Contract negotiations between Barton officials and the Orleans County Sheriff’s Department have soured amid a feud over rate increases and concerns from the town about lack of service.
Barton Selectboard Chair Ken Mitchell-Eby said the board questions Sheriff Jennifer Harlow’s credibility and criticized what he called a “lack of transparency” over the last month of talks.
“We’ve just increasingly come to a point where we don’t have any confidence in what she’s telling us,” Mitchell-Eby said.
Harlow replied by calling the board’s actions “unconscionable” and said her attempts to meet the local leaders’ requests have been futile.
Since Jan. 7, there has been no contract between the two sides, leaving Barton without deputies on patrol. The Vermont State Police is the town’s primary law enforcement provider, supplemented by the sheriff’s department.
Sheriff’s departments around Vermont often contract with towns to provide varying levels of police coverage. The more coverage, the bigger the contract.
Barton’s 2020 contract with the county sheriff ended Dec. 31. Harlow visited the board members — Mitchell-Eby, Jeff Cota and Lenny Zenonos — on Jan. 7, outlining her proposal for a 2021 contract.
Harlow initially asked for a new hourly rate of $55.12, up roughly 7% from the previous rate. The new rate totaled about $63,000 for 2021. Last year’s total had been about $32,900.
That bump in cost, Harlow said, was primarily because her department had begun a $10,600 contract with the dispatch center in Newport to answer calls after her office closes. She said her department had divided that cost among the 13 towns it covers.
She attributed the rest of the 7% increase to cost of living expenses and operational costs.
“That is the hourly rate we need to operate,” she said Wednesday.
But Barton board members aren’t keen on the idea of paying more.
“We’ve been getting comments and input from the villages and the residents that they’ve not been happy with the quality of coverage,” Mitchell-Eby said, referring to the villages of Barton and Orleans, which sit inside the town.
He said most crime in Barton happens in the evening, especially on weekends, but it doesn’t appear to him or others that deputies are consistently patrolling during those times.
“If there is a police presence, the expectation will be that this will cut down on” incidents, he said. He cited a robbery at the Subway restaurant in Orleans — which happened the night Harlow visited the board meeting — as an example.
The board chair also said the sheriff’s department hadn’t used all the money it was budgeted last year. Harlow acknowledged that, because of a data system glitch, deputies had worked fewer hours in Barton than they were supposed to.
And she told board members Jan. 7 that deputies weren’t consistently assigned overnight patrol shifts, but she would like to make that happen.
The board has also questioned a clause in the proposal saying that Harlow would be entitled to compensation “at a rate not to exceed 5% of the total contract value,” though not on top of the total cost.
On Jan. 15, Harlow submitted another proposal to the board, which took “into consideration … the board’s request for patrol hours on Friday and Saturday evenings during the summer hours with an assurance of higher visibility from the sheriff’s department,” according to a Jan. 22 letter Harlow sent to the selectboard.
The second proposal totaled about $46,521, Harlow wrote.
But board members still objected to the rate increase and what they viewed as non-answers to their questions.
Mitchell-Eby remained skeptical about the new dispatch costs, and in a Jan. 23 email to Harlow, he wrote that he had called Newport Police Department and asked how the dispatch center handles calls for the sheriff.
He was told that if someone called after hours and it was an emergency, the center would dispatch Vermont State Police, he wrote. If the sheriff’s department was needed, he described being told, a dispatcher would call the sheriff.
“So this is just an answering service; it’s not dispatch,” he said in an interview.
A few days before it met on Monday, the board offered a counterproposal that removed the 5% compensation clause, reduced total patrol hours by six and mandated evening patrols on Fridays and Saturdays between May and September. The board revision also asked for more reports from the sheriff and said that, for all other patrol hours throughout the year, at least half must be scheduled after 2 p.m.
But Harlow decided the two sides were at an impasse.
“It was very clear that they wanted to micromanage (my department),” Harlow said. “And I can’t have that. I mean, they’re not a police agency; they, unfortunately, don’t understand all the things that need to be done to run the department.”
She thought board members had been unfairly accusatory, and in response to Mitchell-Eby’s email Jan. 23, she wrote that his conduct had been “unconscionable.”
“I have had enough of having my credibility questioned and my integrity attacked,” she wrote. She wrote that she regretted that the sheriff’s department would not be providing services to Barton “for the foreseeable future.”
Mitchell-Eby said the town continues to look at other options for patrol services but declined to go into detail.
Harlow believes there have been misunderstandings throughout the talks.
“I’ve tried to explain again and again. I’ve tried to answer all the questions they’ve had, (but) we’ve not been able to communicate, and I’m not really sure what the issues are behind it all,” the sheriff said.
Read the story on VTDigger here: Contract talks blow up between Barton and Orleans County sheriff.