The Renovo Police Dispute

An Analysis by Aaron Kelley

(Editor’s Note: Aaron Kelley is a senior at Bucktail High School with an interest in writing and in his community. The Record is presenting his report on the recent municipal dispute concerning police protection for Renovo. The town is presently served by two part-time officers while a search is made for permanent replacements.)

RENOVO – At this very moment, Renovo and its surrounding area is ablaze–not with actual flames, but rather with discourse–in a debate that has stirred extreme emotion in many area citizens and that is proving to be hotter, and potentially more dangerous, than any literal fire could ever be. This debate is centered on the Renovo Police Department and the various actions performed by the area’s new mayor and the Renovo Borough council in regards to it. Up to this point in time, there have been a few articles that detail bits and pieces of this debate, but none have covered it as thoroughly as I will in the following text–hopefully, making it easier to understand the entirety of this issue without needing to scour article after article and record after record. As a side note, I would like to suggest reading through this entire article without stopping before coming to any conclusions, as no single section will be able to give a clear picture of the entire story.

Within this article, I hope to explain the area’s police department debate with words and ideas directly from many of its major participants. I will not tell just one side of the story, and I will not reveal my own opinions on the matter. However, I will present the ‘facts’ exactly as I have received them in my search for the truth, as well as explanations of the various opinions that have arisen in this debate. You may read statements from different people that seem factually contradicting–this is to be expected. Just know that everything that I’ve written is completely based on the exact words of those whom I have interviewed.

Many rumors have been floating around about what the opinions of these various players are, so allow me to jump right in and squash one of these misconceptions before delving into the specifics of the issue at hand. This rumor is that there is a major movement, led by one person or another in the Renovo government, to completely eliminate the Renovo Police Department. While this is a suggestion that has been made by various citizens of the area, it is apparently not the position of any of the people that I interviewed. Keep in mind that this is according to the people themselves, not from what any of the people said about any of the others.

Along with the misconceptions that are floating around are ideas that are not understood very well by many people such as the root of this debate. This debate, at its most basic level, can be traced back to the question, “What are the assigned powers of the mayor and of the council?”

Regardless, to start, I am going to briefly describe my experience in speaking with the new mayor, Carl Olshefskie, as well as the policies that he explained to me were his from the very beginning of his initial campaign for the office.

As I entered the home of the mayor, I was greeted with a warm smile and a welcoming handshake. He then took my coat and led me into his living room, where he invited me to sit down and ask him any questions that I would like answered. I opened up my laptop and, after a brief moment, started the interview. Here, I was able to learn a lot about what was going on, and I will now explain it as best as I can.

I first asked the mayor to clarify his position on exactly what he wanted to do with the police department, in order to immediately dispel any rumors that may have been floating around. He said that, from the very beginning of his mayoral campaign, his main goal was to get into office so that he could restructure the police force, and he said that he made this very clear in the weeks and months prior to the election. This goal, he says, became his main political aspiration after he had personally seen, in the past, some of the crime that he says is known to frequently take place in the borough, and because many of his fellow citizens have also shown concern for the safety of themselves and the town in general.

I also mentioned to him that many people believe that he is trying to get rid of or downsize the borough police force, and he explained to me that this is absolutely not true in any way. Rather, he says that he simply wanted to change the way that police officers did their jobs in town in a number of ways.

First, the mayor said that he wanted to make a better schedule for the officers to follow that would allow more comprehensive coverage during the day. This turned into a small fiasco, however, and things quickly went out of control. This is the story that I will now recount to you.

 The First Mayoral Schedule and an Officer’s Suspension

According to a number of my sources, prior to the new year, the borough police officers had written a schedule for themselves that was approved by the borough council. This schedule had one or two officers on the streets every day of the week, but had very little early day coverage and also always placed two officers together on the exact same hours whenever two were scheduled to work on the same day. In other words, if two officers were going to work on the same day, they would always be working concurrently. This schedule, I can testify, did exist in this manner, as it was shown to me by one of the members of the borough’s Police Committee, Kari Kepler.

Anyway, when the mayor was sworn in on January 2nd, 2014, he went to work straight away and created a new schedule for the police officers–one that gave the officers Sundays off and 36 hour work weeks. This schedule was initially made in order to cut down on the expenses of providing the police officers with overtime pay that Mayor Olshefskie says was the result of the schedule that the officers had previously been working from. He then verbally enacted this schedule on January 3rd in an in-person meeting with at least one of the officers, which caused confusion among the members of the police force because the schedule change was neither put into writing nor submitted to the council.

On Sunday, January 5th, the officer that was spoken to in the meeting on January 3rd did not follow the new schedule for reasons that are currently debated and went into work. This same day, Mayor Olshefskie checked in on the officer, and finding him at work, told him that he was to be suspended without pay for 10 days for not listening to him.

