In another sign that the county’s economy is recovering, Pittsfield and Dexter township voters overwhelmingly approved three public safety millages in the May election: by 72 to 28 percent in Pittsfield and 70 to 30 for fire and 73 to 27 for police in Dexter Township. Coupled with the resounding 77-to-23 approval of the Washtenaw Intermediate School District’s special education millage renewal, the results showed that voters were ready, willing, and able to pay higher taxes for services they wanted.
“We were asking voters to nearly double the amount they spent on public safety, so I was cautiously optimistic about the results,” says Pittsfield public safety director Matt Harshberger. “But I would never have guessed it would be passed by that much. Everybody here was very pleasantly surprised.”
“We are very happy with the result,” says Dexter Township supervisor Pat Kelly, “and more than a little surprised at the margin. Back in 2006, when times were good, we passed the previous millage with 54 percent of the vote. In other words, people didn’t support it as much then as they do now. Plus, the turnout for a May election was the highest we’ve ever seen: 26 percent compared with our highest previous turnout of 17 percent.”
Because it contracts for both fire and police services, Dexter Township had the more complicated task of running two public safety millages at once. But Kelly says they were ready for it. “We knew all along that the millage was going to expire, so in April 2010 we formed a public safety advisory committee to help figure out what to do.”
At the time, Dexter was getting fire protection from three different fire departments, and one was raising its rates a non-negotiable 233 percent. The committee found a way to avoid that by consolidating services with the two other departments, but that still meant voters had to approve a 13 percent increase, from 1.7 to 2 mills.
“Fire was an increase,” says Kelly, “but police was just a straight renewal.” That doesn’t mean they didn’t check out alternatives. “We looked at all our options and concluded that our contract with the Sheriff Department provides a lot of service for a reasonable amount of money. You want people to cut costs, and I can see the sheriff [Jerry Clayton] is cutting costs, and he’s fairly aggressive about it.”
Since Pittsfield Township had combined its police and fire departments into a single public safety department, it had to run only one millage. But since the township was asking voters to raise the rate from 1 to 1.95 mills, the challenge there was that much steeper.
“All of a sudden we became aware the millage was about to run out,” remembers Harshberger. “We’d begun dipping into millage reserve funds a couple of years ago to cover our budget. And we knew that we had to go back for an increase so we could maintain our current level of service. Our budget increased that much because of increases in health care and other uncontrollable fringe benefits.”
Though crime in Pittsfield is falling, township supervisor Mandy Grewal wanted to maintain the same level of service. “There’s not a correlation between how many police you have and how much crime you have,” she says. “It depends on what you do with the police. Our crime rate is falling because we’ve reorganized our police force to focus on community policing.”
Things are different in Dexter Township, says Pat Kelly. “Crime has increased. We had a spate of home invasions in the last couple of years, and we don’t typically have that kind of crime out here. But our officers did a fabulous job of investigating, and they caught most of them. That’s why we need our deputies.”
