TUPPER LAKE — The town and village boards are negotiating how much town taxpayers will pay for police coverage outside village lines. If they can’t reach an agreement by Dec. 31, village Mayor Paul Maroun said the contract will expire and Tupper Lake police officers would not be able to respond to emergency calls in the town outside the village come January. The village is requiring the town to pay $50,000 toward the contract or it will end.

Interim town Supervisor Mary Fontana said on Monday it is “very likely” that the contract will expire on Dec. 31. She doesn’t feel good about this, but also doesn’t feel town taxpayers want to pay more to maintain the police contract as the department operates for 12 hours a day, half the time than in the past.

The village gave the town an ultimatum on Oct. 31.

“We want $50,000 minimum or the contract will end,” Maroun said. “That’s not to be mean.”

If there’s no agreement by the end of December, the village will cancel the contract and negotiate a new one.

Without a contract, village police would not legally be allowed to respond to emergencies outside village lines. The police operated outside the village for years before he was mayor, Maroun said, but it was done illegally because there was no contract.

“You can’t go into the township unless you have a contract because you are absolutely liable if anything goes wrong,” he said. “One bad lawsuit could sink the village.”

The town has previously paid $29,000 toward the police contract. For years, the village has requested more and the town has approved small increases. This year, the town has offered a compromise for a potential $50,000 increase: a payment of $35,000 with a $15,000 contingency. If the police department is able to hire more officers — even just one, Fontana said — or expand its shift hours, the other $15,000 would be released.

With this contingency, the $50,000 contribution would come up to a 74% increase in payment, which Fontana felt is “more than fair for a 1-year contract.”

But the village does not want to agree to a contingency. TLPD Chief Eric Proulx has spoken to the board at length about the difficulty of hiring new police officers currently. And being short-staffed, he does not believe shift hours can be expanded unless more hires are made.

Trustee Jason McClain said the police department budget is $1,136,912 this year. In 2021, he said 5.42% of TLPD calls were into the town outside the village. These were mostly lifesaving emergency calls, he said.

Multiplying the budget by the percent of calls to the town outside the village, McClain calculated that the town uses $61,620.63 of the total police budget.

But Fontana said using last year’s 5.42% figure is not representative of the services the department will provide in the coming year. In April, the TLPD cut its nighttime patrol shift due to a lack of active officers, only operating from 7 a.m. to 7 p.m. for the foreseeable future. This means police are on duty only 12 hours each day.

McClain said he gets that they’re only working for half the day, but he said that’s partially because for years the village taxpayers have been the only ones substantially supporting the department.

“I will vote against the contract for anything less than the full 5.42% ($61,620.63),” McClain wrote in a social media post.

He thinks the rest of the board will be fine with a 5% $50,000 agreement. But personally, he said he would not go lower. The contract would pass without his vote, he believes, so he opposes it on a personal basis.

“Thirty thousand dollars more is better than nothing,” McClain said. “But I, personally, am not going to vote ‘yes.’ We appreciate the increase, but it’s still a slap in the village taxpayers’ face. … It is unreasonable to ask the village taxpayer only, which only makes up one-third of the assessed value of the town, to pay for the biggest costing service in our whole community, which serves our whole community.”

Also, Maroun said, the town’s tax base is growing more than the village’s.

If the contract is cancelled, McClain said he would still try to work with the town.

Maroun said he has talked with incoming Supervisor Rick Dattola, who takes office in January, and thinks they can work something out with him. But if the contract expires at the end of the year, there may be a gap in the police contract with the town.

In a November town board meeting, Councilwoman Tracy Luton called the increased contribution a “slippery slope.”

“They want to keep raising it. When you start feeding them money, then they’ll keep asking for more and more money,” Luton said of the village. “That’s where we are now. They want more and more and more.”

Fontana said it is not the town’s intent to “subsidize” the village budget.

“I’m not trying to rob the town,” Maroun said.

He said the increased contribution is to make things more fair for village taxpayers.

“I think Trustee (Ron) LaScala was correct when he said that we should equalize the rates eventually, just like we do for fire (protection),” Maroun said.

McClain said he personally thinks equalization is “unrealistic.” But he believes it is reasonable for the town to eventually contribute one-third of the police budget.

It’s not a lot of money, everyone acknowledged. Maroun said it would be a small tax increase; a couple dollars a year, not hundreds.

“The town has the money,” Maroun said. “This should be a no-brainer.”

“It’s a small cost that will inevitably save a life!” McClain wrote on social media.

Maroun said TLPD do not routinely patrol in the town or look for speeders or drunk drivers. Officers are mostly there for emergencies.

“This isn’t just about murders and robberies and rape,” Maroun said. “This is about emergency services.”

The Tupper Lake Volunteer Rescue Squad do a great job, Maroun said, but they’ve got to page out, get a driver and drive over, which could take 10 to 15 minutes. That time could be someone’s life, he said.

“When you’ve got a car on the road, they are there a lot quicker than having to wait for dispatch,” Maroun said. “Just NARCAN alone, there’s a lot of overdoses in Tupper Lake. These police are administering it and they’re really saving lives.”

Police arrive on scene with CPR knowledge, defibrillators and NARCAN, he said.

“They save lives,” Maroun said. “That’s what the town needs to understand.”

“If even one life is lost because the town doesn’t want to pay the 5% of the budget that they use, that would be tough,” McClain said.

McClain feels the “majority” of the community wants police coverage in the town. He said it should not be a hard sell. Building a tourism industry needs a safe community, he said.

McClain and Fontana both said there are a lot of drugs in Tupper Lake, and McClain said other crime stems from drug use.

“There’s a dire need for law enforcement,” Fontana said.

Maroun said when the New York State Police charge someone with a crime in Tupper Lake at night when village officers aren’t working, they turn it over to the TLPD in the morning, so village officers are still working on calls from around the clock. McClain said Proulx told him they’re spending so much time on paperwork they barely have time to patrol.

McClain said Proulx told him it would take around a $10,000 pay increase in each position to retain officers and recruit new ones to stop the hemorrhaging of staff from the department and offer pay competitive enough to attract new officers. That’s around $90,000 in total.

Last month, TLPD Sergeant Mike Vaillancourt retired. McClain said the department has enough sergeants for the time and is working on bringing in a potential new candidate.

Fontana said that recently, inquiries to the mayor about the contract have gone unanswered. She said the town has been “left on read” and that the core of the village-town problems seem to always come down to a lack of communication.

“The town of Tupper Lake is eternally grateful to Chief Proulx and his officers for all that they do and have done for the town, and hopefully continue to do in 2023,” Fontana said.

Fontana said she only hears from people who don’t want the contract, or don’t want an increase. But she has heard of town residents telling village officials they want the contract. She told these people to come to her instead.

“I am asking residents in the town, if they want emergency service police protection to be able to respond to them, they should call the acting supervisor or the incoming supervisor-elect and tell them that ‘for the little amount of money, we want police coverage in the township,'” Maroun said.