FUNDS FOR POLICE PROGRAM DRYING UP
CHRISTINE DEMPSEY; Courant Staff WriterTHE HARTFORD COURANT
There is no more grant money to pay for the enhanced police patrols that have been a central part of the Quality of Life program, town officials said this week.
Grant money for the police portion of the program is "completely gone," Police Chief Mark J. Sirois said. "It's definitely going to impact what I can do."
But the lack of money is not the death knell for the program, said Mayor Timothy Larson and a town council member.
"There's a reduction in grant funds, and there's going to be a reduction in extra attention we are able to give in certain areas," Larson said. "We haven't dropped our Quality of Life program. What the loss of federal money has done is force us to scale back."
The program, which Larson formalized and announced during his mayoral campaign in the fall of 2001, divides the town into four sections. Teams of police officers and town employees, such as building and health inspectors, are set up in each quadrant to crack down on neighborhood annoyances. Such annoyances may include trash-strewn properties, junk cars and loud stereos.
The inspectors will continue working as part of the program, Larson said. What's different is how the police department does its part of the job. The officers' portion of the work will have to be done by regular beat officers, town council member Mary Alice Dwyer Hughes said.
The way the program worked before, officers assigned to the program were paid overtime to do special patrols in their quadrant in addition to their regular police jobs.
The grant money came from different sources. Most of the money -- $145,204 -- came from the federal Department of Housing and Urban Development, said Michael Dagon, executive assistant at the East Hartford Housing Authority. It was called the "Public Housing Drug Elimination Program."
The program was ended in fiscal year 2001, which ran from Oct. 1, 2001, to Sept. 30, 2002, said Donna White, a HUD spokewoman. She said HUD proposed killing the program "because one of the department's goals was to get back to its core mission: housing and urban development."
White said HUD took half of the $300 million that had been earmarked for the program nationally and added it to housing authorities' capital operating funds. But Dagon said the increase is negligible because it's being spread out over so many agencies, including 2,162 agencies that didn't receive the grant in the first place.
Another source of Quality of Life funds is another federal pool of money known as the Byrne grants. The fund is named after a police officer killed while on duty, said Brian Mattiello, undersecretary at the state Office of Policy and Management.
The town received $9,375 in Byrne money, and the state kicked in $3,125, for a total $12,500 grant, Mattiello said. That grant is called Municipal Narcotics Enforcement in Public Housing, Caring for the 21st Century III.
Mattiello said the grant was awarded for the period between July 1, 2002, to June 30, 2003.