Northumberland County council won’t be pursuing the concept of changing the way police services are being delivered in the county any time soon.
At its monthly meeting on Wednesday (September 18), council received an overview from representatives of StrategyCorp, the consultant that it approved hiring earlier this year at a cost of $75,000 to explore different scenarios for providing policing services in the future for all of Northumberland County’s 80,000 residents.
Currently in Northumberland County, the Cobourg Police Service serves the Town of Cobourg, the Port Hope Police Service primarily serves the urban area of the Municipality of Port Hope (Ward 1), and the OPP’s Northumberland detachment (with locations in Cobourg, Brighton, and Campbellford) serves the rural area of the Municipality of Port Hope, along with Hamilton Township, Alnwick-Haldimand Township, Cramahe Township, the Municipality of Brighton, and the Municipality of Trent Hills.
The report summary from StrategyCorp that was presented to council included three options:
- Transferring the delivery of all police services in Northumberland County to the OPP, which would essentially amalgamate the Cobourg Police Service and the Port Hope Police Service into the OPP.
- Amalgamating the Cobourg Police Service and the Port Hope Police Service into a single service for both the Town of Cobourg and the urban area of the Municipality of Port Hope (Ward 1), while continuing with the OPP for the areas it currently serves.
- Maintaining the status quo.
After an animated discussion amongst county councillors and a delegation from the Town of Cobourg’s police chief, council ultimately opted to receive the study for information only as opposed to moving forward with the second phase of the project, which would have involved a full costing of the alternative service delivery models identified in the study.
Three county councillors spoke in light of the fact that county governments, unlike regional governments, do not currently oversee policing services — that it’s up to the lower-tier municipalities — and they didn’t see the point in moving further ahead.
“We do not have the authority to move forward,” said County Councillor Scott Jibb. “This a lower-tier responsibility and it must stay there.”
Councillors Bob Crate and John Logel shared similar sentiments.
The StrategyCorp report summary projected millions of dollars in cost savings over a 10-year period in both of the first two scenarios, with an estimated savings of $50.7 million if the OPP provided all policing services in the county and an estimated savings of $21.5 million if the police services in Cobourg and Port Hope were amalgamated.
“The status quo (scenario three) delivers adequate and effective policing for each of the communities,” the summary noted. “However, of the three scenarios evaluated, it does so at the highest cost, and with the least opportunity for improved efficiency. This is because the model divides service delivery between three services, two of which are small in scale.”
Last year, council added $75,000 to the 2023 budget to retain StrategyCorp to update the 2007 “Policing Study Final Report for Northumberland County.” The county said the updated study would support municipal planning for effective and affordable policing over the long term, as the community grows and changes, by identifying service delivery options ranging from maintaining existing service structures to exploring a combined model.
The report considered current service delivery models in Northumberland and provided an analysis of potential alternatives. “This report is meant to give county council the information needed to determine if proceeding to the next phase of the project is warranted,” county staff noted in its report.
Municipality of Brighton Mayor Brian Ostrander, who currently serves as the warden of Northumberland County council, earlier told kawarthaNOW that having one county-wide police force for Northumberland instead of three separate services was worth a second look. Ostrander proposed to council the motion of updating the 2007 study.
“Both (County Councillor and Cobourg Mayor Lucas Cleveland) and I put this motion on the floor for this purpose based on a discussion at lunch one day about (how) we should be looking at uploading more services to the county and sharing services better, and emergency services were the discussion we were having,” Ostrander said during the September 18 meeting.
They had discussed both fire services and police services, determining finding efficiencies in seven fire services would be “a heavier manoeuvre” than three police services.
“That’s why we went down this road of investigating this,” Ostrander said. “I concur with my fellow councillors that this is a local-level decision unless we choose to upload it to the county, and I think it makes little sense to go down this road unless we have a willingness to investigate what that upload looks like.”
The day before the council meeting, the Cobourg Police Services Board (CPSB) received a presentation from Cobourg police chief Paul VandeGraaf “that identified exaggerations, misinformation, and incomplete assumptions” in the StrategyCorp report, subsequently passed two motions raising concerns about the consultant’s report, and issued a media release.
