The Town Council has heard the first of two presentations on a Law Enforcement Feasibility Assessment for the Town of Fountain Hills.

Greg Matthews with Matrix Consulting Group made the presentation to the Council on Sept. 6. Although he made no specific recommendations with this preliminary report, it appears likely the Town will seek a significant overhaul of its law enforcement contract with the Maricopa County Sheriff’s Office. Matthews made clear that alternatives are not likely feasible.

Matthews said the only two nearby agencies that would be practical to contract with Fountain Hills, the City of Scottsdale and the Fort McDowell Yavapai Nation, both said they had no capacity to provide services to Fountain Hills in the foreseeable future.

And although the discussion related to formation of a local police department will be covered in the second part of the presentation scheduled for November, it seems apparent that the cost of such a conversion would be out of reach for the Town.

Matthews said short of the creation of a local department the recommendation would be a major overhaul of the contract. Fountain Hills is the largest contract community for MCSO, but it is still quite small when compared to other communities served by contract in other areas around the country, such as Los Angeles County.

“There is no need to be sophisticated in contract administration,” Matthews said.

“We are going to take a look at what it would take to bring the services in-house, but will probably find we can’t afford it,” Town Manager Grady Miller said.

Matthews broke out some of the workload and manpower information he was able to obtain from MCSO. He started with a comparison of the contracted manpower and the actual deployment of deputies for the Town.

He said the current agreement calls for 28.55 employees working in Town and another 1.92 FTE credited to dispatch for a total of 30.47. That includes 19 patrol deputies, command staff, sergeants, detectives and a school resource officer and one civilian administrative.

The actual deployment at this time is 29.47 with detectives removed from Town posting to a centralized location in Phoenix. There are 13 patrol deputies, patrol sergeants, an administrative sergeant and civilian administration.

The contract calls for four deputies and one patrol sergeant on each shift. They are operating with three deputies and one sergeant.

Matthews said patrol in Fountain Hills is operating with minimum staffing.

He outlined response time for calls in Fountain Hills and said the community should be proud. There are three response priorities in law enforcement. Priority 1 is the most urgent calls and the response time for deputies here is 4.8 minutes. This accounts for 2% of total calls. Priority 2 responses are 8.7 minutes in the community, accounting for 39% of all calls. Priority 3 responses take 11.5 minutes and are 60% of calls.

Mathews said the national target response for Priority 2 calls is 15 to 20 minutes and for Priority 3 responses it is 30 minutes.

“Fountain Hills has exceptional response times,” Matthews said.

Workload for deputies is divided between calls for service and related activities and what is referred to as proactive time. This is time deputies can take on unassigned duties as well as administrative duties and mealtimes. Matthews said significant study exists to show appropriate levels of proactive time. That number falls in the area of 35% to 50% of on duty time.

In Fountain Hills the proactive time is 73%.

“Too little or too much [proactive] can be a problem,” Matthews told the Council. “Above 50% and the agency will be challenged to keep patrol busy with meaningful work and engaged in the job.”

Some of the observations Matthews reported include a very high average of proactive time [deputy self-initiated activity can be improved due to the proactive time available], there is exceptional response time in the community, further emphasis can be placed on traffic enforcement. He noted that there is little workload for investigators.

Matthews said in looking at a contract the Town should address staffing issues, which are based on a beat structure. He said there are better ways to approach this. There are no performance measures in the contract and that was information that was unavailable to him in his research and the Town should look at modeling for staffing or setting up shifts.

“There is room for improvement on both sides, but we are satisfied with the results,” Mayor Ginny Dickey said.

“I’ve been saying since I was elected, we are not getting what we pay for from MCSO,” Councilman David Spelich said. He added that yes, Fountain Hills has a low crime rate and good service, but wants to get what is contracted for or get a refund on the shortfall.