SAUGATUCK, MI (WHTC-AM/FM) – A Lakeshore community grappling with its policing future apparently won’t rush into a decision.
Mayor Chris Peterson and her fellow Saugatuck City Council members last night went over results of a survey of its residents, conducted by Alexander Weiss Consulting this past April, in which 259 responded out of over 13 hundred contacted by the retained firm. “What we asked basically were questions of safety,” she said during an interview on “WHTC Morning News,” “how safe do you feel, how you think the officers interact, how do you think they are involved wtih the community. We got the results back from those and now we put it into a kind of a complicated matrix that all of the City Council (members) then will rate those (results). We’ll come back in our next workshop and come up with some options to go forward.”
Peterson added that any decision about whether to maintain the current police arrangement with neighboring Douglas, establish a separate department, work with Saugatuck Township in developing regional policing, or contract with the Allegan County Sheriff’s Department, will still need a year before it can be implemented.
