RANGELEY – Law enforcement representatives from Rangeley, Franklin County and Maine state departments met with Rangeley selectmen and Town Manager Perry Ellsworth Thursday night to discuss town police coverage.
Rangeley, which has not had a full-time police department since its incorporation in 1855, started receiving part-time, two-day-per-week coverage from the county sheriff’s office in 2004, which soon after began splitting the coverage with state police.
Area residents, and Rangeley’s two full-time and one reserve police officers, grew unhappy with the arrangement over the course of the year, Ellsworth said in a September letter to Sheriff Dennis Pike. A workshop was held Thursday evening to “talk about some issues that I think have gone on for too long,” Ellsworth said.
Ellsworth opened the workshop saying that, “It’s not about who’s right and who’s wrong,” and went on to outline Rangeley’s concerns that town officers are spending much of their limited time on out-of-jurisdiction calls. In addition, he said the town is not getting the quality of service it is entitled to receive from payment of state and county taxes.
The town has already spent a significant amount of its police budget on the hiring of reserve officers, Ellsworth said, and spends thousands in taxes toward county and state police coverage each year. Officials have recently begun exploring the possibility of operating a full-time police force and put the money it spends on taxes to the sheriff’s department “into our own police force,” Ellsworth said.
“We spend a tremendous amount of money,” Ellsworth added. He asked Pike to “answer why we’re paying” so much and encountering problems with service, describing incidents in which area residents made 911 calls and did not see an officer for hours. The co-chairman of Rangeley’s Board of Selectmen, Rob Welch, asked Pike, “We’d like to know what (the money) buys us, that’s the rub.”
Pike told the Rangeley officials that many of mix-ups and lagging response times Rangeley residents have experienced have been caused by changes in the department’s dispatch technology.
“Your concerns are absolutely, positively founded,” he said. He went on to explain that currently, “51 percent of all the calls I receive are now coming from wireless phones,” calls which are routed to the state police communications center in Augusta before being directed to his office.
As opposed to calls from land lines, he added, when dispatchers receive calls from wireless phones, location information does not come up on their computer screens. In emergency situations, officers sometimes lose precious time looking for callers in the wrong location.
Pike added he feels the coverage his office provides in tandem with the state police is, “a very positive thing.” He added he knows the service is, “not perfect, but we are all spread very thin.”
One Sandy River Plantation resident, who asked not to be identified, told the assembled officials she thinks residents’ concerns are less about money than they are about quality of coverage. “When we have an emergency, what we want to know is that someone will respond expeditiously to our call.
“The point is that this is all one community,” she said. “We need to figure out how to use our resources in a way that is going to get services to people that need it quickly.”
Ellsworth concluded the workshop expressing a worry that the coverage Rangeley currently receives from the sheriff’s office will disappear, as he did not see provisions for town coverage in the department’s budget for 2005. Pike assured him that the taxes Rangeley pays cover the cost of service, and that, “we will come whenever you call.”
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