News

HAZARDOUS STREETS: City has 10 crashes a day, council hears

By Bill Moss, Published: February 24, 2017

Car crashes and animal control calls are up substantially over the past five years in the city of Hendersonville — creating a service strain that is sparking a City Council discussion on adding police officers.

City Manager John Connet presented the numbers on Friday as the council began its annual planning retreat. The idea, he said, was to look at what the city provides and whether it needs to do more or less.
“Is the service level where you want it to be? Do we need to go up or down?” he said. “If you want to raise levels of service there’s a cost to that and that plays into things that will come after this discussion” — including new buildings, park improvements.
“Are there areas for improvements or are there some areas that may not be a priority anymore?”
High on the list is police calls.
The city police responded to 31,479 calls for service in 2015-16, up 5,100 from 26,379 calls for service in FY 2011-12. The city police force had added no officers during that period.
“Over the last five to seven years the police department has done a lot of outreach that is not accounted for,” said Police Chief Hubert Blake.
Over the same period, animal control calls are up by 421, from 627 to 1,048, ranging from stray dogs to dogs locked in cars to more serious incidents.
“It’s a wide gamut, some take a lot of time, some don’t take much time at all,” Connet said.
The most startling number in the report on calls for service was that Hendersonville has car 10 crashes a day and ranks seventh in the state in the number of motor vehicle crashes per 1,000 population.
“Those things are tying up your patrol squad and it doesn’t allow them as much during the day to do normal patrol or to do specialized patrol,” Connet said.
“Anybody figure out why we have so many wrecks?” City Councilsaid.
“People run a lot of red lights,” Chief Blake said.
“Every time we pull out of our driveway we have a one in four chance of having an accident,” he said. “I mentioned last night that we pay a lot bigger than we are. We know here’s 25,000 to 35,000 in our community day in and day out. That increases our level of service because we have so many people in our community. Part of (the crash rate) is the age of our community.” At roughly an hour per call, crash investigation “impacts our level of service in other areas.”