Houston has a tough choice

Houston residents need to take a long, hard look at whether their police department is worth salvaging.

The department was founded in 2004. Around that time, residents were fed up with having to wait for a response from Alaska State Troopers. The fault didn’t lie with troopers. That organization faced its own funding challenges and has been stretched far too thin in the Mat-Su for far too long.

At the time, starting a police department seemed like a good idea for the city of Houston. It might not be much, residents reasoned, but surely having even one Houston cop on the beat would be better than none. The goal was to steadily build the department. Maybe eventually there would be enough officers to staff the department 24 hours a day.

It was a good idea. But six years later, the department isn’t much better off than it was then.

There are two officers on the beat. One of those is a temporary employee whose contract expires at the end of the month. After that, the city will likely be back down to one officer, which is where it’s been for most of the department’s lifetime. The department has grown and shrunk — at one time there were three officers on the beat — but never reached the magic number needed for round-the-clock service, which is generally agreed to be five at a minimum.

In the meantime, AST opened the Mat-Su West Post on Pittman Road in 2006, and added the Alaska Bureau of Highway Patrol at end of 2008. The Mat-Su West Post was opened specifically to improve service to the stretch of Mat-Su from Wasilla to Willow.

In the meantime, funding issues and controversies continued to plague the Houston police force.

The latest mortal threat to face the department came recently when the city of Wasilla said it could no longer accept the $12,000 Houston pays a year for dispatching services. The new price is $44,000 to $54,000.

Wasilla says it’s not a money issue, but about being fair. That new cost is based on the same formula Wasilla uses to charge the troopers, which also dispatch through Wasilla.

Whatever the reason, Houston can’t pay, and its other options aren’t very appetizing. Talking to the city of Palmer, it doesn’t sound like Houston will find a much better deal there. Maybe Anchorage or Fairbanks could come up with a better price.

If not, the city will be left to build is own dispatch center. It’s a process that, if the experiences of Wasilla and Palmer are any indication, could take years and multiple state and federal grants.

We can’t say we’d be unhappy to see a third dispatch center in a Valley that truly needs just one, but dispatching isn’t the sort of thing that can be put together on a whim. Dispatchers are often a police officer’s only lifeline. Radio traffic and 911 calls are routinely admitted in court cases and must be recorded and preserved. If poor dispatch service means someone is left waiting too long for help to arrive, the legal liability for the city is immense.

So the question Houston needs to ask itself is hard, but fair: Is the tiny police department worth the trouble? Is police response any better than it would be if city residents relied on troopers?

Our hope is that the city will have an open and honest discussion about all the issues its department faces, and whether its goal of having a responsive, professional police force can be met and maintained.

It may be the case that what seemed a good idea in 2004 may not be the right solution today.