BELLE —The Belle Board of Aldermen tabled the vote on the Maries County Sheriff’s proposal until the Jan. 14  city meeting.  The proposal was to contract the city’s police services with the Maries County Sheriff’s Department, disregard the local police department, and keep the marshal’s position to serve as nuisance officer.

The motion to table until January was made by Jeanette Struemph and seconded by Ken Standfield and passed with a 4-0 vote.

Mayor Josh Seaver said the public would not be allowed to voice their opinions and aldermen would not be answering questions at the regular Tuesday city meeting prior to the vote.

Several of the nearly 70 citizens spoke out and even more interrupted as the mayor continued to say, “We are not going to talk about that tonight.”

Aldermen took the opportunity Dec. 4, at a city-sponsored town hall meeting, to share their reasons for requesting a proposal to outsource the Belle Police Department to the Maries County Sheriff’s Department.

Seaver said he doesn’t know what the answer is to the policing issues in town or if contracting with Maries County Sheriff’s Department is the right answer.

“What I do know is that for the past three years we have been $72,000 in the red and we can’t keep going like that,” Seaver said. “The town is too small and we don’t have the money to keep pumping in like that. At the end of this year, that is probably going to be closer to $100,000.”

He said the board is trying to keep the town financially stable.

“It is not an anti-Joe, community witch hunt,” Seaver said. “We have other issues in the community. Water, sewer, we need a new water tower, streets — there is tons of other things that need to be done, but if we are pumping money that we don’t have into the police department — we can’t do any of it.”

Several community members addressed the board, including Sallee Bonham, Arlan Ellis, Kurt Seba, Jacque Moreland, Steve Vogt, David Tacket, Daryl White Sr., Brenda Turner, Terry Connors, and Fred Bethman.

Community members talked about drugs in the community, asked how the contract would work, how the police department and the town would be affected. The board addressed those concerns.

Abel said she wanted to clear up some of the issues and misconceptions that citizens had about the board’s reasoning to outsource the police department.

“It’s not just about the budget or going in the red,” Abel said. “You are going to go in the red with law enforcement. Period. You cannot predict what is going to happen all the time.”

However, she said the crime, drugs, and stealing has gotten out of hand.

“I had to chase someone out of my own yard. My husband’s tire fell off his truck the next night. Something has to be done about the speeding — there are kids on bikes.”

She held up a call log from Osage County Dispatch listing crimes in September and October that she said a majority of which were serious.

“Thirteen tickets wrote, the max this year (since July 1),” she said. “These are drug offenses, DWI offenses. These are not state, they are local.”

She said it is not a revenue thing.

“We have drug addicts bringing in heroin. We are losing kids. We have people stealing stuff we work really hard for. We have people trespassing. Our own children won’t sleep in their beds because we have people in our yard, they are hearing stuff,” she said. “We can’t get the police to patrol the streets when they are called upon.”

She said the problem was the board has never understood where to obtain that documentation and they do now.

“The calls are being called in to 911 by members of our community or people passing through here. They see people intoxicated, people dealing drugs, people stealing stuff, and there are 13 tickets,” she said. “This is one page. The call log is from two months.”

Abel said the tickets do not go to the police department as straight revenue and it is not budgeted that way. They are worried because the crime rate has skyrocketed, but no one wants tickets wrote.”

“You have to write tickets because that is a form of punishment — that is how a problem is solved,” she said. “When you have 13 tickets and this many crimes being committed, that’s a problem. No department can function like that. They cannot operate.”

Abel said she is all for keeping law enforcement within the city. But they can’t force an elected official to work and they can only pay so many officers. So now they are paying overtime.

“For what? Why do we need to pay them overtime? Why do we need to hire more officers if there are no crimes or tickets being wrote? Our town should be safe. Not according to this,” Abel said, holding up the call logs. “That’s a problem.”

Alderman Jeanette Struemph said she wanted to clarify that the city didn’t give up the school resource officer contract.

“The resource officer was taken away from the city and given to the county because the school was not getting what they were promised they would get,” Struemph said. So they thought it would be better to get a deputy from the county.”

The school was promised many things in the resource officer contract.

“They were promised to have an officer there full-time and only to be pulled out in a serious situation,” Abel said. “Instead the officer was being pulled out frequently to assist another officer on very minor crimes or infractions. So the officer was not even there half the time. So they (the school) decided not to contract with the city, but to go with the county.”

Struemph said there was nothing personal about the matter. The contract would save the city the override they are experiencing every year.

“Between $30,000 and $40,000 that we cannot afford to lose a year,” Struemph said. “We have a sewer system running through this town that is a ticking time bomb. Ask the maintenance people that work here. If we don’t salvage and save for the day that this happens, we are sunk.”

