STERLING - Joan Kelley was passing the Sterling Nature Center one night last May when she spotted a group of young adults driving along one of the trails. Kelley, the Sterling town supervisor, stopped to ask the teenagers to leave, informing them that the center was closed.

Instead of accepting that they'd been caught, the group proceeded to follow Kelley in their car, and Kelley, who was alone and by this time frightened, used her knowledge of the area's back roads to lose the troublemakers.

Security in the village of Fair Haven and the town of Sterling, Cayuga County's northernmost points, is lacking, Kelley said.

A few months after Kelley's confrontation, she and several members of the town and village boards formed a public safety committee to look at the feasibility of hiring part-time community police for the area.

Fair Haven Mayor Bill McVea, who was part of these discussions, believes that problems with late-night partiers on West Barrier Bar, as well as the increased tourist population in the summer and frequent speeding on the local roads, need to be addressed.

During the day, there is one car patrolling all of Post 1, which includes Sterling, Victory, Cato, Ira and Conquest, said Cayuga County Sheriff Rob Outhouse. In the A-line shift, which runs midnight to 8 a.m., the sheriff's office doesn't have enough personnel to cover that post exclusively and splits the county in half with the state police. McVea noted that it can sometimes take the Wolcott division of the state police 20 to 25 minutes to respond. This leaves “very little time left to come on up to Fair Haven and look for speeders,” McVea said.

Despite Kelley ‘s and McVea's concerns, a majority of the more than 100 people at a public information meeting rejected the community police proposal, which would have hired Spectrum Security at a cost of $44,000 a year (to be split between the village and town).

A part-time police officer would have patrolled the streets an average of 24 hours a week.

“Overwhelmingly, people said we don't want it or we don't need it,” Kelley recalled.

McVea, who still favors the proposal, said that people rejected the idea for a variety of reasons.

“I think maybe it just reflects the kind of independence of people up here,” he said.

Outhouse attributed the rejection to people's desire to have professional police officers, including sheriff's deputies and the state police, patrol their roads.

They want the type of protection they have now, and they would like the Legislature to provide them with more of it, Outhouse said, adding that he expects to discuss such issues with the Legislature's Public Safety Committee in the future.

“The fact is we are spread thin, as we are everywhere,” Outhouse said, noting that the county has around 18 deputies to cover 700 square miles. “The public does understand that we're undermanned, and we just do the best we can with what we have.”

Staff writer Linda Ober can be reached at 253-5311 ext. 237 or linda.ober@lee.net