Heath Scott is up to his old tricks.
The chief of the townsite police department, who successfully soaked taxpayers for more than $200,000 in raises and extra manpower for himself and his officers while twice overrunning his department budget since his hire in 2016, now wants to hire a sixth officer, at your expense.
Or, he’d like more money for the existing five-man department. You decide. Either way, the man with the enormous appetite for more moolah wants more from you, again.
Scott, the borough’s highest-paid employee at $110,000 plus benefits, made his plea to this week’s meeting of the Public Safety Commission, saying that he can’t provide the town 24-7 police service with a five-man department. Including benefits, adding an officer will cost our town a minimum of $105,000 annually.
(Scott naturally is not recommending where that pile of money should come from. More property taxes for you, perhaps, or reduced services, like snowplowing. Which do you prefer?)
It would be easy to say that Scott is insulting the public while admitting his incompetence. After all, his predecessors – our previous chiefs of police – were able to provide adequate police service with five officers for the last 30-plus years.
And, unlike Scott, they were able to do it while staying within their budgets.
But there’s another game afoot here: Scott understands well enough that budget cuts or tax increases are coming to the Haines Borough, and he’s protecting his turf, knowing full well that in politics, the best defense is a good offense.
Scott doesn’t really expect the assembly to fund a sixth officer, but he knows that if he creates a battle for a sixth officer and loses, he’s still ahead, with a force that’s still bigger than the town needs or can afford.
Scott is a police chief who reads Machiavelli. He knows the political game and he knows that a battle for a sixth officer will successfully camouflage the real issue: At a time when there’s not money enough to operate our ferries, why are are we still paying police to drive around town, checking to see if we’re using our turn signals?
Our town lost its counseling service. It lost its public health nurse office. It lost a huge chunk of school funding. So to pay for vital expenses like educating our children, why aren’t we reducing the police force to four or even three or even two officers?
Since arriving here in summer of 2016, Scott has conjured up all types of bogeymen to justify increased spending on police. He’s the cop who can’t stop crying wolf. We were under threat from opioid addicts, or from criminals running wild out the highway, or from tsunamis or from police resignations due to low pay.
That the latter was a lie has been proved in the past year. Despite the fact that Haines police are now paid handsomely – starting pay of $67,000, plus benefits – three of the department’s five officers have resigned in the past 18 months: Adam Patterson, Chris Brown and Brayton Long. (Long has rejoined the force. Patterson, like Long, has now quit the force twice.)
No matter. Scott, a skilled flim-flam man, will come up with some convincing-sounding argument that life can’t go on here without another officer.
A quick look at Scott’s tenure here shows that he’s all about the money, and he’s not above cooking the books to get his way.
After the 2016 borough election, when the assembly ranked police spending as its lowest priority, he fudged department numbers to show a “spike” in crime that was actually a return to normal numbers following a spate of officer resignations in the previous year. He also reported spiraling number of “minor offenses,” which turned out to be a rash of officers pulling over motorists for missing taillights, etc..
(Former officer Brown, a surly menace if ever there was one, once told a newspaper reporter that if he found a person out after 10 p.m., he wanted to know why.)
More recently, Scott conned a $10,000 annual raise for himself from borough manager Debra Schnabel.
If you’d like to be able to drive around after 10 p.m. without a police officer pulling you over, or you just want to maintain current borough services, call your assembly representatives and tell them to tell Heath Scott once and for all that if he can’t do his job with the resources the community can afford, it’s time for him to find a new job.
For a full litany of Scott’s misdeeds, see an earlier column, https://www.tommorphet.com/2019/08/29/1492/.