The Morrison Town Board voted Dec. 3 to disband its police department, saying it is not financially sustainable. The motion also calls for contracting for full-time town law enforcement services with the Jefferson County Sheriff’s Office.
The change will happen with the start of the new year, Morrison Town Manager Mallory Nassau said.
The department, which includes nine full-time officers, an administrative assistant and some part-time staff, operated at an estimated $1.2 million deficit in 2024, according to town attorney Austin Flanagan.
The town had budgeted $1.6 million for its police department in 2025. That’s almost 40% of the expected $4.046 million in anticipated 2025 general fund expenditures, a number too steep for town leaders.
“I think the time is now,” said Town Trustee Sean Forey, who made the motion at the end of the 2025 budget hearing. “The town has a lot of obligations coming its way. It’s time to try this.”
The motion included setting aside a maximum of $900,000 to make severance payments to current officers and honor other contractual obligations, and pay the sheriff’s office for taking over town law enforcement in 2025.
Nassau said she emailed the town’s officers with the news Dec. 4, telling them they would soon receive details about severance payments. She did not receive any immediate response.
“I imagine things are setting in,” she said. “It’s hard news to receive.”
The Morrison Police Department could not be reached for comment. Calls to the department were answered with an automated recording identifying the location as the Jefferson County Communications Center.
Town leaders said disbanding its police department is a purely financial decision, and has nothing to do with Police Chief Bill Vinelli’s recent involuntary administrative leave or the Oct. 3 arrest in Longmont of Morrison Police Sgt. Richard Norton.
A JCSO spokesperson said the agency is up to the task of adding Morrison to its full-time coverage area. It is already the on-call agency for the town from 2 to 6 a.m. daily when Morrison has no officers on duty.
“I can say that we will take on the proposed expansion,” JCSO Director of Public Affairs Mark Techmeyer wrote in an email. “We have been in contract with the Town of Morrison for several years now for overnight law enforcement services, so this would be an expansion of those services to 24 hours.
“We do not have the staff needed to fill this responsibility, so we will need to add additional personnel,” he added.
The sheriff’s office hasn’t yet calculated the added staffing and other financial impacts.
“It is a fluid situation, and we don’t have a lot of specifics in place yet,” Techmeyer wrote.
Morrison Town Trustee Katie Gill cast the only vote against the measure, saying it was done too hastily.
“I 100% agree that over the last several years, our police department budget has become increasingly unsustainable,” she said. “It’s threatened the ability of the town to invest in our community and purchase assets the community’s been asking for.
“I personally need a little more time to support this big a change,” she continued. “While I see the need and I think it could work, I’m not prepared to support this tonight.”
Trustee Paul Sutton supported the motion, saying the police department’s budget has grown incrementally larger over the years. He attributed it to the need for each officer to have another officer on duty simultaneously.
“Every cop has someone else that can back him up if something weird happens, and it ended up being too much for us to afford,” he said. “You project that budget into the future, and we’re bankrupt.”
Nevertheless, Sutton said he has mixed feelings about the change.
“I’d like to have a police department, but it’s unaffordable,” he said. “We have so massively expensive things to deal with. Doing those things with a police department that is in the red by $1 million is not viable.”