[/personal whine mode]
Ok, this is just personal whining. The city I live in has a long term agreement with a neighboring twp to share a police station and dispatch (seperate police departments). City felt they were unjustly supporting the twp usage (about 4 to 1) and requested renegotiation. For three years they requested renegotiated financial arrangement, and were virtually ignored. Two outgoing council members voted to close the police station and explore other options. Besides the fact it was putting the cart before the horse, they didn't really force the issue of negotiating a new contract. This got my wife irked enough to run for council and won. One of the outgoing council members formally established her as lead negotiator and at my wife's suggestion set a negotiating deadline. On Friday before the twp trustee vote, they had an agreement in principal to set the cost sharing at 40/60. Tuesday the twp turned down a 45/55 sharing agreement (huh, that wasn't even on the table). At the city council meeting the following week, it was made clear the date was come and gone, the city is moving ahead with alternate plans. Twp police chief is given way too much time (2 hours) to explain why 45/55 is more then fair and anybody should be willing to accept that number. Later, reality sets in with two Twp Tustees, beginning to understand, instead of 36k annual increase they are looking at 200k annual increase plus in my estimation over 1,000,000 in start up costs. They force their twp to put it on their next agenda, and have a 4-3 vote already to go. Someone in the twp (suspicion of who, is scary) makes life threatening phone calls (traced to a twp police officer, but accepted that it wasn't him), and slashing auto tires with notes left suggesting the proper vote. The vote ends up going 3-4, because one person was intimidated into changing their vote. All this over a lousy $36k, that is now $200k! Our sons and daughters are in Iraq fighting terrorism, and yet we have to deal with it from local residents too. State prosecuter, local court, FBI, and U.S. Attorney General are all now involved. We can only hope they will figure out who did it, and prosecute, but fear the person was smart enough to not leave any trails. The approach the city council (and city residents) took, was to use legal and appropriate means to affect the decision. Because of this crap (and some other suspicious activity), I've had to put up additional security lighting, and install cameras around my house. Our police chief is stepping up activity around our house. Tomorrow the stuff is really going to hit the fan as the local rag is publishing several articles and an interview with one of the Trustees exposing all the details of how much this person is really going to cost their taxpayers.
[/personal whine mode off]
