La Center Police force stretched thin

LA CENTER — Even before La Center Police Officer Andrew Marvitz stood next to the woman stumbling down Northwest Spencer Road, he could smell the alcohol on her as he walked in her direction.

As he spoke to her, it was clear she had been drinking. Maybe taking something else, too, he said. Her words weren’t coherent, she had a glazed look in her eye, and at one point, she reached out and tried to fix his hair. During their talk, she pulled a crumpled-up beer can out of her purse.

Marvitz continued to talk to her on the side of the winding, two-lane road with no sidewalks, partly trying to assess if she needed medical assistance or if he should bring her in. He was also doing something else: stalling while waiting for backup. It’s something Marvitz, and the rest of the La Center Police Department, are used to.

“Sometimes we can’t do anything until our cover arrives, and our cover is 10 minutes away,” he said. “It makes it hard.”

Things are about to get even harder for the department. Police Officer Jerry Lester retired last week after 24 years with the department. Now, the department has four officers, along with two sergeants and one chief, which is the lowest amount of staffing the department can have to provide 24-hour service, Chief Marc Denney said.

“We’re able to survive fairly well with the personnel we have, but as soon as anyone gets sick or goes down for any reason, it requires overtime,” Denney said before Lester’s retirement. “It’s not ideal.”

All officers are getting a minimum of four hours of overtime a week thanks to the recent retirement. Denney wants his officers working four 11-hour work days. Since the department is short-staffed, to ensure someone is on duty at all times a day, the officers are working 12-hour days. Currently, there is a day officer and night officer working 12 hours with no overlap. The department’s two sergeants work part of each shift.

Marvitz, a Hockinson High School grad who joined the department a little less than two years ago, said the ideal set-up is a day-shift officer, swing-shift officer and graveyard-shift officer, with all working 11 hours.

That’s what Ridgefield Police Chief John Brooks is looking for, too. As one of the closest departments to La Center, in size and in location, Ridgefield has its officers provide backup in La Center — and vice versa — on a daily basis. The Ridgefield department currently has a chief, lieutenant, two sergeants and five police officers, although the department is expected to hire a sixth officer in June, Brooks said.

He also said it can become a strain on his officers to have too much overtime.

“It gets to be to a point where officers need to be away from work,” Brooks said. “They need that proper work-life balance. What I have seen in the past is, officers like to have a certain amount of overtime available to work, if they choose to.”

Most recently, La Center’s police officers worked a bunch of overtime while assisting with traffic for the opening of the Ilani Casino Resort. Marvitz said he worked 45 hours of overtime that week.

The casino is already providing complications for the department, and not just due to traffic. While Marvitz said there haven’t been noticeable changes in the city — that is, outside of the 8-mile traffic backup that turned Interstate 5 into a parking lot on the casino’s opening day — La Center’s financial future is in question thanks to the casino. A bulk of the city’s general fund revenue, which funds safety and public works departments, comes from the cardrooms. With a new $510 million casino open minutes away, nobody is sure how the cardrooms will fare. The New Phoenix Casino closed in March, before Ilani even opened, leaving just two cardrooms in the city.

In the 2017 budget, the city is planning to bring in $1,927,910 in tax revenue from the cardrooms this year, down from the projected $3,153,527 in 2016. That is more than $467,000 better than what the city planned for in its 2016 budget. The city’s cardrooms performed better than expected in 2015, giving the city a $240,000 budget surplus. The city is using the surplus money to maintain staffing and service levels in 2017.

“It’ll be a big hit if one of the gaming establishments were to close or reduce their business,” Denney said. “We’ve got a lot of unknown and angst right now. It may be nothing, and the casino up there may draw a lot of prospects to the area and businesses, and bring in a lot of revenue for the city of La Center. We just don’t know.”

That’s where Mayor Greg Thornton is, too. Thornton said the city will have to wait and see how the revenue works out this year before city officials can really dig into the 2018 budget. He also said there hasn’t been any discussion about going to less than 24-hour service in a few years — and wouldn’t say if that could be a possibility for the future.

With the 2017 budget set, the department was able to make a temporary hire, Denney said. The officer started training with La Center on May 1. It could be 12 weeks until the officer is ready to respond to calls alone. The temporary hire works a full-time schedule, but the contract is for six months and can be extended another four at most.

Denney isn’t sure if the officer will be able to join the staff permanently after the temp contract runs out. Until then, the department’s officers will keep working as is. Marvitz likes that working in a place like La Center means fewer calls, which give him more time to talk to people and patrol. It also means doing a little bit of everything.

“We don’t have a dedicated animal officer,” he said. “We are animal control. That’s the nature of working in a small town.”