Nashville Chief of Police Ben Seastrom went into town budget talks hearing that he needed to cut up to 30 percent of his budget.
He left with his current budget intact, approval to give his officers $1,000 raises, and an apology from the council.
Seastrom’s was one of the first departments to be reviewed as the town discusses finances for 2020 and beyond.
For 2020, the town’s budget is in good shape, said Nashville Clerk-Treasurer Brenda Young. Because of the addition of the Hard Truth Hills development to town, the town was looking to gain about $18,000 in tax money. However, because of the “freeze” the county had put on property taxes, the town was also going to lose about $18,000 in tax money. So, the net result is a wash — just about the same budget as 2019.
However, things are still tight within those tax-funded budgets, Young said. At a budget hearing on Sept. 11, council member David Rudd mentioned making cuts.
Young told council members to look at what’s important to them in the general fund and the motor-vehicle highway (MVH) fund. One other consideration, she said, is that MVH funding would be shrinking by about $2,500 because of some recalculation at the state level, and that’s one of the funds that goes toward paving, as well as some salaries.
“I’m not a proponent for cutting the budget,” Young said. “Obviously, you need to think about areas that if there’s a project or something you’re thinking about that you need to do, that’s the time to do it.”
At the Sept. 11 hearing, council member Nancy Crocker challenged Seastrom to cut the police department by 30 percent. Council member David Rudd suggested 20 percent.
According to spreadsheets handed out at an August budget discussion, the town’s budget — not counting the water and sewer departments — was $1,353,601 for 2019. The Nashville police’s budget was $602,411 of that.
The Brown County Sheriff’s Department also is headquartered in Nashville, but it is a separate police force from the Nashville PD.
Crocker said she’d been hearing from residents who thought the town was spending too much on police. Compared to other communities the size of Nashville, their feeling was that Nashville has too many officers, she said.
The town employs six full-time officers, plus four part-timers who rotate to fill gaps in the schedule when the full-timers are out sick, on vacation or in training, Seastrom said.
According to FBI averages from other communities, Nashville should have three or four officers for its population, Seastrom said. However, that doesn’t take into account the influx of tourists, he added.
Nashville also is a place where officers often start their careers in law enforcement, so they have to go through 15 weeks of training at the academy. During that time, they can’t work their regular shift in Nashville, he said.
When the town had five full-timers instead of six and had no part-time officers, overtime spending ballooned, so the department offered “comp time” instead. However, officers couldn’t really use that time because they didn’t have enough people to cover the shifts, Seastrom said. That led to burnout and officers leaving.
Some council members also asked him about cutting back on the hours that town police would work, or shifting coverage to state or county officers on certain days or times. Seastrom said any of those options make Nashville “easy prey.” Back when the town didn’t have coverage overnight every night by a town officer, there were break-ins at the stores, he said.
Council members talked about instituting a “hiring pause” for all departments. All requests for new hires would have to go before the council.
They also talked about selling the current Nashville police department on Hawthorne Drive and moving officers back into Town Hall, where they had been based until the town bought them a new station in 2012. The town still owes about $200,000 on that building.
After two hours of discussion on Sept. 11, the meeting ended without Seastrom knowing where his department stood with funding.
At least four Nashville police officers, several spouses, a police merit board member and other supporters, and two former town council members showed up to the next budget meeting on Sept. 20.
Seastrom had prepared a new budget reflecting a cut of about 10 percent. That would allow him to keep all the officers.
Town council President Jane Gore said she’d slept on it, and she didn’t think it was a good idea to get rid of the police building and move officers back into Town Hall. The building they have now is too big, but Seastrom said he had ideas for what to do with that space.
Town consultant Dax Norton suggested a “facility feasibility study,” checking whether or not the space the town owns is being used in the smartest way. He said he’d work on it.
Council member Anna Hofstetter asked Seastrom to consider doing away with officers’ vehicles and putting some on bikes instead, as a way to save money, to get a different perspective of the town, and to “promote a healthier lifestyle.”
Seastrom said officers need cars to do their jobs; the cars have become offices for them because of the method by which reports are written. Also, there are a lot of things officers can’t do on bicycles, like make arrests, or work accidents on the highway. “It won’t do anybody any good if we don’t get to where we need to go,” he said.
Council member Alisha Gredy said the main issue the police department has is staff turnover, so instead of making cuts, the council should be looking at how to keep people so it doesn’t have to pay to train new officers so often.
To that end, the council approved Seastrom’s request to give $1,000 raises to each of his five full-time officers.
The council had heard two speeches in support of the Nashville police from members of the audience: from local educator Sarah Cochran, who encouraged them to support the NPD so that officers could continue to form relationships with local families and keep them safe, and from Erin Kirchhofer of Turning Point Domestic Violence Services, who talked about how the NPD works with her office to help local victims.
Gredy asked the council to “stop picking on Ben,” as this isn’t the only time he’s had to fight for the existence of his department and his job.
Discussions have popped up numerous times over the years about consolidating parts of town and county government into “unigov,” including folding the Nashville police department into the sheriff’s department. The most recent time was in March when the council was trying to buy the First Merchants Bank building to use as a new police station. Crocker had pledged to study police consolidation.
Crocker said she purposely challenged Seastrom’s budget because “it got him to think about everything and what’s important, here.” At the end, “we might have exactly the same budget that we had before, but it got us to be thinking about what we’re spending our money on.”
She said that now that she understands more of why the police department operates the way it does, “people approaching me talking about police cuts are going to hear a different response from me now,” she said.
“We’ve got to figure out some way, when we hire these officers, to keep them so they don’t leave us,” she added.
“Government is a service industry, period,” Norton said. “… Really good people provide really good services, and that makes new people want to live there along with the current residents, which improves your ability to raise more revenue to provide more services.”
Gore offered an apology from the council to Seastrom and his department. “We started this whole process with ways to kind of cut the budget, and your number came up first, and it just kind of spiraled into way more than it should have,” she said. “… We deeply apologize, because we do appreciate you and need you.”
The town’s budget has to be adopted before Nov. 1. A public hearing about it has been set for Thursday, Oct. 17, the same night as the next regular town council meeting.
