Sharing in Success: Sharing Police Services (2011 LGAA)

City of Binghamton (Winner)
County: Broome County
Population: 10,001 to 50,000
City Hall: (607) 772-7000

This project marks the first time that a single Broome County-based police chief or set of police chiefs has served multiple police departments at the same time. The City of Binghamton and Village of Johnson City agreed that the police chief and assistant chiefs should increase their regular work hours and then split their time between the two municipalities, with the police chief spending half his time in each municipality and the assistant chiefs each spending 75% of their time in Binghamton and 25% of their time in Johnson City. In practice, this arrangement means that every day the chief and one of the two assistant chiefs serve each municipality for half a day.

While the chief and assistant chiefs received increases to their annual salaries as a result of the shared services agreements, each municipality has reduced its yearly police cost significantly – nearly $100,000 for Binghamton and more than $80,000 for Johnson City. Moreover, since the chief and two assistant chiefs now lead the police departments of both municipalities, the two departments are collaborating across municipal lines more effectively than ever. This has been especially true in the Detective Divisions, which now partner on investigations, and on the Broome County Special Investigations Task Force, where Johnson City's police department joined the Binghamton Police Department and County Sheriff's Department after the shared services agreements went into effect. The City of Binghamton and Village of Johnson City anticipate that the existing agreements will lead to additional shared services agreements – in police and other departments – that simultaneously save costs and improve services.

From the perspective of public safety, sharing a chief or set of chiefs eliminates the barriers that often prevent effective collaboration across municipal jurisdictions. From a financial perspective, the annual savings to each municipality -- and, by extension, their taxpayers -- make the agreement a "home run," especially given the ongoing effects of the national recession. Understandably, residents in each municipality questioned whether the agreement's cost savings were worth the possibility that giving the chiefs a larger workload would put them at risk of losing some amount of focus on their duties. Elected leaders from the two municipalities and the chiefs helped allay these concerns by emphasizing how the agreement actually would strengthen local law enforcement by bridging the two police departments as never before. In sum, this project is helping the two police departments to make Binghamton, Johnson City and the surrounding area safer, while saving substantial taxpayer dollars.