Dryden to once again look at switching to OPP for policing

Less than two years after city councillors in Dryden, Ont. voted to keep their municipal police service, the community will once again go through the process of determining the viability of switching to the OPP.

City council voted Monday night to ask the OPP to again provide a costing for policing the city of 8,000. Dryden is the only community in northwestern Ontario, except for Thunder Bay, to have its own municipal force.

Dryden mayor Greg Wilson brought forward the item on Monday as a Notice of Motion, as council had previously decided to stick with the Dryden Police Service. Wilson was the lone vote in May 2019 to vote for switching to the OPP.

Coun. Norm Bush, who voted for the OPP costing process to begin this time, said it's a financial decision.

"Whereas before, the transition costs for the OPP costing were extremely high, and with the high debt load, I personally didn't want to add to the debt at that time," he said, noting Dryden's debt repayments are "behind us now."

When the community was first looking at switching policing providers, the city was paying $3.4 million per year to service its debt; the cost is now just over $1 million per year.

"Now, we're in a much more favourable position, in terms of being able to handle the short term transition costs."

Based on previous OPP estimates, Dryden would have to pay about $5 million upfront in 'transition costs' to the OPP before they would police the community.

Another issue, he said, was what changes COVID-19 would have to ongoing police operations - something that the OPP may be better equipped to handle than the small municipal force in Dryden.

Bush said there was no timeline on when the OPP would come back with a cost estimate for policing, but he estimated it could take a year.

"The purpose of the study is to see whether it's still viable, and to see if the savings that we saw in the first study are still there."

Council would determine at that time, he said, if Dryden would switch from the its municipal force to the provincial police.

"This has nothing to do with their performance," he said, referring to the current officers in Dryden.

"This has everything to do whether we can afford to continue to have our policing service at the kind of cost structure that we do."