MORGANTOWN, W.Va. — Downtown safety concerns are again a major concern for Morgantown City Council, business owners and residents.
Fifth Ward Councilor Danielle Trumble expressed major concern over a $3 million increase in the city General Fund from unasigned sources with about $450,000 going to the police department. Also, Trumble was the only council member calling for more funding citing the recent exit of Morgantown Police Department Deputy Chief P.J. Scott, staffing issues and concerns from residents about crime, drugs and vagrancy.
Full-time and part-time benefit elegible employees will receive bonus payments in September and May with the extra allocation.
“We’re in a crisis with our civil service department, and I’m just wondering what we as a city can do with these kinds of dollars to help those departments,” said Trumble on the need for a re-evaluation. “One of the city’s main functions is to provide public safety,” she said.
To address staffing and retention issues, Trumble recommended a larger allocation from the General Fund for officer salaries and incentives to encourage more hiring for the department that’s still twenty officers short of being fully staffed. This proposal was rejected by Seventh Ward Councilor Brian Butcher, who suggested a reassessment of the department’s budget was needed because he said the department budget is one of the largest in the state for a single municipality per-capita.
“A reassessment of the police budgets in general, and see what we can do within the budget that we already allocate,” said Butcher. “It’s higher than most police budgets within the state, a good ten percent higher, and we look at that reallocation towards actually paying officers and retaining them,” he said.
According to the West Virginia Auditor’s Office, law enforcement spending for the City of Morgantown for FY 2023–24 is approximately $10.41 million. As the third largest city in the state in population, the budget directed towards the Morgantown Police Department is less than $1 million more than Parkersburg’s police budget and over $5 million less than Huntington’s budget, another municipality with a large college institution within city limits.
Residents and business owners weighed on the need for more public safety by relating their own experiences over the course of several months. Reports included illegal activity from vandalism and littering to the more dangerous things like handing out machetes, open drug use, and open-air drug deals that have even allegedly taken place in the Milan Puskar Health Right parking lot. Each resident called for the need to re-assess social policies and, in some cases, the resignation of City Manager Kim Haws and other officials, while also calling for increased support for law enforcement to improve the situation.
“I have pages of documentation of these activities in that parking lot, including the open drug deals that are never stopped by the staff who oversee the parking lot,” said resident Tricia DiCenso, who owns property near the Milan Puskar Health Right. “In fact, they have protected the drug users from me when I call the police to report them for doing drugs in public,” she said.
In response to the public portion of the meeting, Morgantown Mayor Jenny Selin approved a suspension of Robert’s Rules of Order to allow Butcher to voice opposition to the claim of machete distribution. No members of the council responded to any claims made regarding Health Right representatives alleged role in enabling open-air drug deals.
While close to a dozen residents and business owners voiced their experiences regarding downtown safety, representatives from Main Street Morgantown unveiled a downtown safety plan with the participation of city staff. This included increased foot patrols and an emphasis on code enforcement. While some residents spoke positively about those developments, the general consensus among residents, as well as some members of council, is that a major change in policy needs to take place and that it needs to happen sooner rather than later.
“I’m asking you, as the leaders of this city, to look internally; we don’t want to be Seattle, we don’t want to be San Francisco, we want to be Morgantown; Morgantown is a great place,” said property owner Mike Anderson.