The Georgia Department of Natural Resources’ governing board declined Thursday to revisit its approval to reorganize the department’s law enforcement.
The appeal was filed by a local volunteer group, Friends of Sweetwater Creek State Park, upset over changes in how state parks will be policed in the future.
That’s because the reorganization will eventually take away the policing power of about 80 state park rangers, who work on-site at the parks and juggle part-time policing work among other duties.
Instead, officials plan to divide law enforcement work among its existing 200 full-time law enforcement officers, spread over DNR’s more than 155 properties.
Officials have pitched it as a way to make law enforcement work more efficiently within the agency’s ranks. The plan overall will streamline five separate enforcement units within the agency into one division.
It will be phased in over the next five years, through 2018.
Some, including the Sweetwater group, are worried the plan will stretch the agency’s full-time officers thin and decrease law enforcement visibility within some of the state’s most visited facilities. They also aren’t happy with how the department publicized it.
The board approved the changes in June. Thursday’s vote to deny the appeal was unanimous.
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