Centennial taxpayers would have to pay tens of millions of dollars to create their own police department if the city ends its longstanding agreement with the Arapahoe County Sheriff’s Office, which has handled law enforcement services there since the city’s incorporation in 2001.
Allowing the sheriff’s office to handle law enforcement would cost about $29 million a year, while running a separate police department would cost at least $33 million, a study commissioned by Centennial city officials and released this week showed. Those figures do not include the tens of millions needed for a police building, $19 million for equipment or the $8 million the city estimates it would have to spend to transition the services.
The study’s findings are the latest development in Centennial officials’ debate about the future of public safety in the growing city. With about 110,000 residents, Centennial is the largest city in Colorado without its own police department.
Although conversations about the future of public safety have been ongoing for years, questions about the arrangement between the city and the county spiked November after an upset in the county sheriff’s election replaced Colorado law enforcement veteran David Walcher with Tyler Brown, a police officer from a small Denver suburb. The agreement between the sheriff’s office allowed the city to opt out of the contract — meant to last until 2027 — if a new sheriff takes office. On the day Brown took office in January, the city hired Walcher to study the feasibility of creating a Centennial police department.
“I think it was eye-opening for the city that if we ever wanted to go out on our own that there’s a lot of things we need to consider,” said Allison Wittern, spokeswoman for Centennial.
The city would need to hire officers and civilian staff, build or contract for dispatch services, buy equipment and create department policies. A police building could cost between $53 million and $72 million, a city analysis found.
“This current model delivers law enforcement services at a value you cannot get should you bring this in house,” City Manager Matt Sturgeon said at a city council meeting Monday. “But you always have to look at what service you’re getting and whether it’s the quality your citizens deserve. And that isn’t about dollars. That’s about what the expectations of the citizens are and what your expectations are.”
The city spends about 40 percent of its budget on the sheriff’s office contract. That money funds about 195 full-time staff at the sheriff’s office. About half of the sheriff’s office’s calls in 2018 were from Centennial, the agency’s 2018 annual report shows.
There have been no problems with the sheriff’s office services but city officials wanted to have estimates on hand if they ever needed to make a change, Wittern said.
“There’s nothing wrong at all,” she said. “I think it was just you never know what’s going to happen in the future.”
While the study was underway, the city and sheriff’s office agreed to shorten the contract from 10 to five years and the sheriff’s office agreed to form a public safety advisory group of Centennial residents. They also added a condition that the city and the sheriff’s office work together should the agreement ever be terminated.
“With Sheriff Brown in place, there were areas we could just clear up and get a little more flexibility,” Wittern said.
City councilmembers at a meeting Monday expressed concern about accruing debt if the split were to occur but said the city should revisit the topic in a few months and seek public input.
“Over these past five months, it’s become evident … it would take a great deal of coordination for a transition of this magnitude,” Sturgeon said at the meeting. “It’s something that should be taken very seriously by both parties.”
The city paid Walcher about $60,000 for his work on the study, Wittern said. Walcher now works for the Denver Department of Public Safety’s Public Integrity Division, tasked with overseeing internal investigations in the Denver Sheriff Department.
