The city of Bainbridge Island’s Department of Planning and Community Development plans to reduce customer service hours next year.
Aimed at giving planning staff more time to work on development permit applications, the reductions will cut eight hours per week of counter service, the city announced on Wednesday.
While one Bainbridge police officer was in Port Orchard to drop a suspect off at the county jail the other two on-duty officers were rushing to the home of suicidal woman with a kitchen knife.
That’s about the time their radios crackled with reports of a car collision blocking a major island roadway.
“If we had anybody loose, we would have sent somebody,” said Bainbridge Police Chief Matt Haney, recounting a busy evening for his department late last month. “But when things happen all at once, all of a sudden… sometimes we don’t have the flexibility to cover all things.”
The department’s ability to cover the island may stretch even thinner next year with proposed budget reductions that would pull one patrol officer position from the payroll and eliminate the city’s emergency manager.
“The perception could be that ‘oh, it’s just one officer,’ but it does impact everything,” Haney said, expecting a roster of 22 commissioned officers in 2009. “It’ll be tough next year.”
