Nearly a month after a not-yet-public proposal for Carrboro’s Police Department to merge with Chapel Hill’s set discourse ablaze, Carrboro Town Council members shared their latest thoughts and supported the town manager’s background work on the matter.
Tuesday’s business meeting for the elected officials stretched late into the night, with Town Manager Patrice Toney’s presentation coming after midnight — but provided the first comprehensive opportunity for the council members to collectively receive Toney’s presentation while hearing public comment on the issue. The idea, which was borne from a chance to reduce Carrboro’s municipal spending, aims to transition Carrboro Police officers to working at the Chapel Hill department’s headquarters and operating as Town of Chapel Hill employees by summer 2029. Carrboro would provide a recurring contribution to Chapel Hill to cover salaries, which is projected to exceed $3.3 million a year, but it could ultimately face savings of roughly $3 million each year by not being responsible for the operational costs.
Toney’s presentation and the council’s comments involved no formal action from the elected officials — although the group resoundingly voiced their support for the town manager amid criticism of both the idea, its internal formulation and botched rollout to the public.
Here are highlights from the topic from Tuesday night’s meeting:
Toney: Honor Carrboro’s Values, While Strengthening Its Future
Largely sharing the same presentation and details provided during a public forum she hosted on October 29, Toney said mounting pressures to the town’s annual operating budget was a key driver for exploring merging Carrboro’s police with Chapel Hill’s. Public safety expenditures currently take up 27% of the budget, costing around $5.2 million in FY26. Along with the town trying to cut back on using its fund balance for annual operations, the local government now faces additional challenges in a financial landscape with difficult inflation and fewer methods of raising revenue like an impending constitutional amendment.
That means, Toney said, examining ways to improve operational resilience and efficiencies. But she also pitched the idea as a chance to improve Carrboro’s public safety. Chapel Hill offers a more competitive salary to officers, while having more investigative resources, a newer building for the department headquarters and a successful crisis response model in place.
“The 24/7 crisis co-responder has existed in Chapel Hill [and] has been successful for many years,” said Toney. “It’s the same 911 system — yet if you live in Carrboro, that service is not extended to us, as we speak. In a unified policing system, we would have access to the civilian crash investigators, 24/7 crisis responders, virtual reporting opportunities and then the CARE team. We do have at least one [social worker who is] officially as part of the CARE team, but that pool would expand. And the training would also be in alignment with Orange County training and how Chapel Hill has their social workers responding.”
The phased approach presented to the community and town council includes moving the Carrboro Police Department staff and officers to Chapel Hill Police’s headquarters before determining the “longer-term legislative process.” After staff move to 7300 Millhouse Road, cohorts of five Carrboro Police officers would transition in four-month increments to operate out of the headquarters too before undergoing Chapel Hill’s officer hiring and training requirements. The terms of the short-term operations would be laid out in an inter-local agreement — which has not yet been formally written — before both local governments determine the legal language necessary for the joint public safety coverage of the neighboring towns.
Some of the public feedback shared with the town officials includes concerns of losing the town’s identity or values reflected in its police department. Toney acknowledged those — but said she believes they could still be kept in this model.
“Exploring a different way of delivering police services does not mean abandoning Carrboro’s values, diminishing the contributions of our officers or disregarding the concerns of our residents,” the town manager said. “My responsibility extends beyond preserving the structure of today’s organization. It includes anticipating the needs of tomorrow. Community policing and professional policing are not competing priorities. We need both.”
Carrboro’s Police Department is currently headquartered at the Century Center, a town-owned facility scheduled for repairs in the next five years. Moving the police operations to Chapel Hill Police’s Millhouse Road headquarters would provide more operating, and upgraded, space. (Photo by Brighton McConnell/Chapel Hill Media Group.)
Residents Voice Frustration Over Timeline, Public Participation and Feasibility
The public comment period on Tuesday was slightly less hostile than the tone of the October 29 gathering, although several speakers did not mince words in their frustration of how the potential merger was revealed to the public. Residents’ concerns ranged from how quickly Toney’s proposed timeline for the project begins transitioning officers (with the leaked draft saying November 2026), to how internal rumors of a merger caused months of stress and uncertainty to Carrboro Police officers, to simply not wanting to be associated with Chapel Hill.
Because Toney’s proposal was learned through either social media or a Chapel Hill-based newsletter before the town’s official release, many Carrboro residents spent the last four weeks saying they believed the process appeared rushed, pre-determined without public engagement, or an abdication of public responsibilities. Most of the speakers who commented on the agenda item said they were not in favor of the proposal, with some comparing it to a corporate merger strategy and others calling for a more intentional review to be conducted.
The latter group included former Carrboro Police Chief Carolyn Hutchison, who worked a variety of roles in the town’s department across 30 years before her retirement in 2013. While acknowledging the operational challenges that Carrboro Police Department faces, she also said absorption by Chapel Hill likely does not automatically mean Carrboro residents would experience improved public safety. The retired police chief advocated for using specific data sets to weigh the benefits, like actual staffing levels, emergency response times, crime clearance rates and community satisfaction.