This caused an uproar when the police officer filed for an appeal and a ‘go-ahead’ in order to return to work. The appeal was denied by the then-incumbent President of the Renovo Borough Council, Merry Ann Olshefskie–the mayor’s wife, who was later removed from the council presidency and replaced by Paul Fantaskey. The council, after having come to the conclusion that none of what the mayor did was valid because he was not officially given mayoral powers until the first Monday of the new year–January 6th, then voted to reinstate the officer with back pay and issued a statement to the Mayor that the police officers needed at least 40 hour work weeks and that it was believed by all members of the Police Committee that grant money could be available for paying officer expenses, including those brought up in overtime.

The Second Mayoral Schedule and its Controversy

So, while disagreeing with the idea that grant money could be found for this purpose, the mayor created a new schedule–the third schedule that the officers had been assigned in two months’ time, and the second schedule that Olshefskie had created in the past few weeks–that gave the officers each 40 hour work weeks. The new schedule, yet again, caused an uproar while also creating a number of rumors and mysteries that I will presently make clear.

Much of the confusion around town is related to Mayor Olshefskie allegedly scheduling the borough officers to work 11 days straight and 3 days off. I have seen the schedule, and this is not what it states, although I can understand how this rumor may have gotten started. The actual schedule has all officers off work every Sunday and then working five of the remaining six days of the week each–alone and never overlapping work times (as in, Officer #1 will work from ‘X’a.m. to ‘Y’p.m., and Officer #2 will work from ‘Y’p.m. to ‘Z’a.m.). This creates a cyclical scenario in which any given officer would work for five days straight and then have one day off, before having five days on again and three days off. Therefore, officers working on this schedule would have a repeating ‘5 days on’, ‘1 day off’, ‘5 days on’, ‘3 days off’ schedule.

“Well then, where did the ‘11 days on’, ‘3 days off’ rumor come from if no officer would work for more than 5 days at a time?”, you might ask, and it is a good question with an answer that, in fact, is closely related to another hot topic that I will speak of shortly. But first, allow me to make clear where this distortion of fact came from. Also, if you didn’t realize this, then understand that at least one of the officers lives roughly 170 miles away from Renovo, as this detail is important to remember for the next part of the story.

Anyway, when someone first said that the officers would have to work for 11 days straight, they actually meant that the officers would need to stay in Renovo for 11 days straight in order to avoid travelling the extreme distance that a number of them would need to travel in order to make it home every other weekend for the one-day vacation that the newest schedule assigned to them. Some of you may wonder what the officers previously did during the week when they had to drive these distances, and the fact is that much of the time, the officers had lived in an emergency bunk room above the Borough Building when they didn’t want to travel home. However, this was never written into the contracts of the Renovo police officers and was simply accepted as a result of verbal agreements that have existed between the Renovo P.D. and the Renovo Borough Council for years.

This was not something that Mayor Olshefskie wanted, though, and although his reasons for pressing this issue are disputed by some, he decided that the police officers should no longer be allowed to live in the bunk room because it was, in his mind, an office space, and because this ‘office space’ was littered with alcohol and other personal belongings of the officers (some of which he temporarily seized and showed as evidence for why the council should not allow the police officers to use the room as a living space). This, in turn, caused a ripple effect that once again put council members and citizens up in arms.

Officers’ Bunk Room and Resignations

From the perspective of some of the council members, it seemed (and still seems) as though at this point the mayor was doing his hardest to rid the area of its police officers for good. Not only were these far-from-home officers given schedules that would make it uncomfortable for them to travel such long distances to home for such little reward, but they were also no longer allowed to reside in the bunk room that they had always previously been able to live in. Things were becoming even more difficult on the officers, and the majority of the council would not stand for this.

In a direct reversal of the mayor’s edict, the council voted to allow Renovo police officers to resume living in the bunk room. With ironic timing, however, the Borough’s new insurer (as of last year) called for a risk assessment of all of Renovo’s government properties, which was soon after carried out by an inspector and Mayor Olshefskie, who was, according to his own account, the only official who agreed to be available on the day that the previously stated insurer wanted to do the inspection. This made some other local officials angry, however, as they claim that they were available and that they should have been called–directly contradicting the mayor’s statement that, “No one else said that they wanted to take part in the inspection”.

Regardless, when the results of the risk assessment finally came in, there were quite a few bad marks on a number of the government properties, with the most major concerns being those in the police bunk room–the most costly of which being the suggestion of immediately creating a second means of egress/exit from the room in order to allow people staying there to safely exit in the event of a fire or other emergency. With all of these improvements now being necessary to make, and the Borough already short on funds, the way to move forward is now very unclear to the mayor, and to the council alike.

