Police and council: A relationship examined

Editor’s note: This article is the first in a two-part series examining the relationship and recent history between the Forest Lake City Council and the Forest Lake Police Department. Part one will cover some of the factors that led to this issue becoming controversial in the community as well as the dissolution of the city’s Civil Service Commission. Part two will cover department scheduling discussions and current perspectives on the relationship.

These days, you might read a letter to the editor about it, overhear a conversation at a local watering hole or see a homemade campaign sign mentioning it. As election season has heated up in Forest Lake, the local discussion surrounding the City Council’s relationship with the Forest Lake Police Department has only continued to grow.

In the 10 months since the council voted to lay off a patrol officer, that discussion never really went away. But now, with votes on the line, some local outsider political factions have begun using it as a campaign issue, while others have insisted that the council’s votes on the matter have been good moves for local taxpayers. The Forest Lake Times spoke with council members, police officers and other involved parties to get their perspectives on the situation and on what, if anything, should be done to ease the related tension in the community.

Origins

Forest Lake community members have rallied before when they thought the Police Department could be hurt by a council decision. In the fall 2014, after the City Council requested a $1 million reduction in the 2015 preliminary levy, City Administrator Aaron Parrish brought back a number of budget cuts that included two police officers. Residents turned out in droves to protest the cuts, and the council ultimately agreed and decided not to lay off police staff.

However, the present day discussion of department-council relations has its roots in the council’s December 2015 decision to approve the layoff of patrol officer Max Boukal. The layoff came after the council asked Police Chief Rick Peterson to cut about $90,000 from the department’s 2016 budget, a reduction of slightly more than 2 percent. Residents overflowed from the council chambers to protest the layoff, but it was approved by a 3-1 vote, with Mayor Stev Stegner and Councilmen Ed Eigner and Ben Winnick voting in favor and Councilman Richard Weber voting against (Councilman Michael Freer was not at the meeting but had spoken against the layoff previously). The layoff and the lead-up to it sparked community organizing on social media and calls for boycotts on Winnick’s and Stegner’s businesses, among other efforts.

“I think the laying off of Max Boukal had an impact on the department in the fact that we have a certain amount of officers to fill the mission of this police department, and each one of those officers has a job to do,” Patrol Sgt. Mark Richert told The Times, saying that Boukal’s layoff means that the community is losing around 2,000 hours per year of an officer answering calls, writing police reports and working in and for the community.

Besides the community effect, Richert said, Boukal’s layoff was felt internally by officers, although he was quick to add that the police force has made it a priority to keep residents feeling unaffected by the staffing loss or officers’ personal feelings.

“There was a negative result to the morale of the police department,” he said.

As the only council member who voted for the layoff who is running for a city office this year, Councilman Winnick has felt the brunt of the backlash to the decision this fall. The mayoral candidate said that though he didn’t want to lay off an officer, Boukal’s position was the only significant cut offered to the council.

“This, from the beginning, was a budget issue,” he said, noting that the Fire Department and other city departments had produced budget reductions for 2016. “In my opinion, (2 percent) was not an unreasonable request.”

While Forest Lake’s population has risen by more than 2,000 people since 2010 – up to an estimated 19,654 in 2015 – the department’s calls for service have fluctuated. After a sharp increase of about 1,200 additional calls in 2012, the calls for service have gone up and down in smaller increments since then, with last year’s 15,213 calls actually a decrease from 2014’s 15,609. In 2015, Chief Peterson conducted a comparison study of police departments in Minnesota cities with similar populations and calls for service and found that Forest Lake is comparable to most of the studied cities, neither spending or staffing the most or the least (the outlier is the much lower-spending Hugo, where the city contracts with the county for police service but also handles about one third of the calls for service that Forest Lake does).

Winnick’s statement on the budget echoes similar ones made at the time of the layoff, when Stegner and Eigner expressed skepticism that an officer position was the only $90,000 cut Peterson could find in his budget. Peterson, however, maintained that there was no fat left in the budget – in essence, that if the council wanted to reduce $90,000, an officer was the only line item that could go.

Though he was against the layoff, Freer agreed with Winnick that the council was asking for a budget reduction, not a cut in police staff.

“(Peterson) made that decision,” he said. “The City Council voted on that decision.”

Many residents didn’t see it that way, leading some to promise retribution at the ballot box in 2016. Freer said during the Jan. 11 council meeting that a minority of police officers had “targeted” council members before and after the vote, though he declined to get into specific incidents (Eigner and Winnick didn’t go in-depth on the topic at the time but voiced support for his remarks).
“This group of officers that I work with now is among the utmost (levels) of integrity … that I’ve worked with,” Sgt. Richert said. “There’s no way I think any of my brothers and sisters at this department would target anybody in this community in a negative way.”

Civil Service Commission

Also at the Jan. 11 meeting, Mayor Stegner announced that he was not going to reappoint anyone to the city’s Civil Service Commission. The council then voted unanimously to dissolve the commission.

“It’s no longer needed,” Stegner said of the commission at the time. “The Personnel Committee does that same function.”

The Civil Service Commission was the liaison committee between the City Council and the Police Department. Usually only meeting a few times a year at most and appearing before the council even less, the commission originated as a pre-union organization that could help represent department needs and requests to the council. After police unionization took over salary and benefit negotiation, the commission served as a citizen board that could address personnel issues and hear staffing requests and represent those issues to the council.

“I would keep them advised of any hiring needs,” Chief Peterson explained, noting that a couple of important topics he’d brought to the commission included adding a captain position and instituting community policing procedures, which allow officers to build connections with residents.

City records suggest that Forest Lake has had a civil service commission since the late 1960s; such commissions are not in place in every city with a police department, but they are not uncommon today.

Peterson and then-commissioner Ken Urquhart said they were not notified that the commission was going to be disbanded before the council decision. Another commissioner, Chris Hoyt, could not be reached before press time. Both Peterson and Urquhart said they did not know why the commission was disbanded.

“I guess I would have expected them to call us in, ask us any questions,” said Urquhart, a retired Minnesota State Patrol major and a member of the commission for more than a decade. “I just thought it was handled pretty poorly.”

Urquhart said the commission’s real strength was bringing an outside residential perspective to police activities and requests. One of his busiest times as a commissioner came in early 2012, when a police officer, acting on a request from the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, shot and killed two fawns that, unbeknownst to police and the DNR, were frequent and beloved visitors to a local family’s yard. Amid a barrage of media coverage and residential reaction, commissioners were able to relay citizen concerns about the deer dispatching and were kept abreast of the investigation into the officer’s actions.

“There was a connection with the community,” Urquhart said. “The chief would keep us up to speed on any kinds of internal investigations, if any existed.”

Stegner said he chose not to reappoint anyone to the commission because its former functions have essentially been absorbed by unions and the Personnel Committee. Staff recommendations can be made at the committee, and personnel issues are forwarded to the Washington County Sheriff’s Office for investigation, so Stegner felt it was redundant to pay people to meet a few times a year to discuss topics that were being handled elsewhere.
“They met so infrequently, I really didn’t think it was relevant anymore,” he said. “I’m actually surprised people were concerned we’d disbanded it.”