(Credit: Steve Thurston, 2022)
James Montagnino
Citing a need for more police officers on the beat, especially on weekends, the Saratoga Springs City Council defunded the single position of Assistant Chief, sending current Assistant Chief Robert Jillson back to his rank of lieutenant.
Earlier this year, Frederick Warfield was promoted to lieutenant to fill the position emptied when Jillson was promoted. Warfiled will be moved back to Sergeant.
The city has two possible assistant chief positions. One was already unfilled and unfunded. SSPD has three empty sergeant positions, so Warfield will not displace anyone, Commissioner of Public Safety James Montagnino said.
The decision was finalized at the city council meeting March 15. The change will be made official in April.
The changes will put one more officer and a sergeant on the street. Sergeants are generally the highest ranking officers with a regular beat outside City Hall, Montagnino said during the meeting. .
“We’re not eliminating the line,” or the position of assistant chief itself, Montagnino said in an interview after the city council meeting. That move would likely run afoul of Civil Service rules. “We’re just redirecting the funding.”
Jillson’s appointment to Assistant Chief had been a bit of a political football late last year. By last fall, then-Assistant Chief John Catone announced his retirement for early 2022, and then-Commissioner of Public Safety Robin Dalton moved to replace him with Jillson.
At the time, commissioner-elect Montagnino cried foul, saying that it would be his job, once in office, to replace Catone.
He lost that argument because there are two assistant chief positions. The city legally added funding to the empty position and promoted Jillson into it. Catone left in January. The funding for that position was not refilled.
[Read more about that here about the political dust-up, and read here about the outcome.]
Asked if the civil service rules would allow the defunding, Montagnino said: “The unfunding of a line is something that is not going to get any traction" if someone contests it.
He added: “This is not something that was done on the spur-of-the-moment. This is something that has taken a lot of reflection and research before the move was made.”
The changes come as Phase 1 of a new Patrol Division Increase Initiative. The initiative is intended to get more officers on the beat, especially on the weekends, and to remove wasteful spending and duplication of efforts, Montagnino said by way of introduction.
Approximately 40% of the city’s officers do not work weekends, meaning, he said, that they often do not even need to leave City Hall for much of the work they do.
“That is to say, they are not working on the street,” he said, adding that the measures are aimed to change that.
Agreeing with Montagnino at the time of the vote, Mayor Ron Kim said: "We do need officers on the streets. We need those sergeants on the streets, so I commend you for doing this. It's always a tough decision. Personnel issues are difficult."
Montagnino said the assistant chief position duplicates much of what the chief already does, and sometimes that causes miscommunication or other problems.
As an example he referenced the press conference that then-Assistant Chief Catone held last year with the Commissioner of Public Safety. It was a role the chief, who was on vacation at the time, should have held. Instead, the press conference added to the anger Black Lives Matter protestors felt and led directly to the July 14 protest that blocked city streets and led to more than a dozen arrests.
Last summer, the city saw a spate of violence, in one case deadly. However, Montagnino said earlier in the meeting that there has been no statistically significant change in the number or types of crimes over recent years.
Jillson had been the department’s public information officer before becoming the assistant chief. Montagnino was not sure if he would return to that role, but instead may end up helping the police department with its accreditation.