JAY — After six months of studying whether to share police services, the Wilton-Jay Police Collaboration Committee plans to present four options next month to the towns’ select boards.
At its meeting Monday night, the committee set Jan. 28 to present its findings at a joint session with the select boards. The snow date is Feb. 4. The meeting will likely be held at a school, though the time and place have yet to be set.
Meeting at the Jay Town Office, the 12‑member committee reviewed four options for police collaboration:
- Take no action, leaving each town with its own police department.
- Contract with the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office to police both towns.
- Have one town provide police services for both through a contract.
- Establish a “quasi‑municipal structure,” creating a new police agency governed jointly by the towns.
Wilton Selectman Keith Swett, a committee member, noted that a fifth option — “fire them all” — was not among those reviewed. If Jay or Wilton decided to eliminate its Police Department, as Dixfield did in 2020, the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office would take over.
The committee has drawn up lists of pluses and minuses for each option. For example, in the case of “take no action,” the committee listed among the pluses maintaining local identity, keeping capital costs as low as possible and ensuring transparency and community engagement.
Against those, it foresaw these minuses, among others: continued staff shortages, low officer retention, lack of 24‑hour policing, increased overtime pay and questions about the ability to maintain police operations over time.
Contracting with the Sheriff’s Office, option two, would eliminate both chief positions and a full‑time (Jay) and part‑time (Wilton) administrative assistant. The force would have 12 members: a lieutenant, 10 deputies — five assigned to each town — and a school resource officer. Jay provides a school resource officer to Regional School Unit 73, with the district paying 75 percent of the cost. Both towns would have 24‑hour police coverage.
Current officers would need to reapply to the Sheriff’s Office for each of the 10 deputy positions.
Contracting jointly with the Sheriff’s Office would cost about $2.24 million a year, with Jay paying slightly more than half. If each town contracted separately with the Sheriff’s Office, the cost per town would increase.
The fourth option, the “quasi‑municipal structure,” would essentially mean creating a new unit of government. According to the “Guide to Local Government in Maine,” published by the League of Women Voters, “Districts like these exist to provide a service or maintain infrastructure that encompasses too large an area or is too complicated for one municipality to maintain.”
It would not be run by either town, according to the guide, but such “districts generally have a board of elected or appointed officials … tasked with oversight of the service or the infrastructure that the district was created to provide.”
The total first‑year budget would be about $2.25 million, roughly $6,000 more than the Sheriff’s Office estimate. That projection, however, did not include the cost to each town of maintaining office space and other facilities for the deputies.
On the committee’s list of pluses are economies of scale (lower cost per unit of service), more staff members at lower cost, maintaining local control, transparency, faster response time and public trust.
The minuses include the time and work needed to set up the structure, capital investment requirements and its complexity and novelty, since it has not been tried in Maine. Monmouth and Winthrop, however, are working toward some form of collaboration.
Pennsylvania and Connecticut have some multitown police departments. New York, Illinois and California have policing districts, such as transit police, that overlap local departments.
Police Chief Joseph Sage of Jay and Chief Ethan Kyes of Wilton have told the committee their challenges include training officers, sending them to the Maine Criminal Justice Academy in Vassalboro and then losing them to departments that offer higher pay. Both departments also must pay overtime to cover shifts when officers are in training or when the force is shorthanded.
Sage said Monday of the collaboration effort, “This all started with, ‘How can we attract and keep people?’”
Committee Chairwoman Lee Ann Delassandro said staffing police departments “is a big issue nationwide because people just aren’t going into policing.”
Jay and Wilton are comparable in population — Jay has 4,620 residents and Wilton has 3,835 — and each covers between 40 and 50 square miles. Jay police assets are valued at about $375,000, and Wilton’s at about $409,000. Both include assets, such as cruisers, that depreciate over time.
Jay’s per capita yearly income is 40% higher than Wilton’s — $77,500 compared with $55,700 — and Jay has more miles of roads, 95 to 69. Jay’s police budget this year is about $921,000, while Wilton’s is $1.1 million.
The towns’ police activity reflects the differences. In 2024, Jay police responded to 5,900 calls for service, an average of 16 a day, while Wilton police handled 4,870 calls, or 13 a day.
