A hearing in St Joseph Thursday to examine the merger of the Water Patrol with the Highway Patrol brought out assertions of compromise and cooperation, as well as some harsh criticism about the lack of training, and the failure of the Nixon Administration to oversee the transition.
If you ask local officials, the transition from the Missouri State Water Patrol to the Marine Division of the Missouri State Highway Patrol has been seemless.
Buchanan County Sheriff Mike Strong told the interim legislative committee there has been no drop off in service since the merger. St Joseph Police Chief Chris Connally says until Thursday’s meeting, he had forgotten there was a transition. Connally says the service continues to be as smooth as can be, and is improving. Northwest Missouri officials and law officers pointed with pride to the working relationship between law enforcement, the Department of Conservation, and the MSHP’s new Marine Division.
That has not been the prevailing wisdom in other parts of the state where four previous hearings were held. Committee member Rocky Miller, whose 124th District encompasses a large part of the Lake of the Ozarks, says the Administration “screwed it up,” that they “messed it up bad,” and that troopers are not adequately trained for duty on the water.
“I think they dropped the ball,” the Republican Miller said in an interview. “I think it’s obvious they dropped the ball in the training after we’d gone through the committee hearings. They obviously could do a better job and they need to.”
“What we’ve seen is inconsistent training of officers, lack of training for officers. We have some people on the water that did not pass a swim test. That’s about as basic as it gets.”
Democratic Representative Pat Conway of St Joseph voted for the merger bill, which was introduced during the last day of the 2010 legislative session. At the time, lawmakers were in a hurry to find budget savings, and they were told the merger would save an estimated $3 million per year. As it turns out, the merger, so far, has cost an additional $900,000 per year.
“I’m still a little skeptical that the only reason for doing it was for saving three million dollars,” Conway said in an interview. There had to be support on both sides of the aisle to get this accomplished. Now we’re just wondering if we did the correct thing when we did it, and what can we do if it’s not working the way that it should be.”
“I always want to go back to the why? What is the problem that it’s going to fix? If the fix was the $3 million, fine, but this has been attempted, as the chair said, several times before. There is other rationale out there on why you want a much larger, combined law enforcement agency.”
The final report from the committee is still several weeks out, and Conway says he’s going to spend some of that time trying to find answers to the question “why?”
“I’m going to ask some people who are no longer with the Water Patrol, if they think that was one of the bigger elements, rather than the three million dollars, and if that should be the case then I think that has to be included in the final report.”