Who Needs Bullets? Proposed Township Police Cuts Raise Some Eyebrows

A feud between the Haddon Township police department and township Commissioner Paul Dougherty took another turn Tuesday.

Dougherty, the new township director of revenue, recommended an additional $20,000 of cuts to the police department budget above $8,000 that had previously been identified by officials. The cuts even included items such as bullets, some officials said.

The cuts were part of the township’s new budget, which was briefly discussed during a commissioners caucus meeting Tuesday.

Dougherty, one of three members of the Board of Commissioners, stepped down in April as the township’s director of public safety after local police officers lined the walls of the commission meeting room and their union representative delivered a letter of no confidence.

They claimed Dougherty had misused his position while he was overseeing the police department as director of public safety. They alleged that he had meddled in department internal affairs; had inappropriately discussed disciplining a police officer in a public meeting; had a financial relationship with an internal affairs hearing officer he had recommended and that police had found him in a suspected state of intoxication on several occasions.

Dougherty, an attorney, denied the allegations from the officers and attributed the dispute to a failed police contract negotiation. On Tuesday, he continued to deny his recommended police budget cuts had anything to do with the dispute.

“It has absolutely nothing to do with it,” Dougherty said of his cuts. “We cut $400,000 from the budget across the board.”

Commissioner John Foley, who swapped jobs with Dougherty the end of April and now oversees the police department, said he was “concerned” by Dougherty adding $20,000 in police budget cuts.

“Going $28,000 in cuts from year to year, I was a little concerned,” Foley said after the meeting. He said he couldn’t confirm if the cuts included purchases of bullets. “Him being the former director of public safety I guess he wanted to weigh in on it.”

Dougherty also said he couldn’t recall the specifics of the cuts, but that if a line item had not been spent in a previous budget it could have been cut in the current budget.

“If I cut the bullets I may have if they weren’t used in the last two years,” Dougherty said. “That’s how you cut a budget. You look at the evaluation for the prior couple of years and you make decisions.”

In the proposed budget, police salary and wages dropped from $2,304,406 to $2,298,712 and expenses dropped from $113,00 to $85,800.

The commissioners have scheduled a public budget hearing next Tuesday before an adoption vote. The budget includes a $72 annual tax hike for a typical resident with a home valued at the township’s average property assessment.