The city’s public safety advisory committee heard from city employees in the Municipal Court, legal office and Great Falls Police Department.

During their July 3 meeting, Allison McMaster, a court clerk, told the committee about the work involved for coordinating jury trials and compliance orders.

She said that morning she had 20 voicemails about jury duty and court staff spends roughly 50 hours calling 600 jurors monthly.

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She said in the public safety levy denied by voters in November, the Municipal Court asked for a jury clerk, compliance clerk and one general support staff position.

She said that typically compliance with court orders is:

• community service: 11 percent
• jail alternative: 24 percent
• house arrest: 32 percent

Those who don’t respond to a jury summons can be held in contempt of court, but staff has to track all of those as well and contract those individuals, who often say they’d rather pay the fine than appear for jury duty, which is typically less than a day, she said.

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The Municipal Court’s portion of the levy request was detailed in multiple public meetings, city documents available on the city website, the Safety in the Falls site and reported multiple times by The Electric.

Municipal Court officials asked for $232,00 broken down for:

• one additional jury clerk: $62,000
• one additional court officer clerk: $62,000
• one compliance officer: $72,000
• related accommodations, equipment and training: $36,000

Thad Reiste, owner of Electric City Coffee and a committee member, asked McMaster, “if you could wave the budget wand, what would help you?”

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She said a jury clerk and Reiste asked if she knew if that had been in the court’s levy ask, to which she said yes.

Morgan Medvec, court supervisor, told the committee that jury contacts don’t stop even if a case doesn’t end up going to trial.

She said that tracking noncompliance with court orders is a major consumer of time for court staff.

Sandra Guynn, committee member, asked if volunteers could be used in Municipal Court.

Medvec said that she’s checking with human resources but there’s concern about using volunteers since the court handles a significant amount of confidential criminal justice information.

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Cascade County is adding a pre-trial program through a contract, but his hiring a county employee to coordinate that confidential criminal justice information that the contractor can’t have access to, according to multiple county officials.

Aaron Weissman asked if there would be enough work for a full time jury clerk to which Medvec said yes.

He asked what the salary would be for that position, which was included in the publicly available levy ask and associated documents.

Neil Anthon, chief prosecutor in the city’s legal office, walked committee members through their workload and challenges.

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He said his office doesn’t do well communicating with witness, largely for lack of time and the high case volume.

He said that recently, there were 53 trials set for one week and that involved 199 witnesses.

Most of them were in law enforcement fields, but about 75 were civilians, he said.

“They don’t have much contact with the criminal justice system often. It can be a new experience for them,” Anthon said. “It can be an intimidating and confusing experience.

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The impact of mental health “seems to be increasing,” he said and it’s having an impact to their jobs but they have limited ability to address those cases.

Anthon said if they have a case against someone who isn’t able to care for themselves, his office may call the county attorney’s office to ask if they can have the person committed to the state hospital, but that’s another time consuming process and the hospital is also limited on its ability to take patients.

Determining a defendant’s ability to stand trial can also slow the process as completing mental health evaluations is a challenge in the community with limited providers and resources, he said.

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Anthon said the state set aside funds for county attorney’s to get help with mental health evaluations and stabilizing mental health patients in the community.

Racki, county attorney, told The Electric that the Montana Department of Health and Human Services set up a program for community evaluations, but the agency didn’t talk to providers and he hasn’t yet been able to find a local provider willing to do an evaluation for the DPHHS rate or they are booked out several weeks or months.

Municipal Court established a mental health court in an effort to try to address some of those issues, Anthon said.

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Often times, the city legal office is reactive and not proactive, Anthon said, “we’re applying Band-Aids to issues.”

Sgt. Katie Cunningham of the Great Falls Police Department said that the committee had asked public safety staff to the meeting to talk about what isn’t working well.

“A lot of things,” she said.

She said retention and manning are major struggles.

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When she started, she said she complained that there were six officers on the street, now there’s two.

Cunningham said “we made the ask over and over again,” for more staff, “it just never came.”

In the levy, GFPD asked for 24 new sworn officer positions at a total cost of $2,650,000.

Those positions would take several years to fill due to the number of available slots at the Montana Law Enforcement Academy and the training timeline, which GFPD Chief Jeff Newton and other city officials have said in multiple public meetings.

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When shifts get as low as two people, it forces overtime and she said GFPD has made schedule changes to try to better provide law enforcement services with limited resources.

She said that domestic disputes are dangerous calls for law enforcement and now, it’s often a situation of dispatch responding that they’ll try to find someone to backup an officer on those calls.

Sometimes the Cascade County Sheriff’s Office or Montana Highway Patrol will back up GFPD on calls, but there aren’t enough people on the street, she said.

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“It’s fertile ground for liability and mistakes and missteps,” she said, plus officer burnout.

Cunningham supervises nine people in the investigations bureau and their caseload is so high that they aren’t getting to every case.

“That’s what should make you lose sleep at night, that there are people walking around with no accountability,” Cunningham said.

GFPD also asked for an intel analyst, which would be an entirely new position to the department, at a cost of $85,000.

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That person would help go through data, such as cell phone data for evidence, she said, which is something GFPD isn’t currently equipped to do and there’s a backlog at the state level.

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Cunningham said drug endangered children are a significant concern and violence among young people, such as shooting guns at each other, is growing.

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“We refuse to give up,” she said, “we’re making do with what we have and what the community says we can have,” but if the community doesn’t start investing in public safety, “we’re going to have problems.”

Reiste, committee member, asked Cunningham if she was chief for a day, what would she ask for.

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She said everything that was included in the levy ask last year.

Reiste asked if the city would need more patrol vehicles if more officers were added.

Cunningham said yes and those were also included in the levy ask.

Weissman said that part of the reason the committee was created was voters said they couldn’t afford the 24 new officers.

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“I don’t think we can make do with anything less. We’ve been making this ask for at least the last 10 years,” Cunningham said.

In 2017, GFPD requested three additional officers during the budget process. That request was partially funded by commissioners.

In 2018, 2019, 2020, and 2022, GFPD requested six new officers each year. Commissioners did not fund any of those request.

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In 2021, Newton wrote in a budget chart for the meeting that “I would like to have it on the record that this is another budget year that I would have asked for at least one full time employee to backfill the position used for the creation of the Violent Crimes Task Force. This task force was created in response to the ongoing increase in violent crime here in Great Falls and we intentionally used a position in our Patrol Bureau to make this happen.”

The city has added some police officers through a federal grant that covers a portion of the cost for three years, but by the fourth year, the city has to cover the full cost.

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Doyon, city manager, said that for years he’s tried to build capacity into the city’s budget for public safety and added people or equipment incrementally when the budget allowed, but it hasn’t worked.

“What keeps all of us up at night is when we get into a situation that we knew we could have prevented” and there’s a loss of life or property,” Doyon said. “We know we’re ripe for that.”

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Reiste said he was previously unaware of the public safety problems and that his customers are often unaware.

He said he supports conducting a community poll or survey on public safety.

“How do we as city residents expect the same level of service but we’re not willing to give an inch,” Reiste said.

The committee meets again July 17.