CID board wants cops walking beats downtown on weekends

The Downtown Community Improvement District and Cape Girardeau Police Department want the same thing: officers to walk a beat downtown during peak weekend hours.

The CID board met with chief Wes Blair on Thursday in an attempt to iron out lingering issues in the contract.

For Blair, officers on foot, bicycle or ATV fit with his community-policing goal, having a more approachable and interactive police force.

“We both want foot patrols in downtown Cape Girardeau,” Blair said. “That has been a vision of mine since I’ve been here.”

Downtown business owners such as Dave Hutson with Hutson’s Fine Furniture said foot patrols can decrease vandalism downtown and give visitors peace of mind that downtown is a safe place to be at night.

“You can’t get rid of the idiot factor,” Hutson said. “But you can make them think twice.”

The disagreement between the city and CID is in the details of the contract. The first detail is the necessity of foot, bicycle, ATV or horse patrols.

“My concern is if you limit it to foot, bike, horse, ATV, if it’s pouring down rain, we might not send anybody,” Blair said.

The CID was clear if officers are in patrol cars more often than not, however, it negates the purpose of the money the district wants to spend.

New CID member Lee Schlitt said the police would be a vendor the organization would employ, and the CID should have the same requirements it would have of any vendor. Schlitt recommended a reporting system that would specify how police patrolled on the invoices provided to the CID.

Blair also re-emphasized it is preferable to him to have the officers on foot or some other type of open transportation between the hours of 10 p.m. and 2 a.m. on Friday and Saturday nights downtown. Blair said two officers would be able to cover the downtown patrol.

The second detail discussed in depth dealt with the compensation of officers.

The language in the contract stated officers would be paid by the CID at rates mutually acceptable to Old Town Cape Inc. and the police department, and their time could comprise regular-time hours and/or overtime hours to be determined by the department’s patrol-staffing levels.

Deputy city manager Molly Hood said that language allowed the CID to debate whether the officers should be paid overtime on a weekly basis.

“I don’t want to get into this ongoing debate in how we’re patrolling,” Hood said. “We don’t want the CID board telling Wes how to do this.”

Blair said whenever possible — for instance, when an officer needs to make up hours — he would try to not charge overtime.

He said the CID would be paying an overtime rate most of the time, however.

“I have eight officers on the street right now,” Blair said. “We’re answering 50,000 calls a year. You can imagine how busy those guys are. ... The guys like overtime; they lap it up.”

CID chairman Jon Rust, who is the publisher of the Southeast Missourian and co-president of Rust Communications, said when the foot-patrol proposal originally was explained, it was not necessarily going to be overtime.

Rust and other CID members were worried about making the $27,000 budgeted for the proposal last over a long period of time.

“We just have X amount of dollars; we have to make them last as long as we can,” Hutson said.

The CID board tentatively agreed to change to the mutually acceptable rate to “actual rate.” There was not a consensus on a second piece of language that required the police department to make a good-faith effort to minimize the number of overtime hours charged to the CID.

“How is that even enforceable?” Hood said of a good-faith effort.

Rust said Blair already had expressed an intention to make such an effort.

CID members such as Hutson and Kent Zickfield were interested in completing and signing the foot patrol contract as soon as possible, so a follow-up meeting was scheduled for 10 a.m. today.

“We’re still crawling before we walk,” Hutson said.

bkleine@semissourian.com

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