Hello Mayor and Council members. I hope you all had a good holiday season. It’s been a busy winter so far. I’m happy to have been able to spend a little time, over zoom of course, to get to know our new council members a bit. I don’t know about you, but I am looking forward to in person meetings again sometime in the future. Just my own personal feeling on the matter.

The goal setting process for council has been really informative and much different that those in the past. I feel like the process this year is much more productive that it has been in the past. Not to say previous goals and sessions were bad, I just feel like this process has offered more input and an element of team building, which is always good.

We are still in the middle of the hiring process here at the police department. As of this writing, I have made three conditional offers to the top candidates. It was two before but unfortunately, I had to let Officer Lew Sytsma go. He resigned effective December 31, 2020. This was a very tough process for me as Lew had been here with our police department for close to ten years. But, it could not be helped and I know the right decision was made moving forward with our department. So, this opened up another position that we need to fill. Thankfully, the decision was made some time ago to keep the recruiting process open until positions were filled. Also leaving our department, under completely different circumstances, is Sgt. Luke Hodges. Sgt. Hodges is moving to another agency to continue his career. He started his law enforcement career with Sandy PD and has been an outstanding officer and employee. Sgt. Hodges has spent nearly ten years at the City of Sandy and he will be missed. I wish him the best as he transitions to the next phase of his career. This means we will need to promote one of our employees to Sergeant soon. We are completely refining our Sergeant testing process and will begin that process next month. I see no need to hire out for this position as I believe we have several very capable officers to fill this position. Lots of change coming to the police department and you will see some fresh faces soon. Never in my time here have we hired so many new folks, five total including the two officers that filled the positions via the public safety fee.

I am looking forward to our work session regarding homeless folks in our area. This is not yet scheduled or was going to be scheduled for February but I will need to push that back until some time in March. The reason for rescheduling is that I have contacted Bill Stewart with the Clackamas County DA’s office to attend the zoom workshop. He is not available until March. DDA Stewart has been involved with some new “outside the box” programs such as mobile court and shower to name a few. I believe he’ll have some encouraging information for us. This “outside the box” thinking is just what we need as we move forward to come up with viable solutions to the issues at hand. For years, this issue has been placed on the shoulders of law enforcement agencies and obviously, this has not worked. With the recent changes in law in our state and around the country, our ability to remove folks from certain public areas has been very limited. Not that our approach was working or solving the much deeper issues associated with homelessness, but law enforcement is not the answer to the issue at hand. I certainly believe we need to be part of the solution, but law “enforcement” is not fixing our issues or helping these folks get out of the situations that they are in.

That is all for now. Please feel free to contact me anytime if you have questions or would just like to chat. Chief Roberts