Part One: Sheriff’s department explains costs for police services

Undersheriff Spadafore explains dollars and cents to Algonac officials

By Barb Pert Templeton

At the May 5 meeting of the Algonac City Council a couple members of the St. Clair County Sheriff’s Department gave a 30-minute presentation sharing their services and responsibilities in providing police protection for the city.

The St. Clair County Sheriff enforces all state laws and city criminal, civil and traffic ordinances within the city. The current agreement between the city and the sheriff’s department is a three-year contract that began on Oct. 1, 2024 and will expire on Sept. 30, 2027. The city has contracted with the sheriff’s department since 2012.

The agreement included the following breakdown of contract costs:

· Oct. 1, 2024 – Sept. 30, 2025 – $938,082

· Oct. 1, 2025 – Sept. 30, 2026 – $962,510

· Oct. 1, 2026 – Sept. 30, 2027 – $983,626

The total cost for the three-year contract will be $2,884,218.

Undersheriff Jim Spadafore started the presentation off noting that he would be co-presenting with Captain Matt Pohl. He explained that all departments within the sheriff’s office fall under his jurisdiction including budgeting so he was going to talk about the contract the city has with the county for police services. In contrast, he said Pohl is in charge of all the road patrol services – including detectives, the drug task force and the marine patrol, so he would talk about that during his portion of the presentation.

Spadafore said he works closely with his financial director and the city manager to come up with the parameters of the contract. He said the contract in Algonac currently is $968,000 annually and the sherif’s total road patrol budget itself is $10.6 million for the calendar year.

He said contracts with municipalities cover everything from cars, to uniforms, to wages and benefits.

The bigger areas of the monetary spending falls to patrol cars and for Algonac that’s two cars and the city paid $92,000 over three years for those. The price to buy those cars today is $52,000 each so that’s $104,000 so the county already has money invested just to buy the cars, Spadafore said.

The cars also have to be upfitted with cameras, printers, computers, electronics and light bars which can cost of between $6,000 and $8,000 each and that’s done annually.

“So, we’ll do that every contract cycle so that gets factored in as well, when we look at just two cars, that we redo every year we’re at around a $27,000 deficit for the county just to do those cars,” Spadafore said.

The contract also has $16,000 in it for repairs to the cars for three years and the city has already used $14,000 for just one year so that’s certainly going to go over before the contract expires, he said.

Then there’s equipment and there’s not even a line item in the contract for that “the city of Algonac pays zero for equipment,” the undersheriff said. Equipment is for both the cars and the deputies.

An example of expenses for those includes body cameras at $3,500 each and Algonac has five deputies, plus in-car vehicle cameras are $5,300 per car plus $1,200 for modems. Not to mention all the other items that are in a car like sirens, docking stations for the computer, fire extinguishers, flares and blankets just to name a few, Spadafore said.

“There’s no line item in the contract for the city and quite frankly we replace these items every four or five years and we’ve never come forward and asked for money,” Spadafore said.

The last thing he wanted to point out was wages for the deputies. He said the last contract they factored in a 2% raise for each year of the three-year contract for a total of 6%.

The deputies have the right to take the raise or got to arbitration and in this case, they did and got a 10.5 % raise for the three years and the county didn’t come to the city and ask for the difference.

“We’re willing to put in that money because we value this relationship with the city and everybody down here that pays taxes to the city pays taxes to the county too,” Spadafore said. “I believe that’s come to about $44,000 extra that we’ve put in for wages over those three years.”

So, factoring in those four areas – cars, uniforms, wages and benefits – the county is in over $110,000 to $120,000 for the contract the city is paying and the county is there to make sure those costs are covered.

“If I didn’t have a $10.6 million dollar budget that would be hard to swallow and hard to factor out, if I had a $2 or $3 million-dollar budget that $100,000 would be hard to factor out,” Spadafore said.

The presentation was then turned over to Captain Pohl who spoke to operational items and general police services.

See Part Two of this story on this website.