While all of this was going on, Mayor Olshefskie also incited further debate by handing down new policies on how the police should act and perform their jobs while on duty. Many people around town believe that these are orders that demand officers to stay on foot patrol and not use their police cruisers, as well as to refrain from following people who disobey the laws outside of the Renovo Borough. In reality, the mayor says, these new orders simply suggest that the police officers should spend more time patrolling the streets on foot while also refraining from leaving the Borough–the place that they are paid to protect–except for in the cases of dire emergencies or at the instruction of the state police.

Also, in response to people who have been saying that the officers need to be able to use their cruisers as they please while on duty, the mayor has said that the officers have been spending all of their time sitting in their cars while ignoring the crimes that have been being committed in plain view on side streets and in the area’s parks. When questioned further about this, the mayor said that if the officers would just divide their work hours into some time on foot, some time patrolling in their cruisers, and some time working on paperwork, then he would have no problems with their work.

Along with this, it was noted that the police officers have been improperly filing their traffic reports, making it so that the Renovo Borough will not be receiving any fine money that should have come from the routine duties of the police officers. The officers and their supporters claim that this was the result of a new electronic system of filing the reports that the officers did not understand needed to be used.

These new procedures (questioned heavily by a number of officers and members of the borough council as to what constitutes a ‘dire emergency’), coupled with the bunk room issue, the new schedules, the accusation of the officers not performing all of their duties, and a number of other complaints against both the mayor and the specifics of his new policies eventually led to the complete resignation of the town’s police officers.

So, very recently, the town became one without police protection–with a few council members still trying to compromise with the mayor and the resigning police officers in order to keep them around. However, against the mayor’s wishes, the council went ahead and decided to keep the former police officers on the job–according to a member of the police committee–for 20 hours a month while having them only do office work and train any newly hired police officers. As recently as just a few days ago, this became a major issue when one of the area police officers responded to an ambulance call and was suspended once more for doing so. The mayor’s reasoning for this was, in his own words, because, “…(the officer) was not on-duty and responded with the Borough’s police cruiser with a female riding with him to an emergency call at a local pub.” Clarifying this statement, Mayor Olshefskie said that, when he initially saw that a Renovo police officer responded to the ambulance call, he called the Com Center and asked for the on-duty police officer to call him. At this time, Mr. Olshefskie says, he found out that no officer was currently scheduled to be on-duty and that the officer responded outside of his scheduled hours. He then said that, while he initially planned on dealing with the off-duty officer through informing the State Police, he was urged to deal with him administratively–doing so by, once again, suspending him.

A Regional Police Force

Amid all of the debate, a topic that has been thrown around is that of instituting a regional police force that would protect Renovo and all of the surrounding municipalities. The specifics of this idea are greatly debated, with some townspeople like newly returned Bob Shank, owner of Moose and Goose Billiards on Erie Avenue, believing that Renovo should charge the surrounding municipalities for police protection on a per-usage basis. Some people believe that an entirely new force should be created. Some others even hope for the creation of a Pennsylvania State Police substation in the Renovo Area, although this is universally agreed upon to be unlikely to happen in the new future.

When asked about his opinion of the possibility of a regional police force being created, Mayor Olshefskie said that he believes that this is a wonderful idea, but that he also doesn’t believe that the Renovo Borough would want to be a part of the service unless the interested municipalities each ‘bought in’ to the idea equally–not placing extra burden on the Renovo Police, who the mayor once again said should only be focused on protecting the Borough alone.

Conclusion

Winding down this report, I’d now like to relate to you all the state laws regarding the duties of borough councils and mayors as pertaining to an area’s police, directly from the revised 2012 borough code that can easily be found online by anyone with a computer and an Internet connection.

Pursuant to Section 1123.1 of the Pennsylvania Borough code, entitled ‘Mayor’s Powers; Police’ subsections (a) and (b), “…the mayor shall have full charge and control of the chief of police and the police force,” and, “The mayor shall direct the time during which, the place where and the manner in which the chief of police and the police force perform the duties of their rank.” This suggests that the mayor was not in the wrong when he, on his own power, changed the police force’s work schedule and the manner in which the police would be required to patrol the town. However, according to a number of council members, this is just a basic guideline that can be changed or made more specific by a Borough’s council, as (in complete, easily verifiable truth) it really is their job to create the laws of the borough, and pursuant to the same Pennsylvania Borough code, create the ranks and offices of borough police officers. Therefore, debate does exist, and for good reason.

So, who is right? How should the borough move forward? The answers to these questions are up to you to decide. Regardless of how you see it, it is my hope that this article–while lengthy–has helped you all in forming your own opinions on the matter, and in coming to your own conclusions. The heat from this debate can be felt everywhere, and only knowing the facts and opinions of the major participants in these current events can help to begin dousing the flames that they are creating.