“Where’s the sheriff?” Linda Bloom whispered.
“I wasn’t invited,” Sheriff Ken Fries barked a few minutes later, after he swaggered tardily into the county commissioners meeting, backed by his chief deputy and a handful of county dispatchers.
“Yes, you were,” Bloom responded. “I invited you.”
This “did not,” “did too” dialogue was one of the friendlier exchanges involving the angry Fries, who – after making his grand and late entrance – immediately got to the business of castigating the commissioners and city officials over a common-sense plan to merge the city’s and county’s police and fire dispatch departments.
The commissioners disagreed with one another. The commissioners disagreed with the sheriff. Decorum went out the door. In some ways, Monday’s hour-long county commissioners meeting epitomized what is wrong with Allen County government. And it demonstrated in graphic ways the impediment Fries poses to government progress.
Fries told the commissioners they are wrong. And so is the mayor. The police chief is wrong, too, and so is state Rep. Matt Bell. In fact, the entire legislature is wrong. Fries took time to criticize City Councilman Tim Pape, who is wrong, as well as Fire Chief Pete Kelly, also wrong. The city’s dispatch policies in general are wrong as well, Fries said. Oh, and so is The Journal Gazette editorial page.
“You’re wrong, you’re wrong, you’re wrong,” he announced as city officials left the meeting. “People are going to die, and I’m going to hold a press conference.”
There is, however, no evidence to show that having a board oversee merged police and fire dispatching – much as city-county boards oversee the Department of Health and Airport Authority – would cause someone to die.
The system proposed here is nearly identical to the well-run system in Evansville-Vanderburgh County, and others have a merged system.
There is evidence, though, of wasted time and mistakes in dispatching under the current system.
“Nelson, do you understand that?” the sheriff said condescendingly to Commissioner Nelson Peters after justifying the county communications department’s top-heavy management (one supervisor for every two non-management employees) by saying supervisors also dispatch calls. “That’s the problem, you don’t understand dispatching,” he told Peters.
“I would have liked to hear Rusty York say something, but I know he has to be in fear of his job,” Fries said dismissively after the city police chief left the room following a meeting in which York sat attentively but silently.
“I disagree with (state Rep.) Matt Bell,” Fries said in reference to a state law that limits each county to no more than two emergency dispatch centers beginning in 2014. “The information (the legislature) got was wrong.”
After dominating much of the meeting, Fries interrupted when Peters began to list reasons for a new dispatch arrangement.
“Do I get to answer any of these things, or are you just going to keep throwing them out?” Fries demanded.
After Fries flung his arrow at York, Fries’ chief deputy, Dave Gladieux, chimed in against Mayor Tom Henry. “The mayor was obviously wrong when he said it was going to improve service.”
How could any system be better if anyone besides the sheriff was in charge?
Who’s in charge?
“No other law enforcement leader (other than the sheriff) is elected within any local, state or federal governments. We do not elect the chief of police or the director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI). It is important that county law enforcement be led by and accountable to the county executive for the same reasons that the remaining administrative county offices should be: It ensures that local government leadership and responsibility are clear, and gives citizens direct access to that leadership.”
– Kernan-Shepard report
Area residents are well aware of the repeated battles between city and county government. But Monday’s meeting – perhaps “show” or “circus” would be a better word – was clearly an internal county matter. And don’t blame partisan politics, either; this was an all-Republican free-for-all.
One of the more surprising and controversial recommendations by the Kernan-Shepard Commission to Reform Local Government was to include the sheriff in the list of county positions that should be appointed rather than elected. The commission suggested that counties replace the commissioners with a single elected executive, who would make the appointment – just as the mayor appoints the police chief (and can fire him or her).
When one official pointed out at Monday’s meeting that one advantage of a board is that the township fire departments could have a voice on the board through an appointee, Fries responded, “they all have a voice, it’s called an election.”
Perhaps, but many residents don’t even know that some township trustees oversee fire protection, and many of them run unopposed. For his part, assuming Fries is re-elected next year, he will be a lame duck and ineligible for re-election in 2014.
The commissioners and the County Council have to buy the equipment the dispatchers use. They also have to buy buildings, and a similar battle is likely brewing for a new sheriff’s office – Fries wants his own building, and the commissioners want his department in the City-County Building or Renaissance Square.
