EVANS CITY — Borough council unanimously approved just over $100,000 for the newly formed public safety department Monday, Feb. 5, in a decision that keeps options open, according to council president Cheri Deener-Kohan.
The funds, approved at the borough’s regular council meeting, will be used to maintain policing equipment, handle unforeseen circumstances while the borough transitions police forces and cover the salary of the newly sworn-in public safety director.
The borough recently selected Joe McCombs as public safety director. McCombs was the police chief of the Evans City-Seven Fields police department, which the two municipalities agreed to dissolve last year.
McCombs will serve in a consultant role and be paid $500 a month, according to Deener-Kohan.
“We have put Joe as our public safety director, which will help us with some of the police issues,” Deener-Kohan said. “It’s hard to explain, but we’re keeping our options open by keeping our police department without police officers.”
Evans City has been relying heavily on state police since March and will continue to do so, but for the “little matters,” such as helping with faulty traffic lights, McCombs will be able to provide assistance, Deener-Kohan said.
“He will still have his licenses to be a police officer, but we’re hoping that until we can get some other people that can work as a police officer, our department will stay,” Deener-Kohan said. “We just don’t have police officers in it, but it gives us the option to continue on.”
The borough is not currently accepting applications for police officers said Deener-Kohan.
“We don’t have that kind of money,” Deener-Kohan said.
Another roadblock to hiring police staff, according to solicitor Ryan Mergl, is that the borough is waiting on a Originating Agency Identifier (ORI) number.
“We are working with Harrisburg to give them the paperwork that we have, so we can get our O.R.I. that we can have access to the policing database and so forth,” Mergl said.
According to Mergl, when the Evans City-Seven Fields Regional Police Department was formed a decade ago, Evans City lost its own independent number required to perform background searches and initiate cases.
Without an ORI number, police would be unable to issue citations or start new case files, according to Mergl.
