Many new OSP troopers will not be in rural areas
Tuesday, July 17, 2007 10:56 AM PDT
PORTLAND (AP) — After years of cutbacks, the state has provided enough money to add 100 troopers to the Oregon State Police.
But recruits undergo many months of training, so it will be March before the first batch hits the highway. Moreover, the new troopers won’t be seen in many rural areas.
Gov. Ted Kulongoski proposed adding almost 140 recruits, but the Legislature authorized only 100. The deployment plan for the new troopers puts most of them in high-traffic areas, such as Portland, Salem and Springfield. Smaller outposts, such as Arlington, Hermiston, Gold Beach, Florence, Lakeview, John Day and Burns, were originally slated to share 37 troopers. But they won’t get any.
Though the state police didn’t get as many new troopers as it had hoped, the addition of 100 troopers does reverse a three-decade trend.
A thinning of the ranks began a year after voters approved a ballot measure removing the gas tax as the main source of state police funding. Since then, the agency has had to compete with other core government functions for general fund money.
There were 665 state troopers in 1979. Though Oregon’s population has boomed since then, the number of troopers plunged by more than 50 percent.
Timothy F. McLain, superintendent of the Oregon State Police, said the new hires won’t turn the clock back to 1979, when he was a rookie.
‘‘When you left the office, you had the expectation that there were four or five patrol cars out per shift,’’ McLain recalled. ‘‘You had a zone, and you patrolled it. Not only could you take care of the calls for service, but you had the time and availability to take proactive steps that would reduce the crashes and other things that we’re dealing with.
‘‘Now, you’d be fortunate in an office like Salem to have two or three patrol cars. That would be a good day.’’
As the number of troopers declined, the traffic on the state’s highways and calls to the state police increased. In 2000, with about 375 troopers available during the peak summer driving months, there were 22,731 calls to the agency reporting dangerous driving.
In 2004, after a large budget cut caused by the 2001-03 recession, only about 240 troopers were available to respond to 38,738 calls.
Num wrote on Jun 3, 2008 10:41 AM: