Isabella County Sheriff’s Department may remove one officer from Bay Area Narcotics Enforcement Team

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Isabella County is looking into removing one Sheriff’s Department officer from the Bay Area Narcotics Enforcement Team to stimulate revenue.

The idea has been discussed by County Commissioners and may be included in the final budget, which must be adopted by Sept. 30, said County Administrator Tim Dolehanty.

The proposal came as a surprise to Lt. Det. Amado Arceo of BAYANET’s North Team, who first heard the news in last Wednesday through published reports.

“I don’t have any information that they’re going to pull it,” Arceo said. “I still have their officer on my team.”

Dolehanty said he has submitted a balanced budget as of now, but much debate will follow and he does not expect his budget to be final.

Department requests for funds were $1.4 million higher than county funds available, and Dolehanty is still waiting on final state revenue sharing figures.

Currently there are seven full-time equivalents from BAYANET tied to the county. Three are designated to the county as a whole, two are assigned to the Saginaw Chippewa Indian Tribal Police, one to the city of Mount Pleasant and one to Central Michigan University.

The removal of the officer from the sheriff’s department would remove one of the officers covering the county, Dolehanty said, but would not be a significant loss to drug-enforcement efforts.

“I believe very strongly that would be the case,” he said. “We still have the officer from Mt. Pleasant and a total of six officers. No one else comes close to that.”

Breakdown

Isabella County’s seven officers dwarf other counties. Saginaw County has two full-time equivalents, where local counties like Clare and Gladwin Counties have no full-time equivalents.

Just more than 7 percent of BAYANET’s Isabella County arrests happen in rural areas and almost 70 percent of their arrests come from Mount Pleasant and CMU’s campus, which would still have officers dedicated exclusively to them.

The sheriff’s department officer would be reassigned to traffic operations in this proposal, Dolehanty said. Traffic tickets are down 75 percent in the last five years.

While Dolehanty said he doesn’t think tickets should be written all the time, the loss of revenue is important to the county.

“When I see a revenue source drop 75 percent, it’s something I have to address as a public administrator,” Dolehanty said. “It amounts to hundreds of thousands of dollars.”

The drop in ticket issuing is largely because of a drop in tickets written by non-secondary road patrol units. Tickets written by non-secondary road patrol units and secondary road patrol units are near equal now. In 2005, non-secondary patrol units wrote almost 1,300 more citations, according to a public safety budget recommendation provided by Dolehanty.

Ticket numbers have also dropped because sheriff’s department personnel have been pulled from traffic concerns to more serious crimes.

Sheriff Leo Mioduszewski declined to comment on the matter for now.

“I’m still waiting on some statistical data,” Mioduszewski said. “I have not had a chance to delve into the data on whether that’s a good idea or not.”

The recommendation document had other suggestions like cutting overtime for the sheriff’s department and secondary road patrol.