Back on May 5th, residents rejected the almost $1.7 million police budget presented at the annual town meeting over concerns about ballooning costs and the close relationship between Chief Deanna Strout and the select board. Her husband, Marc, a fellow cop in the neighboring Pittsfield PD, serves on the board. With hundreds packed into the Wahconah Regional High School auditorium Thursday, town leadership presented a new version of the budget, with around $34,000 trimmed off the top.
Select board chair Robert Bishop said the new plan had been hammered out the week prior in a meeting between members of the select board, finance committee, and police department leadership.
“Everybody in that room walked away feeling really good about this," he said. "Everybody on the finance committee that night voted for it, and then last Monday, everybody on the select board voted for it. So, I urge you to pass this budget tonight.”
At the contentious May 5th meeting, residents opted to move the budget vote to secret ballot. That forced what had been a too-close-to call decision during public voting into a vote strongly against the budget.
Tensions from that night were very much in the air Thursday.
“Now, certain people wish to fail this budget that is even lower than the two that failed at May's regular town meeting. Prior to town meeting in May, both the finance committee and select board – that’s you – unanimously approved a budget higher than the one we are asked to approve tonight," said Dalton resident Lynn Clements. “When the proposed budget was dropped down lower, it was forced to secret ballot due to its having been an orchestrated and very personal attack on our chief and our officers. Tonight, we are wasting more taxpayer money to hold this very meeting. I think it speaks volumes that the fiscal overseers are intentionally wasting your tax dollars right now, and it's not rooted in fiscal responsibility. It's rooted in spite.”
While the updated budget passed comfortably Thursday, detractors made their feelings known.
“I fully believe we need to decrease the policy budget down to $1 million. $1 million. That's more than enough for this town to pay. This budget is way too high for this town that has no crime, no crime that we, the taxpayers are paying for," said Lisa Turner. “The crimes that were committed in this town, if you would call them a crime- We have two lawsuits against the town of Dalton, both of them brought on by the Dalton Police Department. I see how quiet it is now. If we don't decrease, wait until they want to have their police station built. Wait for the millions and millions and millions that they are going to ask us to build them a police department because somebody saw a mouse in that building. The rest of the town employees, they all work in that building, and that's okay, but the police are not having it.”
Former town manager Ken Walto, who spent almost 20 years in the role before stepping down in 2020, said he was only willing to back the previous year’s allocation of around $1.3 million.
“I noted that this budget is up almost a half a million dollars in the last five years," he said. "That's entirely too much.”
But Chief Strout defended the spending during a tenure that began in 2021. She said costs only appear to be up because she is fully funding her department at the beginning of the year, rather than filling in costs throughout the year, as had been Dalton’s previous approach.
“My first year doing the budget, I did it their way," the chief told WAMC. "My budget was two weeks late when I started. So, I went in, I did it exactly the way they told me to, and then I was $110,000 over in my budget, and I almost had a heart attack because I was like, oh my gosh, what are we doing wrong? And I went in, and I realized they weren't budgeting for vacation time, they weren't budgeting for personal time, they certainly weren't budgeting for in service, so we were going over by all this money.”
Strout framed her approach as more transparent, putting the PD’s complete spending plan before voters at town meeting as opposed to filling in hundreds of thousands of dollars in budgetary gaps with transfers later in the year without public approval.
“Some people don't understand- especially Mr. Walto, our former town manager, who should know, because he's the only authorized these transfers," she said. "So, what would happen is they would deliberately underfund these budgets each year, and then at the end of the year, without any taxpayer knowledge, they would transfer interdepartmental transfers.”
Strout said that despite criticism, her department is staffed to the same levels of equally sized communities in the Berkshires and that crime was not nonexistent in Dalton.
“We've had about 34 arrests for the year since January," she told WAMC. "11 of those were in custody, 23 were summonses. So, it's not horrible. We live in a beautiful community. We're really lucky to live here, but we definitely have our share of crime, and the officers are very busy, but they do a great job. So, that is a little disheartening, and I think it's unfortunately, it's uninformed people that make statements that they don't know what they're saying.”
