Police Cover Costs of Campaign Visits

With a little more than a week to go before the presidential election, candidates and their surrogates are coming to New Hampshire to make a last ditch effort to win the state’s four Electoral College votes. Jill Biden, as an example, the wife of Vice President Joe Biden, is due in Concord this morning. The costs of these trips, including security costs, which are campaign expenses, are supposed to be reimbursed to public entities.

However, increasingly, campaigns aren’t paying the costs of the visits and in the case of the Concord Police Department and the New Hampshire State Police, the departments aren’t asking for reimbursements and are rolling the costs of protecting the candidates into their regular budgets.

In the most recent visits to Concord – Biden’s speech at the Statehouse on Sept. 21, and Mitt Romney crashing his veterans event on Sept. 6 – both departments used a number of personnel for security.

For the Romney event, Concord Police lent seven members of the department for 1.5 hours, according to Police Chief John Duval. The State Police used two troopers to pick up Romney in Lebanon, drive him down to the Statehouse, and then back to his summer home in Wolfeboro, according to Lt. Nicole Armaganian, a spokeswoman for the department. Another three troopers were at the Legislative Office Building – along with Secret Service – while the event was going on.

Both Armaganian and Duval said most of the personnel working that day to protect Romney were on duty and there was no overtime used for the event.

“There was no extra financial resources (used),” Duval said, noting that most of the staffers just put off their ordinary work tasks until later on in the day.

For Biden’s Statehouse speech, 34 troopers worked the event, 12 administrators and 22 patrol officers, at an unknown cost for the staffing. Concord used 20 personnel, including two parking enforcement officers, with a cost of $4,342.85 in overtime to the department. Two staffers spent about 50 hours attending meetings and planning for the events, Duval said.

Neither Duval nor Armaganian said their departments would be invoicing the campaigns for the extra protection costs.

“Being the capital city, we have come to expect that we’re going to have dignitary visits,” Duval said, “so that 50 hours of staff time, for us, is money well spent because we’re able to have a say and a voice at the table in terms of routes, time of day, day of week, in certain circumstances.”

Duval said his department was able to minimize the impact to the community and utilize staffing that was “already on the clock.” While $4,300 “is not pocket change, our exposure certainly could have been a lot greater,” he said. Duval added that the money used for the overtime was taken out of the department’s regular overtime budget.

“We look at our staffing on a daily basis,” he said. “It’s a constant balancing act on how we spend our money.”

Duval said since Concord had a larger police force than some communities, like Durham, which expected to get reimbursed for the cost of a recent visit by President Barack Obama, it was easier to cover the security needs of the visit. In that case, an anonymous donor came up with the money to cover the extra costs of the event.

Duval said while protecting the candidates and their surrogates was part of the job, it was also important to contrast these costs with other police duties.

The standoff on Hoit Road, as an example, cost the department more than $9,000 in overtime costs, surrounding the home and directing traffic away from the incident.

“We will try to recover that money through the criminal justice system,” he said, “should the individual be found guilty, and charged with what we charged him. We’re going to recover that emergency response through that. But that event, I couldn’t plan for, and it cost my department over $9,000.”

For Jill Biden’s visit today, police don’t expect traffic disruptions around the Green and Warren streets event location but commuters may encounter delays or problems if they don't stay out of the immediate area between 10:30 a.m and noon.