Submitted photo Austintown Patrolman Brad McFadden and his K-9 partner Eras work together as a team.

AUSTINTOWN — On May 5, Austintown Township trustees approved a motion to eliminate the police department’s K-9 program to save money.

The very next day, one of those trustees secured a donation to maintain the program until next year.

Austintown police department’s two dogs, Gunney and Eras, handled by patrolmen Jason Murzda and Brad McFadden, respectively, would have been retired on July 1, but Trustee Rob Santos found a way to keep the dogs on the job for the rest of 2025.

“We had to make the decisions we had to make. This was a cut we definitely did not want to make. But I had an anonymous donor willing to write a $10,000 check,” he said. “Other community members have since donated, and that reduces the amount of the check the initial donor will have to write.”

Santos said other donations via GoFundMe include $1,500 from members of the Austintown Senior Center, $1,435 from resident Ryan Previttee, $1,000 each from the Austintown Eagles Lodge 3298 and Austintown Eagles Ladies Auxiliary, $2,500 from the Mahoning-Shenango Kennel Club, and $500 from another anonymous donor.

That all adds up to $7,935, so the original donor will only need to cover $2,065.

The police dog program costs the department about $20,000 a year, but Santos said Austintown is only going to accept donations for the rest of 2025 because legislation has been introduced in the statehouse that may force Gunney and Eras out anyway.

Ohio House Bill 396 is a bipartisan bill introduced in February by state Rep. Sean P. Brennan, D-Parma, and state Rep. Josh Williams, R-Toledo, that would provide police departments with funds to replace drug-sniffing dogs trained to hit on marijuana, in light of the 2023 passage of Issue 2, which legalized recreational marijuana.

The bill would retire those dogs and provide up to $20,000 to train dogs that will not hit on marijuana. The bill states that it is extremely difficult to retrain police dogs not to hit on a substance they already have been trained to sniff out.

As Santos explained, the bill is founded on concerns about Fourth Amendment violations.

“If someone buys legal marijuana and they put it in their glove box and get pulled over, and the police dog sniffs that marijuana and tells the officer there’s an illegal substance in the car, then the police have the right to search that vehicle,” he said.

The problem, in the advent of legalized recreational marijuana, is that while the marijuana may be legal, the police may still search the rest of the vehicle. But if they find anything illegal, that item may not be admissible as evidence in court because the search was based on the dog identifying a substance that is now legal.

In law, this doctrine is referred to as “fruit of the poisonous tree” — evidence obtained by an illegal search.

With the potential looming for marijuana-sniffing dogs like Gunney and Eras to be replaced, Santos said the township wants to be responsible about collecting donations for the program.

“We do not want to mislead any of the generous donors who are willing to contribute to keep our K-9 program intact,” he said. “We would hate to collect $20,000 for next year and then we’d have to remove those dogs anyway, and reallocate those funds for a purpose the donors did not intend.”

HB 396 has been referred to the House Finance Committee, where it awaits a first hearing.

Santos said Austintown will monitor the bill closely and make a determination about 2026 based on its passage or failure. He said he’s optimistic that, one way or another, the township will find support for the program.

“We’re confident, because of how quickly we got community support for this year, that we would be able to get it for next year,” he said.

Trustees have worked with the police department since early 2024 to cut more than $275,000 from the financially-struggling department’s budget.

But on Monday, they approved a motion to pursue a new levy for the department. Voters in November defeated a 2.4-mill continuous levy that would have generated $2.6 million for the police department. This year’s proposal is a 2.22-mill, five-year renewable levy.

Trustees will ask Mahoning County Auditor Ralph Meacham to determine how much the levy will raise, but based on last year’s math, a 2.22-mill levy could be expected to generate about $2.35 million per year.

Police Chief Valorie Delmont said the department is at a point where it cannot continue under the current conditions without reaching a point of financial insolvency from which it cannot recover.

PRESS CONFERENCE ON POT

In a related matter, Austintown will host a joint press conference at 3 p.m. Friday at the township hall, with state Rep. Lauren McNally, D-Youngstown, and county, city, and township leaders from Mahoning and Trumbull counties to discuss the potential loss of funding from recreational marijuana sales. Among those expected to attend are Struthers Mayor Catherine Cercone Miller, Girard Mayor Mark Zuppo, Hubbard Mayor Ben Kyle, Niles Mayor Steve Mientkiewicz and Warren Mayor Doug Franklin.

When Issue 2 passed in 2023, the law stated that Ohio would collect a 10% excise tax on the sale of marijuana from legal dispensaries, and that 36% of that tax revenue would be given to the communities where the dispensaries operate for as long as they are in business.

But state legislators and Gov. Mike DeWine have proposed cutting the funding to only 20% and only for the next five years — a move that could cost local communities hundreds of thousands of dollars in revenue.

For townships like Austintown, where the local budgets rely on levy dollars for about 88% of their operating revenue, any extra funding from such sources is a valuable bonus that Santos and others do not want to lose.

A dispensary is likely to open in Austintown later this year, along the Interstate 80 and state Route 46 corridor, operated by Terrell Washington, owner of Leaf Relief on Market Street in Youngstown. Last June, trustees approved zoning to allow only one dispensary in the township.