White Hall Town Council approves request to purchase new K-9

WHITE HALL, W.Va. (WBOY) — White Hall police officers approached the town’s city council on Monday to request funds for a new police K-9 once its current K-9 Riley retires.

Officers asked the council to provide the department with $6,500 to purchase the K-9, which was approved. These funds will be used alongside $10,000 from the department’s drug forfeiture account.

“We have a dog that is getting ready to retire, it’s getting some age to it. This new dog that they are looking to purchase would also be trained in fentanyl. So, this is a dual-purpose dog, it can track so it can get a scent, and track looking for people, but it will also do the drugs, it will do fentanyl, it will do heroin,” White Hall Mayor Jason DeFrance said.

Also up for consideration Monday night was an update to the town’s police and public work service fee ordinance, which the council unanimously approved. The ordinance was first approved by the council last year and allows the city to charge a fee if the police or public works needs to respond to an incident of a non-resident.

“Sometimes our police force and or public works could be out on the scene for possibly a couple hours,” DeFrance said. “Sometimes there is clean up, oil, whatever. So, there would be a fee for that if it was a substantial incident. The problem was it really didn’t define what a substantial incident was. So, we updated that ordinance to allow the police and or the public works to use their discretion.”

The council also considered and approved allocating sales tax funds that members had previously discussed in a council workshop. Mayor Defrance said that the town’s sales tax revenues have increased because of the redevelopment of the Middletown Commons with new businesses opening up. This has allowed them to reallocate how much money goes to each of the town’s departments.

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