Police Chief Patriarca presented budget to Selectboard and Advisory Committee

Police Chief Patriarca presented a thorough explanation of his FY24 budget request to the Selectboard and Advisory Committee on Tuesday evening. He explained that recent Police Reform legislation is making it hard to keep part-time officers. Over a series of slides, the Chief demonstrated how Princeton’s pool of part-time officers has been shrinking. Traditionally, the department has used part-time officers to fill in gaps in the shift schedule and avoid excess overtime. Chief Patriarca described a couple of recent incidents where only one person was on duty and explained why this situation was less than ideal for victims and police officers. The Chief would like to have two officers on each shift. He referred to this as full coverage. He explained why it is less expensive to add an officer than to rely too heavily on overtime. The Chief would like to present three budget options to residents at Town Meeting. The first adds two officers and uses part-timers and overtime to achieve full shift coverage of two officers on each shift. The second adds only one officer and uses part-timers and more overtime to achieve full shift coverage. The last option adds only one officer and keeps the status quo for shift coverage. This would mean that there would typically be only one officer working on the overnight shift. Note that the Selectboard has not yet voted on the final budget it would like to present to voters. To learn more about this important decision voters face, you can watch a recording of the meeting or you can review Chief Patriarca’s presentation.