JAMESTOWN – The Jamestown City Council has given the go ahead to have a Rochester firm to continue services related to the completion of a Police Consolidation Plan.
During Monday night’s city council meeting, lawmakers unanimously approved a resolution that would pay the Center for Governmental Research up to $44,000 to help with the next phase of the study, which would be to create a draft Inter Municipal Agreement (IMA) between the city and the county. That’s on top of the $168,000 that CGR has already been paid to assist with the consolidation study, which included facilitating several meetings of the Police Consolidation Task Force and finding the best way for a consolidation to take place, which would be through a gradual phase-in that could take up to two decades to complete.
The funding for the study is coming from a New York State Department of State Local Efficiency Grant. In 2012, the city was awarded the $400,000 grant after saying it wanted to look into the feasibility of consolidating public safety services between the City of Jamestown Police Department and the Chautauqua County Sheriff’s Office.
Following the task force’s last meeting in April, City Council President Greg Rabb explained to WRFA why it was important to keep this project moving forward.
“If we get this done, and there’s every possibility that we can, this is probably going to be the most difficult consolidations ever attempted, not just by us here in Chautauqua County but by anywhere in the state,” Rabb said. “We’re the trailblazers. Nobody else has done this before, but we’ve got a nice dialogue going politically and otherwise because you’ve got the police, sheriff, city council and county legislature. This is probably one of the very few places this is going on, but it’s a very important issue: public safety. So I came in with the attitude that if we don’t do this it’s going to die so we’ve got to keep moving.”
With the council’s approval, CGR will now begin meeting with various stakeholders in an effort to write up a draft Inter Municipal Agreement, which would then be presented to the city and the county once complete.
Leave a Reply