Nazareth holds off on hiring full-time police

FROM THE MORNING CALL

For any other police department, it would be an unremarkable request: Two hundred uniform patches. New officers need uniforms, after all, and uniforms need patches.

But this is Nazareth, where council members pay bills for a department they've vowed to dissolve.

Nazareth Police Department Chief Thomas Trachta asked for new patches at the police committee meeting Monday, along with permission to hire four part-time officers and $1,000 to repair a patrol car. All will likely be approved.

But the borough refuses to hire new full-time patrolmen, who Trachta says are sorely needed to fill holes in his shifts. Councilmen also is reluctant to hold a sergeant's exam, which would lead to another supervisor on the force.

That's the Nazareth paradox: Despite plans to shut down the local police force and contract with a regional department, borough council still acts as if everything is business as usual — but will only give the minimum.

"I've been waiting over 10 months for the replacement officers," Trachta told the police committee Monday. "The department has only moved one baby step forward and three steps back. This is no way to run a police department."

Nazareth's force is bleeding staff. Detective Fred Lahovski, one of the force's three remaining full-time officers, has told Trachta he plans to become a police chief in Luzerne County and could leave before the end of this year. Another full-timer is out with an injury, and all nine of the department's part-time officers are either injured, looking for another job or working fewer hours.

It's natural, Trachta says — why work for an employer who has openly said it wants to shut the business down? But that leaves him with several shifts with just a single officer patrolling the town of 6,000— and no one back at the station to keep an eye on things.

Councilh says the department has become too expensive for the borough to bear, with the police budget growing by 50 percent over the past five years and insurance premiums rising 22.5 percent in the last year alone.

Earlier this year, council voted to open negotiations with Colonial Regional Police Department, which covers Lower Nazareth Township, Hanover Township, Chapman and Bath. But little progress has been made since, with Mayor Fred Daugherty saying they haven't even had a meeting with epartment officials.

The mayor and council members won't explain the delay, saying only that they are contending with personnel matters.

In the meantime, they've given tepid support to Trachta, approving his request to hire one part-time officer earlier this summer. But his demands for more full-time officers — he had six a few years ago — have been met with silence.

Lahovski, who says he's only a few steps away from becoming police chief of Forty Fort, Luzerne County, has been an outspoken critic of the borough's push to regionalize. He says his move north wasn't motivated by his clashes with council — entirely.

"It's never one variable. It's always a combination of good and bad things," he said. "I've enjoyed my service to the citizens of Nazareth and I did the best I could do. I didn't always get it done, but I tried to do the right thing.

http://www.mcall.com/news/local/nazareth/mc-nazareth-police-chief-shortage-20110919,0,2845626.story