BETHEL — More than $200,000 in municipal department funding requests received Board of Finance approval this week.
The board voted this week to approve a $100,000 request from the parks and recreation department to support its programming and a $125,500 request for new Bethel Police Department software.
The parks department budget took a $100,000 cut earlier this year when the Board of Finance slashed $660,000 from the requested 2021-22 town and school budgets — reducing the department’s programming budget to roughly $400,000.
Finance board chair Bob Manfreda said the cut was not meant to reduce programs, but to avoid what happened the year before when services were budgeted for but never rendered due to the pandemic.
Manfreda said the finance board would work to come up with an additional $100,000 for parks and recreation programming if needed during the 2021-22 year, and that promise was kept.
According to parks and recreation director Eileen Earle, the department is seeing an increased demand for programming and enrollment is higher than it was this time last year.
“Our programs are starting to take off and show that people want to have programs,” she told the town’s selectmen last week.
With 35 to 40 percent of the department’s funds for the year already spent, Earle said the additional $100,000 will be crucial for springtime.
“If we don’t have the funding then we would have to adjust what we offer come spring,” she said.
With the finance board’s approval, a town meeting will need to be scheduled to vote on adding the $100,000 to the Parks and Recreation’s programming budget.
Police department
The Board of Finance voted to approve the police department’s $125,500 funding request to upgrade its computer-aided dispatch and records management system software.
The department is looking to make NexGen — a public safety solutions company that serves most municipalities in the state — its new software vendor.
Police Chief Stephen Pugner said the new software would help improve efficiency in a number of ways — one being that it would allow officers to write accident reports outside the station.
Right now, he said, they can’t do that.
“The guys have to come in off the road and use the computers in the station to do the accident reports,” Pugner told the Board of Selectmen last week.
He said the department’s current 15-year-old system could be upgraded to make it possible, but it would cost about $40,000.
With NexGen, Bethel police would also no longer have to pay extra for system upgrades and officers would be able to issue and submit traffic tickets electronically, all from the scene of an incident.
“Right now, we hand write tickets, go to the station and mail it to the state,” Pugner said. “This new CAD system would allow us to … type the ticket into the computer system from the car, print it out and hand it to the person, and it goes directly to the state after we review it.”
To upgrade to the NexGen software for $125,500, Pugner said a contract has to be signed with the company by the end of the year — otherwise, the cost would be close to $200,000.
First Selectman Matt Knickerbocker said a town meeting will not be required for the police system funding since it was included in the capital budget approved through the town’s last budget referendum.
