RANDOLPH — Town officials are reopening their laptops to punch up a new — and substantially smaller — proposal to re-establish a police department after voters rejected the original plan at Town Meeting last week.

The town manager was instructed by the Selectboard on Thursday, two days after voters defeated a $771,000 proposal for a five-person municipal police department, to present a revised plan that would show what kind of force the town could cobble together with the $328,000 that was raised from property taxes in the police district in the most recent budget cycle.

“The approach that is coming through to me making the most sense is developing a (police) budget that is level-funded and what does that look like. ... I don’t see how else we are going to get to a point where we are moving forward,” Trini Brassard, chairwoman of the Selectboard, said after two hours of discussion about next steps on Thursday.

A revised proposal for the police department is to be presented to the Selectboard at its next meeting in two weeks.

Brassard’s comment followed Randolph resident Kelly Green, an opponent of the defeated proposal, who emphasized to the board that “a lot of people I talked to said adding hundreds and hundreds of dollars (to their tax bill) a year for policing in a very small area is just far too much. There just aren’t enough people to support five new municipal employees and pay them what they deserve to be paid.”

At issue was a rapidly conceived plan to equip and staff a police department that would include a chief, three patrol officers and an administrative assistant to take over policing of the downtown area of Randolph that had been covered under a contract with the Orange County Sheriff’s Department. The county sheriff informed Randolph officials in early February that a mass exodus of deputies has left the sheriff’s department without the manpower to fulfill the contract.

Randolph initially reached out to Vermont State Police to ask if they could provide an increased presence, but being some 50 troopers short in their own ranks, the state agency said it only had enough manpower to respond to the most urgent calls.

Lieutenant Hugh O’Donnell, chief of the VSP’s Royalton barracks, came to Thursday’s Selectboard meeting armed with data to show the extent of the policing challenge in Randolph.

He said the sheriff’s department responded to 2,300 calls in Randolph in 2022 — the majority of them inside the police district — and state police responded to an additional 1,000 calls in Randolph. Given that the Royalton barracks responded to a total of 7,200 calls among the 18 towns in its territory during the same period, O’Donnell said, Randolph generated a disproportionate share.

“Your guys get a lot of calls. It’s very high for the region. We don’t have the capability to take on 2,300 calls,” O’Donnell said.

What kind of policing Randolph would get if it re-established a police force with a $328,000 budget is not clear. But Town Manager Trevor Lashua said it likely would support two full-time officers, plus “maybe two part-timers depending how many hours we can sneak in” along with an administrative position.

“You’re talking a number less than (120 hours per week), so it will have its impacts,” Lashua said.

Brassard stressed any short-term outcome would an “interim” arrangement until the town can find a long-term solution. Some have encouraged the formation of a regional agency that would encompass multiple towns sharing policing resources, but that could take years to come to fruition.

The Selectboard’s original proposal was complicated by the fact that it was largely to be paid for by residents within the “police district,” an area roughly contiguous with the core of Randolph, commonly referred to as the village. The district was created in the early 1980s when the formerly separate Randolph municipalities of town and village merged.

Property owners outside the police district, who tend to own larger parcels of land, have long contended that they do not require — nor should they have to pay for — the same level of policing as property owners inside the more densely populated police district.

Only 23.2% of the eligible 1,568 voters in the police district cast ballots on the article, the town clerk’s office reported. The total number of registered voters in Randolph is 3,720. Randolph has a total population of nearly 5,000 over a 50-square-mile area.

Under the plan, Randolph would have budgeted $771,000 to operate and staff the police department in its first year, of which $500,000 would have been raised through taxes and the rest by transfers from the general fund and tapping federal pandemic relief funds.

The town’s contract with the sheriff’s department to police the village cost $349,000 annually. Supporters pointed out it would cost only about $150,000 more annually for Randolph to re-establish its own police department.

Critics were concerned that portions of the budget coming from general fund and pandemic relief funds are one-time sources and the town would have to resort to increasing the tax rate even higher in subsequent years.

Brassard, the Selectboard chairwoman, pointed out that the town still has money in the budget that would normally have gone to pay for the now-canceled contract with the sheriff’s department to pay for some policing service, although that funding expires at the end of the current fiscal year on June 30. And the town has already used pandemic relief funds to purchase two cruisers and equipment and hired former sheriff’s deputy Scott Clouatre as police chief, along with an administrative assistant.

Brassard said opposition to the plan, based on her reading of the comments posted on Front Porch Forum, the Vermont-based social media site where the debate has largely unfolded, appeared to be divided into four groups: people who didn’t want to pay for it, people who thought a five-person department was too big, people who argued for more mental health workers instead of police and people who thought the tax burden should be shared equally townwide.

“I don’t know (that) it’s an easy path to figure out,” Brassard said of the path forward. She said the plan “kicked back up” lingering ill feelings over the re-merger of separate tax districts in Randolph.

In one bit of good news, Brassard said that Randolph has received its “ORI number” from the FBI, which allows the nascent town police department to access the federal agency’s fingerprint database and other law enforcement tools. The town is still awaiting approval from the state to access its databases.

Former Selectboard member and downtown business owner Perry Armstrong, a vocal advocate for Randolph to re-establish its own police force, predicted that debate between residents inside and outside the police district over sharing the tax burden “is going to get a little nasty.”

“The people in the village think they can force the people who don’t live in these villages to pay for these services,” said Armstrong, who himself lives outside the village although his business, an events tenting company and warehouse, is inside the village. He said it has been the target of multiple break-ins and thefts over the past 18 months.

Armstrong likens the concept of the police district to a water district or sewer district, where the cost to support those services is borne by the system users and not by residences who have their own wells and septic tanks.

In the meantime, Armstrong said he is taking added security into his own hands and is looking at spending about $40,000 to surround his business property with a chain-link fence to keep intruders out.

“We’re probably going to do it this spring,” Armstrong said. “It’s going to look like New Jersey.”

Contact John Lippman at jlippman@vnews.com.

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