HANCOCK — The Hancock City Council held its regular June meeting on Wednesday evening via Zoom. One of the largest items on the agenda was the amending and approval of the city budget for the year 2020-2021.

A main point of discussion involved the “Defund the Police” movement, which was brought up by two community members during a public comment period, and again by Councilor Will Lytle during discussion of the motion. Lytle was also the only councilor that voted against approving the budget.

“Given the context, I think this is an appropriate time to express the intent to manage these resources in a different way,” said Lytle. “(…) We have a great police force and a great police chief who can help us implement these changes.”

City Manager Mary Babcock and councilor John Haeussler pointed out that many aspects of police spending are already locked in through multi-year contracts that have already been signed. Further, some of the funding for the municipal police comes from the state and is difficult to reallocate in some of the ways proposed by advocates of the Defund the Police movement.

“I know that given world events right now it’s easy to look at the world we live in and the world that we want, but if you look at the City of Hancock, over the last thirteen years or so, the police department has already had a negative budgetary impact,” said Haeussler.

A discussion was briefly held on potentially tabling the budget to continue the discussion later as the meeting had already been ongoing for over three hours by the time the budget was brought up. However, deadlines for the city to have their budget submitted to the state precede the next scheduled council meeting.

While the council voted to approve the budget as it was without changing the police budget, members of the council did say that they were open to addressing the police budget in different ways. Haeussler advocated for enacting funding changes “by attrition” by not filling potentially unnecessary staff positions as they arise rather than reducing staff all at once.

“It’s something that we should look at every year. We should always be looking at efficiencies,” said Haeussler.

The Defund the Police movement, which has been closely related to but is not the same as the Black Lives Matter movement, advocates for directing funding away from law enforcement toward other community resources.