By John Huxman
Freelance Reporter
Special to the Tribune
At the Pratt joint City and County Meeting, held at the Pratt County Public Safety Meeting on January 27, the City of Pratt officials explained a plan to move the Pratt Police Department from the Law Enforcement Center at the court house into the east end of the Pratt Community Building (619 N. Main) at a January 27 joint city/county meeting.
This plan, which is in the planning stages and will not come to fruition until 2026 at the earliest, has already garnered significant controversy on social media.
“There’s just a lot of information about the Law Enforcement Center and a lot of misinformation including an unfortunately misrepresentative Facebook post over the weekend about what the city would like to pursue with the Law Enforcement Center,” said Pratt City Manager Regina Goff. “One of the main misconceptions appears to have been that the city is planning to kick the Senior Center out of the community center. This was never the plan. The City would only use the east part of the building which the seniors do not use.”
The impetus for moving city police from the Law Enforcement Center to the community building is twofold; space and money.
“Both the City Police Department and the Sheriff’s department have stated in numerous public meetings that they don’t have adequate space at the LEC,” Goff said.
In one-on-one meetings in 2024, every last police officer that Goff talked to stated that they needed their own space and did not have enough room for evidence, records, and offices.
“The police department itself is in three different places; the Law Enforcement Center, the Municipal Building and an offsite evidence area. It works but it doesn’t work. It’s very challenging,” said Pratt City Police Chief Nate Humble. “The community center is a very large building and what we were looking at was to move there and utilize what a lot of people consider the voting room area. It’s a big open area on the east side of the community center. On the west side is where the senior meals and activities are going on. Also there’s a basement in there that would work for the evidence part of it that’s not really being utilized except for some storage that’s been there for decades and a lot of things in there, quite honestly, are junk.”
He went on to explain that the supervisors and detectives currently stationed at the Pratt Municipal Building would also be moved there so that everything would be in one place. The east end of the community building alone will double the space that the police department currently has at its disposal.
The second consideration is monetary. At present, the city police rent their space in the county’s law enforcement building by paying all of the salaries for the dispatchers, which comes to half a million dollars per year. Goff pointed out that this is a contributing factor to the high tax rates that people experience within the city limits—tax rates that she has committed to address.
“Dispatch serves all of Pratt county; Pratt County Rescue, the Sheriff’s Department, and the city,” said Goff. “But all of those dollars are being collected from the subset of the City of Pratt citizens and not spread out to all of the taxpayers of the county.”
At present the city rents the community center to the county for only one dollar per year. It simply makes financial sense for the city to use the community center and pay a more proportional percentage of dispatch’s payroll.
Pratt County Commissioner Rick Shriver pushed back somewhat on the idea that the county pays only a single dollar per year for its use of the community center. He said that, in addition to that dollar, the county has spent tens of thousands of dollars on maintenance and improvements to the community center.
City officials agreed to “make it good” to the county, but pointed out that, even so, the move would be the more economical option for the city. Chief Humble said that his department has enough money in its budget to accomplish the move without requiring any additional funds out of the city budget.
An unsolved problem would be voting room use. Since the police will be using what has been the voting room, election voting would have to be moved either into a part of the community center used by the seniors or to the Pratt Municipal Building. If polling is done in senior center portion of the building, they would not be able to use it for meals during elections.
The polling question is one that will require research to resolve, especially since there are some fairly stringent and elaborate requirements for polling places, including the need to have them in separate rooms that can be locked securely when not in use. Also, because the Kansas Attorney General is pressuring localities to stop doing polling in church buildings, government buildings will be even more in demand for polling than ever before.
In other business, the joint session also:
* heard from Bruce Givens, Pratt Area Economic Development Corporation President, who said he hoped to procure funding for a full-time employee who could more aggressively pursue grants and other opportunities. He said that his plan for paying for this employee’s salary was to solicit donations from area businesses that would benefit from the resulting economic development. He did not intend to increase the burden on the taxpayers at all.
