by 
David Blue
For well over a year, the communities of Hayden, Kearny and Mammoth have been without a police chief. As budgets continue to get tighter and revenues remaining stagnant, cost sharing is starting to become a norm for communities across the country, especially in the Copper Corridor.
For the past six months the local municipalities through the “Five Mayors’ Meeting” have been woking on a process to hire a chief of police that could lead all three individual police departments. Currently Winkelman pays a contract to the Town of Hayden to provide police services in their community. Hayden took the lead to manage the advertising, posting and interviewing of the police chief, in September they made an employment offer to Sgt. David Blue who has served as an interim chief for all three of the communities over the past year.
At a special meeting on Monday night the Kearny town council approved an Intergovernmental Agreement with the Towns of Mammoth, Hayden, Winkelman and Hayden to share a chief of police. Mammoth is expected to review the IGA again and approve on Tuesday, Nov. 29, 2016. A few minor verbiage changes were requested by Kearny to protect each community for each being liable if the chief has liability each of the communities.
Don Jones, Mayor of Mammoth, spoke to the Kearny council on Monday and encouraged the council to support the hiring of a joint chief.
“It saves us all a lot of money,” he said.
Currently the IGA and calls for a one year employment contract for the multi agency position. Jones expressed his concern that the agreement should be at least two years to give the person in the position a chance to develop.
The hiring of a chief to serve each community does not mean that each community will be served under a coalition police force. That idea has been discussed through the Five Mayors’ Meeting, but has not been actively discussed in over a year. No further developments have gone on there and it was shared in the Hayden and Kearny council meetings that the hiring of a shared chief was not the development of a coalition police force. Each community will keep their individual police department, the chief will manage the leadership, policy development and administrative management of each department for each of the three communities with police departments.
This is a developing story as each community moves through the approval process. This story may have updates posted online before the next print edition. Check back on www.CopperArea.com to stay up to date on this story.
Mila Besich is a resident of Superior with two children. She volunteers for many local organizations. She is an experienced fundraiser and event planner for Copper Corridor Economic Development Coalition. She covers some of the area town councils and schools.
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