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RCMP will be asked to give municipalities a year's notice before sending them a bill.
Vernon Mayor Akbal Mund is at the Union of BC Municipalities meeting this week and said a resolution was passed requesting police provide 12 months notice for billing over and above the norm.
“When they download something to us we want a years notice,” said Mund, explaining municipalities set their budgets once a year, making it difficult to factor in unexpected costs.
“We do our budget and we try to abide by our budget because that's what we're mandated by legislation,” said Mund. “Over the years the RCMP have just come up to us and said 'We are starting this in two weeks and the municipality is going to be in charge of it.' How does a municipality do that? We can't go back to the taxpayers and say we are going to be charged more so, therefore, we're going to cut here.' Somehow we have to raise those funds.”
Mund said the catalyst for the resolution was the operations communication centre (OCC) and calls for service after 5 p.m. where municipalities would have to respond to those calls themselves, meaning the city would have to hire more municipal staff.
“That was presented to us in late December of 2017 to begin January 1 of 2018,” said Mund. “We just weren't given enough notification.”
Vernon's top cop Supt. Shawna Baher said the radio dispatching is done through the South East District in Kelowna via the OCC and “for a long period of time they had been taking on additional duties that aren't really in the job descriptions that they had.”
Baher said the division had to look at the extra work that was beyond their mandate and “in some instances, they said they can't answer the calls for some detachments after a certain time period, especially detachments that are open 24 hours. That doesn't fall within the funding formula for them.”
Baher said the answers need to come from South East District, but as she understands it, it means the after-hours service will no longer fall in the funding formula for larger detachments open 24 hours a day.
Baher wonders if it is possible to incorporate it into existing services within the detachment.