The contracted officers would be stationed in the city limits, one on duty at a time, for a minimum of 20 to 24 hours a day. Not like the contract Bland had with the Gasconade County Sheriff’s Department.

“Bland had 24-hours of coverage a month,” Sheriff Chris Heitman said. “We are a minimum of 20 to 24 hour coverage a day.”

Abel said it continues to be a crime issue more than a ticket issue, even though the budget is a factor.

“It just keeps escalating because it is not being taken care of,” she said.

The Belle Police Department is short an officer since the termination of former Capt. Kim Elrod, but Abel said the coverage wasn’t better when they had five officers on duty, and hasn’t changed much with three.

“We had more than that,” Abel argued. “We had 24-hour coverage and still — he (Marshal Joe Turnbough) said we needed boots on the ground. We put boots on the ground because of the crime. The presence of a law enforcement officer hasn’t deterred the crime. Therefore the next step is to start writing tickets, start putting them in jail. That’s not happening and the crime rate is escalating.”

Heitman clarified his deputies could patrol Osage County in Belle if the contract was agreed to, and his department would be able to write the tickets in question.

At recent meetings, citizens have questioned the officers’ salaries, and were told officers start at $12 an hour, but their benefits packages are a benefit.

“Their health insurance is coverage is 100 percent coverage and zero percent deductible,” Abel said.

Furthermore, the board said they do not take issue with Turnbough having a second job. It’s true that some of the board members have other full-time jobs, but they aren’t elected to serve full-time positions at the city like the marshal is.

“He was elected to be a full-time police officer,” Seaver said.

Struemph said the board does not work under his job description.

“Here is the way I look at it,” Abel said. “Work two full-time jobs, work three, as long as your department is managed, I don’t care where you are. I don’t care if any elected official in a full-time position works three jobs, as long as your department is managed.”

Struemph said the city’s currently paying more now in taxpayer dollars and are getting a (expletive deleted) less than what they are going to get.

Alderman Ken Stanfield asked Heitman, “If we should go with this Maries County deal, you would pay for the new cars, the equipment, right? That is in the budget? And you would maintain the cars, the city would have to?”

Heitman confirmed that was correct.

“How many officers are you planning on hiring for Belle?” Stanfield asked.

Heitman said he plans to keep the two Belle officers and hire one or two additional officers.

“Will you pay for their health insurance,” Stanfield asked.

Heitman said the officers would be on the county insurance, not quite as good as the city’s.

As to why the board didn’t bid out or seek bid proposals from other police departments or entities, Struemph said the situation is unique.

“Law enforcement is a unique entity on its own,” Struemph said, adding that the entities all work together.

The proposed contract would charge the city about $155,588 annually, which Heitman said is a wash for the county.

“The county commission told me as long as it doesn’t cost the county money, they are fine with it,” Heitman said. “It should operate even.”

He added that he plans to apply for a grant next year that could go towards a deputy’s salary. He said deputies receive comparable time in lieu of overtime. Struemph said the Belle Police Department is sitting on a high amount of comparable time that would have to be paid out.

“If more of you want to start attending the regular city council meetings — this information can be compiled and available at the city meetings,” Abel said, referring to call logs and other police department data. “But it is very disappointing to gather all this information and nobody shows up.”

She said she supports the police department 100 percent, and it was her goal to support the marshal’s office when she ran for alderman.

“My main goal when I decided I was going to take this journey was to help the police department,” Abel said. “I am pro law enforcement. Joe agreed to have budget meetings once a month — we were going to go over — have an extra set of eyes. We have had one meeting.”

She said they can go over the budget, and us as a whole with (Turnbough) and whoever he wants to help, but it’s only a piece of paper. When a bill comes in because someone spent money, it has to be paid.

“We can only manage this budget so far ourselves,” she said. “But when an individual is entitled — has the authority to go spend money — without discussing it — the city still has to pay for that. We have to stay in good standing. It’s not just the city council.”

She said more than 50 percent lays in the board’s lap for not taking steps to make (Turnbough) pay the money back for unauthorized purchases.”

Debbie Turnbough argued that her husband, Joe, does not have a city checkbook, is not in charge of money and can’t spend money without permission.

“These are charge accounts at the stores,” Abel said.

Abel said before they started digging on the call logs from Osage County Dispatch, she did make a comment at an August board meeting that there was not enough crime in town to support another officer, and based that information off of the court reports where as few as four new offenses were being heard at the municipal court each month.

“That’s just like for the month of November — four tickets,” she said. “If the crime is that high, there is only one way to address that. If there is only four tickets for the month of November, that tells me and the city council that the crime rate is not that high for Belle. Do you disagree?”

She said the board has to justify spending taxpayer dollars.

“If we don’t need that extra officer, we are not going to put the money there when we can be saving for a new car, or new equipment, or bullet proof vests,” Abel said.

Seaver said the board had a lot to think about and the meeting was closed.