Over 350 Niverville residents have signed a petition calling for town council to conduct a study to determine if an independent police department would be feasible for Niverville.

Lindsay Unrau and Barry Piasta put together the petition and have been going door to door collecting signatures. Unrau says town council has indicated they will not reassess future policing options until Niverville grows past 5,000 residents at which point the cost of RCMP services will go up. She notes the next census will only come out in 2021 and many residents do not want to wait that long to find a solution to Niverville's current crime troubles.

“If we look at the statistics that the RCMP have given us, in this first quarter of 2017, our crime rate is up 45% from 2016. Residents from Niverville are afraid right now. We are hoping that by putting this petition together that it will encourage our town council to do more than what they are currently doing.”

Unrau says so far they have been very encouraged by the participation from Niverville residents who are eager to sign the petition. She notes between herself and Barry Piasta they have been to over 400 houses in Niverville and collected over 300 signatures door to door and another 50 signatures on their online petition. She notes they are really looking for ways to make their community safer and one way to do that would be through an independent police department similar to what Ste. Anne has.

“What we are asking them to do is put together a feasibility study to find out whether or not an independent police department would be successful here in Niverville. We need to figure out the cost, we need to decide if it would be a good fit, but we cannot do that unless we put a study together to determine all of that information.”

Unger says they hope to collect over 500 signatures by the time they present the petition to the town at the next town council meeting on July 18th.

According to the Town of Ste. Anne's financial plan, they spent $502,170 on town police services. With 2016 census date showing Ste. Anne with a population of 2,114 meaning the Town of Ste. Anne spends $228 per resident for police services. For comparison's sake, the Town of Niverville spent $209,000 in 2016 for their RCMP subcontract and they have a population of 4,610.