LETTER TO THE EDITOR
The majority of city council members are not always right! The Journal Gazette recently ran a story about a difference of opinion between city council and our Sheriff. The flap was over eliminating the county dispatch service by combining it with the city’s dispatch service. Although the Gazette didn’t bother to get the sheriff’s side of the issue, I did and this is Sheriff Frie’s side of the issue: Nelson Peters and Greg Purcell’s new plan to combine the county and city dispatch service was presented with much fan-fare and a promise to save taxpayers 1.5 million dollars. This imaginary savings of 1.5 million dollars dwindled and eventually the best they could claim was a savings of $33,000 and at last they were forced to admit it will save the taxpayers nothing and a user fee (tax increase), and perhaps additional employees will be needed to implement their plan. The political duo of Peters and Purcell are trying to ram-rod this unnecessary change through city council on the basis of a questionable bill recently passed by the Indiana State Legislature. Off the record, the state senator, who authored this bill confided: It’s a bad bill; it was intended to save tax dollars but instead, it has the unintended consequence of usurping power from and elected, voter-accountable, county official and placing it in the hands of “politically appointed,” city bureaucrats? Furthermore, several city council members (speaking off the record), readily admitted this change will do nothing to improve public safety, efficiency or response time and it will “increase” rather than reduce spending.
This is not the first bad decision implemented by The Fort Wayne City Council. In a failed effort to improve city/county response time, council members spent $735,000 on a computer system that was supposed to build a communications bridge between Allen County, the City of Fort Wayne and the Three Rivers Ambulance Service. Three Rivers; refused to connect their computer system to the new computer system and thus the 735,000 dollar system did nothing to improve response time, or make our county a safer place to live.
The sheriff said, “The currently, overwhelmed, county dispatch service could’ve easily been fixed by purchasing additional electronic phone consoles that would’ve saved about $535,000.”
The most cynical thing, however, about usurping power from an elected official who’s accountable to voters, and giving it to politically appointed bureaucrats is that eventually those same bureaucrats will begin another campaign to “privatize” the Sheriff’s department and replace it with a private security force that’s global and cannot be held accountable to the U.S. Constitution, or anybody else except a few mega-sized international corporations. “We the people,” elected Sheriff Fries to look after our best interest and he’s doing exactly that.
Few people realize it, but a County Sheriff is the highest legal authority in the land, he could, if need be, arrest the president of the United States and the only person who can arrest the sheriff; is the county coroner. Our system of law was fashioned after English law and it has served our country well, but from the very beginning, city, state and federal law enforcement bureaucrats have constantly searched for ways to lessen the sheriff’s authority and take his power for themselves. Please support our Sheriff.
From a Concerned Citizen
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