Heath and Colrain have begun exploring the possibility of regionalizing their emergency services, starting with police.
The Selectboards for the two towns met Tuesday to begin discussing whether creating a shared police and fire district would make sense for Heath and Colrain.
“We really came to talk about police. We’re really in a transitional period with our Police Department,” Colrain Town Administrator Diana Parsons said. “We’re doing OK, but we would like to have a little more robust services.”
Parsons said the department’s one full-time officer recently left to take a position in another town, and the part-time chief has taken on more hours. Colrain’s police chief works 35 hours a week. The department also has two other part-time officers who help respond to the 972 calls the department receives each year. Regionalizing could enable the town to add an administrative assistant or more full-time officers.
In Heath, Police Chief John McDonough said he works 14 hours a week, and after his hours, only four hours are budgeted for officers to come in.
For fiscal year 2026, Colrain budgeted $156,540 for the Police Department and $165,214 for the Fire Department. Heath budgeted $37,295 for police and $51,870 for fire.
“The budgets are quite different and the number of calls is quite different,” Colrain Selectboard Chair Emily Thurber said. “It was quite surprising.”
Both towns have reported seeing increases in calls related to mental health and speeding in recent years, and both chiefs said that paperwork and submitting reports to the state’s Peace Officer Standards and Training (POST) Commission takes up most of their time.
“A lot of those cases take a lot of time,” Colrain Police Chief Chris Lannon said. “There’s a lot more to it now than there used to be.”
Lannon said administrative work, including reviewing gun permits, takes up 15 to 20 hours of his week. McDonough agreed that gun permits also take up a lot of his time.
Selectboard members said if the two towns regionalized, they could perhaps add an administrative assistant who could help with payroll and other tasks, allowing police to spend more time policing.
“Not having the time and proper coverage on the roads is a problem for us,” Heath Selectboard Chair Robyn Provost-Carlson said.
McDonough told the boards that Leyden and Bernardston share a police department and Leyden pays Bernardston roughly $100,000 a year for the police. Similarly, Wendell is covered by the Leverett Police Department and pays approximately $95,000 for it.
Lannon added that, as part of the agreement, Bernardston Police patrol Leyden for about four hours each day and respond to calls in the town.
McDonough said he imagines that if the two departments were to join forces, Colrain could patrol Heath, but Heath does not have the budget to patrol Colrain.
Provost-Carlson said the town would need to increase the budget if it wants better coverage than it currently offers.
“This would most likely increase the budget in some way, shape or form,” she said.
While the majority of the discussion centered around policing services, Nick Anzuoni, chief of both the Heath and Colrain Fire departments, said regionalizing could allow for paid staff to fill gaps in coverage. Both departments are volunteer on-call departments; however, many of the volunteer members have full-time jobs elsewhere and are not always available to respond to calls during the day.
“It certainly streamlines things,” Anzuoni said. “You don’t have to rethink the wheel; you just need to figure out how to fund the wheel.”
The Selectboards agreed to move forward with research and tasked their chiefs with coming up with lists of work they do that could be assigned to an administrative assistant, as well as look into the agreements and structures of other shared police departments.
The towns plan to meet again early next year to further discuss their budgets and dreams for the future of policing in Colrain and Heath.
“The driver really comes down to the dollars and cents,” Provost-Carlson said. “How do we work as standalone towns? We can’t. I don’t think it’s sustainable the way it is.”
