BALTIMORE (Map, News) - Police in Bel Air, Aberdeen and Havre de Grace are asking Harford County to reconsider the formula for sharing public safety money, arguing that the current system is outdated and shorting the municipal cops.

Bel Air town Commissioner Terry Hanley spoke before the County Council on Tuesday, pleading for a rewriting of the formula and the addition of funding to improve the municipal cops’ salaries and benefits.

Every year the county gives each of the municipalities a “refund” for providing law enforcement services that would otherwise fall on the Sheriff’s Office. The formula for calculating that refund, based in part on assessments of how much the property inside the municipalities is worth, needs to be fixed, Hanley said.

“The formula is flawed in several aspects; it was flawed 30 years ago,” Hanley said. “I’m pleading with the council and the county executive to let us have a seat at the table so we can renegotiate this.”

Members of the County Council responded that the budget might be too tight this year to consider additional funding for municipal police. The proposed 2009 budget will have $2.2 million to be divided among the departments, but that would not be enough to give the officers a pay increase or enroll them in a better pension program, Councilman James McMahan

said.

“With budget cuts coming from the state of Maryland, we’re not in a position to do more,” he said. In the future, the towns will need to give the county better estimates for the cost of improving pay and benefits, while the police and administration refine the funding formula, McMahan said.

Any additional money given to the local police would need to be drawn from somewhere else, and Sheriff Jesse Bane said he was worried it would draw heaviest from him.

“If it were done this year, it would have to come out of my budget. ... It would cut my budget to the bone,” Bane said. “My impression is that the executive and council are amenable to doing something, but this is not the year to do it.”

If the county can’t pass along more money, Hanley said he’d want the commissioners to move $5 million in Bel Air’s 2009 budget from updating the police station and town hall to police salaries and pensions.

msantoni@baltimoreexaminer.com