ELY— The Ely City Council voted unanimously this week to reject a formal police services agreement with Babbitt, accepting its budget committee’s recommendation against the arrangement. The city will, however, continue allowing its officers to work overtime shifts for the neighboring community as Babbitt works through an ongoing public safety crisis.
The decision closes the door, at least for now, on a potential merger that Babbitt Mayor Andrea Zupancich had brought to the Ely council earlier this year. Zupancich approached the council seeking talks about consolidating the two departments as Babbitt struggled with staffing shortages and a $1.3 million budget shortfall.
Babbitt’s police department has been operating with just two officers, down from its authorized five-officer complement. The department is without a chief and two additional officers, a staffing collapse that accelerated after former Babbitt Police Chief Troy Bissonette left to join the Ely Police Department. To maintain around-the-clock coverage in the interim, Babbitt has been paying officers from surrounding agencies, including Ely, to work shifts at time-and-a-half rates.
“We’re not going to eliminate 24/7 coverage at all,” Zupancich said at the time. “Public safety is very important to us.”
While Ely’s council has now declined to formalize that relationship into a broader agreement, the overtime arrangement will continue, providing Babbitt at least a partial stopgap as it weighs its options.
Those options are several. Babbitt had requested cost proposals from both the St. Louis County Sheriff’s Office and the East Range Police Department, which currently serves Aurora and Hoyt Lakes. St. Louis County proposed providing four officers plus 100 hours of overtime to maintain 24/7 coverage at a cost approximately $100,000 below Babbitt’s current police budget. East Range submitted a comparable proposal that would save the city around $60,000.
It was East Range officials, Zupancich noted, who had raised the question of why Babbitt wasn’t pursuing a partnership with Ely given the cities’ proximity. She said Babbitt had previously been told Ely wasn’t interested in a merger, though that information hadn’t come directly from Ely’s council or mayor, prompting her to bring the question to the council directly.
The policing question has unfolded against a backdrop of deep financial instability in Babbitt.
During a four-hour council meeting last September, residents packed the chambers to confront officials over a proposed 20-percent property tax levy increase and threatened cuts to police and library services.
Department heads had submitted budget requests exceeding $4 million against revenue projections of roughly $2.7 million, producing the substantial shortfall that has driven the city’s search for savings across multiple departments.