on Commissioner items. So our next meeting date will be Thursday, September 10th 2026 at 6 p.m. Here in the Great Hall Select board representative mister Paul O'Brien.

Good evening again. Thanks for inviting me back. I didn't thank you guys for the 4th of July. It was a great time in the town. Everybody appeared to have fun. Thanks for what you guys did. A couple of updates from where we're sitting. The town manager recruitment is going forward. More on that soon. There's a lot of people who want to know what's going on. And after you have interviews, then you have to make sure that background checks and things of that nature have to take place. So we're moving forward there. I was going to mention Right to Know because we have the same thing. We're getting a fair amount of Right to Know requests. And we have an obligation to document what we're getting and publish what we've learned so that we can avoid duplication. And so Amy is personally working on that. But if you're interested in how we charge on a per page basis, we can just get you a copy of the policy that we adopted and that will help. The everlasting, ever eternal question of where do you put the cruiser, you put it on the operating side, you put it on the warrant, you know, you guys are going to have fun trying to deal with that. The highway department normally asks for vehicles out on the warrant, you know, if they need a new 10-wheel dump truck, you know, it goes out on the warrant. The budget committee does have a desire, I think, in my opinion, to try to keep the operating budget kind of in a moving along and not have a big number go in the operating budget. We'll leave that up to you folks to do your thing with them. Capital improvement, which is the process of actually teeing up your long-term capital needs that kicks off next week. First one in the barrel is the municipal electric department. I think you guys submitted for CIP. I haven't gotten through. You didn't have anything in CIP. Okay, good. I'm going to leave here tonight and go to the budget committee. Budget committee is in the monitoring of expenses part of the world, but they're going to start getting more involved in things. We've passed out all the budget guidelines to the teams. And the captain is right as to when they're due back to the town manager, and that process gets going. Hopefully you'll soon get to meet our new finance director, Adam Camoli. Adam has been on board for a few weeks now. quiet, but I believe he's going to be really good. He's helping right now with our audit, which started officially the other day. Auditors were in three days ago. And the reason it took a while for us to get the audit done is there were some undone things in 2025 that we had to do. We had to do some trial balances and some book closings and things of that nature. That all got done, and so the audit has officially begun. I have no idea when it finishes, but they will have it done. It'll be a full audit. It's not a top of the waves audit. And aside from that, in the next couple of weeks, we've had a public hearing on the Libby. That is a very popular item. We will have another one next week. The question before the public is to comment on whether the building should be taken down or not. We've told the public, and I'll say it here tonight, we can't, as a select board, we can't do a thing without the oversight and the approval of the Charitable Trust Unit of the Attorney General's Office. And as Jim Pineone said when he introduced this topic about a year ago, he said, you can't snap your fingers and make the building go away. So it's meant to be a tough process. It's going to be a tough process. And the second thing we'll have to do is if we were to take a decision or make a recommendation to the charitable trust unit, there would have to be an appropriation. Somebody's going to have to pony up the money to take the building down, and that's going to have to go out to the voters. So there's two kind of guardrails here on the question of the Libby. There is an organization who has stepped forward, the Libby Museum Preservation Society. They have taken the first step to become successors to the Libby, which in my personal opinion is the greatest thing we could ever do. because it gives them an opportunity to fulfill Dr. Libby's promise. More to come from them. We've asked to meet with them, and I think we'll probably meet with them in a week or so to kind of get that thing rolling. There was another organization called the Lake Winnipesaukee Association who expressed a letter of intent, not interest, but an intent to become a successor. They sent me a note the day before yesterday and withdrew. their intention to become a successor. So right now, it's the Libby Museum Preservation Society that is going to be running point, at least for the moment, on the Libby. I think that's good momentum. I think it's taken a long time. There's a lot of reasons why it got here, but, you know, there is hopefully some people who are going to hoover up some money, operate the place, and turn it into the museum that people want it to be. So with that, any questions? John? Kevin?

Thank you, Paul.

I'm off to the budget committee.

Thanks. Thanks, Paul. Thank you. All right. And obviously, Tom Bell isn't here because he is at the budget meeting. So civilian input, public input. Bernie? Nothing. OK. All right. So we do have a non-public this evening, and I will entertain a motion to enter a non-public under RSA 91A-5.

I'll make that motion.

Second. We will do a roll call vote? Yes. Yes. Yes. Okay. Thank you. All right. Well, that ends the public meeting. We will move into non-public.

Thank you, Bernie. Thanks, Bernie.