Ga. City Begins Dismantling Police Department over Finances

FORT GAINES, GA—Fort Gaines no longer has a police department after two officers and the police chief quit amid a consolidation process with the Clay County Sheriff’s Office.

About 30 residents crowded into the small city hall building here Tuesday evening to hear the mayor and councilmen discuss the dismantling of the department. The council voted to move forward with negotiations to combine the city’s law enforcement coverage with the Clay’s Sheriff’s Office because the city cannot fund a police department. The negotiations with the sheriff’s department would provide a six-month “trial” coverage period.

A few residents voiced concerns during public comment.

“We can’t afford our police department, and that is a major concern,” Fort Gaines resident Mary Ann Parham said. “I think everybody here is concerned that we’re going bankrupt like Edison did and like Georgetown did. We deserve answers.”

Short-staffed law enforcement agencies are not uncommon in this part of the state. Many of Fort Gaines’ neighboring towns operate with fewer than five officers and a mix of full- and part-time staff. Edison, which borders Fort Gaines, has been recovering from a financial crisis for more than a year and had only one full-time officer for about a year.

Edison has since been able to hire more officers, but not without imposing a monthly law enforcement fee on citizens in order to pay officers and operate police cars and communication services. Last year, another nearby town, Arlington, had to cancel its historic May Day Parade due to a lack of law enforcement. Many of these towns are reliant on their county sheriff’s departments for support.

The Fort Gaines City Council and mayor discussed Tuesday that the city had been going over budget on the police department for several years. Mayor Kenneth Sumpter said this was due to the city’s inability to hire enough officers. Fort Gaines had two full-time officers and a police chief. However, in order to provide adequate law enforcement coverage to the city, they were consistently working overtime, extending beyond the city’s budget.

The council began working to consolidate the department with the Clay County Sheriff’s Office in October. Between then and now, its two officers and chief quit their positions.

Not everyone was in agreement about abandoning the local police department. Councilwoman Susie Rhodes said she was interested in keeping the local department.

“Even if it’s something like ⅔ of the time, I mean we have the cars, we have the equipment, we have facilities in place,” she said. “I would like to see us advertise for a new chief and at a greatly discounted pay scale.”

However, most agreed that finding a new chief and officers was unrealistic for the city at this stage.

“We’re in a different time now,” Councilwoman Karen Kinsell said. “It’s just difficult to find officers willing to work in these very rural areas. I know that the county struggles with that as well as the sheriff.”

She said the pay scale and benefits the city could offer to police department staff place Fort Gaines in “an even less positive situation” than the county. The city will be struggling even to pay the sheriff’s department for services, she said.

A couple of councilmen brought up the potential for re-establishing a local police department years down the road.

“It is going to be very sad,” Kinsell said. “Nobody wants change. It kind of feels like this was a sudden event. It really wasn’t. It had been developing for years.”

For the most part, Sumpter listened quietly as the councilmen debated. He told The Albany Herald he believes the decision not to rehire staff for the Fort Gaines Police Department is a “short-sighted” decision on the council’s part.

“If expenses go beyond the budget, typically in your home, you would stop going to the movies … for the next six months, you’d cut out subscriptions … make concessions, and you move forward,” Sumpter said. “You don’t burn down your house.”

Sumpter said he worries about the city receiving adequate police coverage from the sheriff’s department, which is responsible for the entire county. He said the sheriff already said response time would become longer.

“You don’t have the aspect of patrolling,” he said. “The sheriff will come through and make some effort … drive through and look for traffic stops, but the police were checking doors, making stops … at a level that cannot be expected from the sheriff.”

Sumpter also said the process of switching to full coverage from the sheriff’s department isn’t so easy.

“It’s the same as peeling an onion; the more you peel back, the more there is,” he said. “The more we look into this transition, the more that’s involved with this.”

There’s the issue of figuring out municipal code vs. county code, the processing of citations, where the money goes and what happens to municipal court.

Cynthia Wadsworth, a Clay County resident, asked during public comment what happens to pending cases now that there is no longer a police department.

Sumpter said he was surprised more people did not speak up about losing the police department during public comment.

As far as this police problem being a further indicator that Fort Gaines has entered a financial crisis, Sumpter said that is not the case.

He said the city has received “slaps on the wrist” for going over budget on the police department, but he said all of the city’s audits have been submitted for the last several years, albeit with the 2024 audit being late. Sumpter blamed the city’s outdated computer and financial systems for not catching budgeting issues sooner.

He brought Lori Moore, a financial manager who has helped Edison and Dawson recover from financial woes, to help upgrade the city’s system.

“We’re not as small as we were 10 years ago,” Sumpter said. “We’re doing more business this year. We’ve got a $6 million project going on on our sewer treatment plant. We have … a good $100-to-$200,000 in grants coming through here. We can’t continue to operate like we were 10 to 15 years ago.”

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