WOODVILLE – The Woodville City Council adopted an ordinance amendment pertaining to the city’s police deparment and its ability to have reserve officers.
Sgt. Lawreance Hicks spoke before council on the matter at the governing body’s regular monthly meeting on Monday evening. Hicks said that Woodville PD recently underwent a TCOLE (Texas Commission on Law Enforcement) audit, and while everything passed, the city was found to be in need of an ordinance stating that it can have reserve officers. The reason that this was adopted, Hicks said, was to prevent the practice of “reserve farming,” where cities had been found to have officers, who, as reserve officers, would work traffic duty elsewhere and make money while not doing anything for the cities that held their commissions.
TCOLE recommended the city use Bonham’s ordinance for having a reserve force as a template, and Hicks said that in creating the ordinance and researching it, he also discovered Woodville did not have an ordinance to even have a police department, something he attributed to the age of the agency.
Woodville Police Captain Jathan Borel said the ordinance is set up to have up to the same number of reserve officers as it has full-time members of its force (which is 10 officers). Currently, Woodville PD has five reserve officers: Scott Yosko; Bubba Sheffield; Terry Riley; David Davis and Steven Hoke. The state requires a reserve officer work 16 hours a month to maintain their TCOLE certification, and these officers help provide another set of eyes to back up the full-time officers, Hicks said.
