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With the Maine State Police continuing to reduce patrols in rural parts of the state, Hancock County is making adjustments to its law enforcement budget to try to lessen the anticipated impact of the reduced trooper presence.
But the answer is not simply hiring more sheriff’s deputies to roam the roads in their cruisers, as police agencies at all levels are continuing to have trouble plugging staffing shortages. Hancock County also plans to boost pay for its patrol deputies in order to retain and attract more officers.
Hancock County, which this week finalized an $11 million countywide budget for 2024, is not alone in trying to figure out how to provide adequate police coverage while fewer and fewer qualified candidates are applying for available police jobs.
Other counties are responding in their own ways.
This year, legislators in Penobscot County unsuccessfully sought state funding so the Penobscot County Sheriff’s Office could hire more deputies for rural patrol. But it did get help from the Legislature to maintain the current level of state police patrols in Penobscot County through 2024.
Last year, Washington County added a deputy position to its sheriff’s budget to help offset the reduced Maine State Police presence there.
Hancock County increased the sheriff’s budget for 2024 by $363,000 — to about $2.3 million compared with $1.9 million for 2023 — which includes funding for one more deputy position, according to Paul Paradis, chairman of the county commission. That increase also includes pay raises across the board, in hopes of encouraging existing deputies to stay and getting more prospective officers to apply for vacant positions, he said.
The county did not fund more than one additional deputy position because the vacancies have proven difficult to fill and it doesn’t want to create more jobs that likely would still remain vacant, he said.
“The sheriff had a proposal for three or four new positions, but we had a hard time stomaching that,” Paradis said.
But he said Sheriff Scott Kane is rightfully concerned about having adequate coverage to meet the county’s public safety needs, and that the three-person commission shares his concerns. He said that the commission is willing to consider funding more deputy positions if Kane fills the positions he has and believes more are needed.
“We are worried about rural patrols,” Paradis said.
Kane did not reply to an email or a voicemail message left for him on Friday.
The municipalities of Bar Harbor, Bucksport, Ellsworth, Gouldsboro, Mount Desert, Southwest Harbor and Winter Harbor have their own police departments and are unaffected by the reduction in state police patrols, though they also have to contend with industry-wide staffing shortages.
Maine State Police Lt. Michael Johnston, who oversees trooper patrols in eastern Maine, said Friday that his agency is in discussions with the Hancock County Sheriff’s Department about potential new patrol sharing agreements. The current agreement has expired, he said, but the state police are honoring that agreement until a new one can be ironed out.
Johnston said his agency plans to continue providing some patrols in rural Hancock County, and will continue to provide additional services in the county such as drug enforcement and homicide investigations, computer crime analysis, tactical teams and more. Demand for its specialized services have increased significantly in recent decades as its roster of available officers has shrunk.
“We have less troopers on the road today than we did in 1980,” Johnston said, adding that the agency also has 50 vacant positions it has been struggling to fill.
“Our mission and responsibilities have gone up significantly since we first established patrol-sharing agreements with sheriff’s departments in the 1990s,” Johnston said.
Besides funding one extra deputy position and raising pay, Hancock County also cut funding for the local Maine Drug Enforcement Agency task force. The task force has a vacant position — another casualty of staffing shortages — and commissioners wanted to use that funding instead to offset the increase in additional patrol deputy pay, Paradis said.
The county also funded a detective position in the county district attorney’s office, which it had done in the recent past. By doing this, patrol deputies will be able to spend less time assisting on pending court cases by checking on bail conditions or no-contact orders and more time on responding to urgent police calls, Paradis said.
