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KETTLE FALLS — For the first time in years, the Kettle Falls Police Department is fully staffed. The city announced this month that new hires have filled out the small department’s roster, ending a stretch of vacancies that had left the town of roughly 1,660 people leaning harder than planners intended on the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office and neighboring agencies to cover its streets.
The department’s current roster, listed on the city’s own website, is Chief Brandon Hoover, Officer Hunter McDaneld, Officer Brian Heimbigner and Police Administrative Assistant Jaya Fowler. That is a modest lineup by any city’s standard, but for Kettle Falls it represents a return to a staffing level the department has not consistently held in years, according to the Statesman-Examiner, the Colville paper that has covered the shortage as it dragged on.
The gap was not a secret. The city’s own comprehensive planning documents have described a police department built around three sworn officers and a reserve officer, while stating a goal of at least five sworn officers to adequately cover a jurisdiction that stretches from the Colville River flats up toward Lake Roosevelt. Kettle Falls has never been a department that could absorb a single resignation quietly — when one officer leaves, the math of covering patrol shifts, court appearances and case follow-up falls apart fast for the two or three people left behind.
That arithmetic is why the staffing shortfall has mattered well beyond the police department’s own paperwork. Kettle Falls contracts with Stevens County for jail space, dispatch and prosecution, an arrangement common to small Washington cities that cannot justify running those services alone. But that interagency structure assumes the city is holding up its end on patrol. A department running two officers short does not just mean slower response times on Highway 395 or around the Meyers Falls mill area — it means the county’s dispatch and court systems are absorbing the strain of a partner agency that cannot fully staff its own beat.
Small-town policing in Stevens County has faced this problem for years, and Kettle Falls is not unique in it. Recruiting and retaining sworn officers in a rural department competing against Spokane-area agencies with bigger budgets and shorter commutes has been a persistent complaint from chiefs across the county, not a one-department story. What makes this month’s announcement notable is that Kettle Falls appears, for now, to have solved it — at least on paper, and at least until the next resignation tests the arithmetic again.
Neither the city nor the Statesman-Examiner’s report detailed starting dates, salaries or where the new hires came from, and city hall has not said whether the fifth-officer goal set out in the comprehensive plan has now been met or whether four sworn positions, including the chief, is being counted as full strength under a revised target. Those are the kind of details a city council budget line or a police department staffing memo would normally settle, and neither has surfaced yet in public documents tied to this announcement.
It is also worth asking who was not quoted. The city’s brief announcement and the Statesman-Examiner’s report do not include comment from the Stevens County Sheriff’s Office on what the change means for mutual aid, nor from the Kettle Falls City Council on whether the hires required new budget authority. For a department this size, both would ordinarily be part of the story — a council vote to fund additional positions, or a sheriff’s office statement on whether calls it had been absorbing will now return to city patrol.
For residents, the practical change is simpler to state than to measure: a department that has operated short-handed for years now has bodies to put on patrol, and a chief who has presumably been filling gaps himself now has officers to assign. Whether that translates into faster response times on the ground, or into the county being able to redirect deputies elsewhere, is the follow-up story nobody has written yet.
Kettle Falls last filled out its department amid a broader wildfire season that strained emergency services across Stevens County this summer, from the Bradeen Hill Fire evacuations near Gifford to a statewide burn ban that runs through the end of this month. A fully staffed police department does not fight fires, but it is one fewer thin spot in a county emergency-response network that spent much of the summer stretched thin.
Sources: Statesman-Examiner, City of Kettle Falls.