“If consolidation is truly better, the evidence should truly demonstrate that,” Hutchison told the town council members. “We should not confuse having access to a larger police organization with guaranteeing better police service to Carrboro residents. I ask council to slow down, examine the evidence, consider the alternatives, and make sure that whatever decision is made puts the interest of Carrboro’s residents first.”
Council Vocally Back Town Manager, Denouncing Attacks and Tone of Discourse
Some of the criticism directed toward Toney in recent weeks, however, bordered on personal attacks — which drew condemnation from both Carrboro Town Council members and some public commenters on Tuesday.
While accusations of deception or limiting public input were levied, each elected official at the dais stated their support of Toney and thanked her for exploring the idea of police consolidation. Council Member Jason Merrill spoke first, saying how people conducted themselves regarding the topic had both gotten him “pretty fired up” and disappointed.
“This is actually trying to put some progress in our progressive labels and values,” he told Toney. “And I really appreciate that.”
Council Member Danny Nowell said he believes the way the proposal reached the public does not reflect any desire or attempt to “skip any steps” in the process. To him, reframing the proposal less as an abdication of policing responsibilities and more as an exploration of fiscal responsibility is crucial.
“A town manager proactively exploring a solution is a town manager doing her job,” Nowell said. “There should be hundreds of projects right now that this council does not have detailed operational oversight of. There should be projects in economic sustainability, in transit planning…in every single one of our divisions that we are not yet ready to comment on.
“I think we can take it as evidence that some members of our [local government] were displeased with this plan, and that I take seriously,” the two-term council member said of the fact sheet’s leak. “We need to see the way that this has reached the public is a reflection of that displeasure. But this has badly compromised our ability to have a productive public discussion about this and every issue in our town government could be vulnerable to a similar violation of public trust.”
Mayor Pro Tem Eliazar Posada-Orozco said Toney was within her job description and legal parameters to explore a department merger, criticizing the public discourse that steered toward personal attacks of the town manager and council members. He described it as “completely unacceptable,” especially as the public process for the project has yet to fully play out.
“We are setting the priorities,” Posada-Orozco said of his council colleagues. “We will have a debate. We will have the conversations of whether or not this moves forward. We will have the decision. But we don’t run the day-to-day operations of this town. We are not the ones who are ensuring that all the departments are doing their job, and we’re not the ones tasked with continuing to come up with ideas to make this town more efficient and [serve] our community better. We hired someone who is extremely qualified, extremely thoughtful and cares deeply about this town to do that for us.
“I just want to say publicly, town manager,” Posada-Orozco added, “you have my full support as you continue to do your job.”
Bringing more fully-fledged proposals to the public for consideration is one of the goals of the Town of Carrboro under Toney, according to Council Member Catherine Fray — an effort which they and the rest of the council want to improve decisive action.
“We’re talking about ‘The Carrboro way [of doing things]’ and there is an extent to which for a long time ‘The Carrboro Way has been to chew things to death in the public space, never actually get to the proposal details and then shelve the whole thing because somebody at some point gets ticked off,” Fray said. “This is actually something that we are trying to do more of is to come up with ideas about how to improve our town services, how to improve our residents’ lives, how to make a concrete difference for you. And we want those to be solid enough proposals that people can assess them.
“And then the critical point,” Fray concluded, “[is] we want to actually act on those proposals and make them real.”
What Are Council Members’ Priorities in a Formal Proposal?
Still, the Carrboro Town Council did not immediately endorse the plan for merging the town’s police forces with Chapel Hill.
Fray said they want to see concrete evidence of how such a change could improve the accountability of the police department and where the investigative responsibility would lie if there was an officer-involved issue within the town limits. Posada-Orozco said one of his primary concerns is current Carrboro Police officers retaining their roles after going through Chapel Hill’s training process.
Merrill agreed with both issues, and added he’d prefer a “prescribed timeline” for a chain of action from both town governments to establish when a vote on a merger could take place. Doing so could outline additional times for public comment beyond Carrboro continuing to take in feedback through its Engage website page for the project. Council Member Fred Joiner added that he wants to hear more perspectives from Black and brown residents in the town who may have different relationships or concerns around local policing.
Many of the operational structure, oversight and accountability details would be established in an inter-local agreement necessary between the towns of Carrboro and Chapel Hill. Toney said that a version of that contract is being drafted and will ultimately be shared with both town councils, staffs and communities before any public vote to adopt the agreement.
Meanwhile, the Town of Chapel Hill’s elected officials have not formally weighed in on the topic of a police department merger. While Toney had been communicating with her peer, Town Manager Ted Voorhees, council members are set to receive their first formal presentation on the pitch next Wednesday, November 18. The direction Carrboro Town Council members gave town staff was to bring a draft inter-local agreement forward on December 1 and — if acceptable and approved — that would be considered by the Chapel Hill Town Council on December 9.
To watch the full November 10 Carrboro Town Council meeting, visit the town government’s YouTube channel.
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