The commissioners and sheriff are both elected and are free to go in separate directions. That was abundantly clear Monday, when Fries demonstrated why the Kernan-Shepard recommendation was right.
The issue
City and county officials have long sought a way to merge the city and county emergency dispatch operations. They perform largely the same job but have two sets of managers. But sheriffs – including Fries and his predecessor, Jim Herman – have strongly fought any such effort that doesn’t put the sheriff in charge, even though the vast majority of the calls are within the city.
In some ways, the departments are already partly merged because when dispatchers on one side are busy, calls bounce to the other. As a result, some city calls go to a county dispatcher, who then has to switch the call back to the city, a process that can waste valuable seconds.
Fries insists any change must be driven solely by safety and accused Peters of seeking a merger simply to save money. “Safety is paramount,” Peters agrees, but the 911 service isn’t free. The city and county face a combined bill of more than $14 million to replace radio equipment in coming years, Peters said, and transferring at least some of the costs to the 911 fee on residents’ telephone bills is the closest thing to a user fee.
If this issue was purely about safety, the city and county would pool their resources to the benefit of all of their constituents.
Fries says he objects for safety reasons. But make no mistake: This is all about political power and control.
Commissioners at odds
“No business would hire three executives to direct its activities and finances. Similarly, a county led by a three-member board is hampered in being responsive to its citizens and taking the definitive actions necessary to address the complex nature of today’s economy and public services. We recommend the establishment of a single elected county executive to provide a single point of leadership, contact and accountability.”
– Kernan-Shepard report
Monday’s meeting wasn’t all Fries vs. the world. The commissioners were at odds, too, with Commissioner Bill Brown siding with Fries and against Peters.
After Peters and Henry announced the city and county had finally reached agreement on 911 dispatching, Brown started expressing doubts.
Brown raised several issues – few of which struck at the heart of the debate. He said he preferred an even-numbered “consensus board” over the proposed seven-member board, suggesting boards should have to reach near-unanimous agreement to take action. He promoted tearing down the wall in the basement of the City-County Building that separates the city and county dispatchers – even if nothing else is changed, suggesting the symbolism of the wall coming down was enough.
Fries and several other people said that could be done almost immediately, until County Councilman Darren Vogt pointed out there would be issues with the heating and cooling system.
Brown said at the beginning and end of the meeting how glad he was that these discussions were occurring in public. Unfortunately, however, the meeting was not held in the Commissioners Courtroom, which is equipped with video and audio recording. Despite the significant issue discussed Monday, the commissioners met in their smaller conference room. The bigger Commissioners Courtroom is reserved for their more formal legislative meetings on Fridays.
Friday’s indecision
Four days after Monday’s discussion session, the proposal to create the city-county dispatching department was up for a vote at Friday’s session.
Bloom acknowledged the acrimony at Monday’s session – “it wasn’t that fun” – summarizing it “for those of you who were unable to see it on television,” apparently unaware that it wasn’t televised.
Brown was still enamored of the idea of an even-numbered “consensus board” and explained to the audience how tearing down the wall would be only a symbolic act.
“This is not a political decision,” Brown said, expressing perhaps the most wildly inaccurate observation at the meeting, before criticizing the city for playing politics by putting Fries’ 2006 election opponent, Tina Taviano, in charge of city dispatching.
Peters’ description was on the money: “This whole issue seems to be about turf.”
Brown said Fries had earlier proposed a board that would oversee the combined dispatching operation. It sounded remarkably similar to Peters’ proposal – the one that, in Fries’ view, would cause people to die.
The biggest difference is that it would be an even-numbered board, much to Brown’s delight, and the three county appointees would come not from the commissioners but from Fries. With Fries instead of the commissioners making the appointments, presumably no one will die.
With Bloom joining Brown in opposing the proposal, Peters did not ask for a vote.
“I obviously didn’t do as good a job counting my votes as I had thought given previous representations that had been made,” Peters said, a not-so-subtle suggestion that Bloom flip-flopped from an earlier commitment to support the plan.
So, after roughly five years of discussion during which Fries and his predecessor have always found a reason to oppose the merger, the commissioners instructed Fries and York to go back to the table, Brown and Bloom naïvely thinking that somehow this time will be different.
For his part, with a bigger audience than Monday, Fries was well-mannered, saying nothing during the public meeting.
He didn’t need to. The community may have lost, and good government may have lost.
But he had won.
