“This administration has a different way to analyze financial risk to the Town of Ulster,” said Quigley. “I look at it with my business eyes and say, ‘How can we get hurt here.’”
James Quigley III
Quigley added that differences in wage structures and benefits also meant that a consolidation of town and city police departments “would not be attractive to town taxpayers.” Even something as seemingly simple as consolidating dispatch services, Quigley said, can become impossible as multiple police agencies try to merge technology and workers. Despite the obstacles, Quigley said, financial pressures on Ulster County municipalities might eventually force some level of “streamlining, rationalizing and merging” of police services potentially into a single countywide police force. That was the path taken Nassau and Suffolk counties in the years after World War II when many of Long Island’s small town and village departments were dissolved and folded into a county-level police organization. Today, cops in the two departments are among the highest paid in the nation. That, Quigley said, is something that local police consolidation proponents should bear in mind.
“If there’s one thing I’ve learned in my short time as town supervisor,” Quigley said, “is that when a union bargains with a government entities, they love to bargain with the government entity with the deeper pockets.”
Mayor Gallo did not return a call seeking comment.
Re: town liability in joint operations: we just had an incident, in Saugerties of government run by the insurance company: Saugerties rejected that and established that the insurance companies are in service to the town, not vice versa: If Mr. Quigley is leery of things that go bump in the night he needs to follow up and see that he can in fact support joint operations, or, if he really can’t, stop. But find out.