"We couldn’t cover Hopewell Borough with the staff we have now," Pennington police Director William Meytrott said Wednesday
By John Tredrea
If Hopewell Township police stopped covering Hopewell Borough, one place the borough could turn would be Pennington Borough, which has its own police department.
The two boroughs are about four miles apart. The township encircles both of them. Both boroughs are less than 1 square mile. The township, one of the largest municipalities in the state, is 58 square miles.
"We couldn’t cover Hopewell Borough with the staff we have now," Pennington police Director William Meytrott said Wednesday. "We’d have to increase staff, training and equipment. We’d have to increase everything."
Mr. Meytrott said he could not estimate at this point what the cost would be if Pennington were to police the Valley’s other borough.
The township charged Hopewell Borough $318,000 for police coverage this year, $30,000 more than last year (see related story). The township says it costs $500,000 to provide the service, so that is what the borough should pay. Hopewell Borough Mayor David Nettles says $318,000 is fair. The township and borough have agreed to apply for a state grant to hire a consultant to study the matter and make recommendations by spring.
Director Meytrott said the 2005 Pennington budget line item for police totals $453,000. Most of that $380,000 is for salaries. But there are other costs not addressed by that portion of the municipal budget, including a $40,000 interlocal agreement with Hopewell Township for communications services and about $114,000 for benefits to police employees. Those other costs bring the bottom line to a little over $600,000 per year.
The Pennington Police Department has seven employees Director Meytrott and six officers. In the early 1990s, the Pennington Borough Council discussed at length the idea of disbanding the borough’s Police Department and contracting with the township for police services. Council scrapped the idea after residents jammed Borough Hall, with the vast majority saying they wanted their own police department.
Creating a brand new police department another option Hopewell Borough could conceivably take if it breaks off with the township can get into serious money, the Pennington director said. "You have to have police cars, a headquarters," he said. "And the biggest cost could be a communications system. They are expensive. If you had to start a communications system of your own, it could run into hundreds of thousands of dollars."
Reflecting on the debate between the township and Hopewell Borough, Director Meytrott, who also has been a Pennington fire commissioner for many years, said: "At some point in the future, it would probably be a good idea from a public policy standpoint to consider having a single Valley-wide police department." If that were done, he continued, "it would appear to me that it would be best to have that department run by a board of police commissioners elected by the people. Or it could be a Valley-wide emergency services commission, which would oversee fire and first aid services as well as police."

