SUNBURY— The City of Sunbury is looking for a new location for their police department. Mayor, David Persing announced at the city council meeting Monday night that the city is searching for a new building for the police department in the downtown area.
Persing said, “We have been putting a lot of money into the M&T governmental building, and it has help us, it really has, but we are looking at an elevator that’s real old. we are looking at a roof that needs replaced, a whole entire heating system. So, instead of throwing $150,000 into it that building we just want to see if there is something more viable out there that we can do.”
Also, the council voted at the meeting to change the City’s civil service regulations for their police officer applicants. Now patrol officers applying to the Sunbury Police Department will only be required to score a 70% on the civil service exam opposed to the 80% they required to score previously.
Mayor Persing hopes this will broaden the applicant pool. The city hopes to hire two new full- time officers by the summer, but due to a lack of qualified applicants the city will need to send new hires away for training, “Once we go through the civil service test and we get our two to three top people then when we pick them we have to send them away for six months to get training what we are trying to find out if there is a reimbursement program that allows us to get some of the money back . It’s hard to pay a guy full salary and send him away for six months and not have him on the streets, it doesn’t help you at all.”
Mayor Persing also announced Monday night that the city will advertise for professional consulting services agreement to assess the status of the city surveillance cameras. He said, “We just want to establish what we have now for a baseline so that we can move forward and say, we want to improve this next year, we want to maintain them, we want to drop them all together, whatever we want to do.”
The system assessment of the current cameras will focus on system performance, condition of equipment and growth recommendations. The information from the assessment will be used to establish a multi-year City-wide camera program. ( Sarah Benek )
