MILO – Police Chief Todd Lyford listened patiently to a local merchant who walked into the Milo Police Department recently to vent his frustration about someone repeatedly using his walkway as a urinal.

The businessman, unperturbed by Lyford’s uniform, which bore Brownville Police Department patches, described the large sneaker tracks left behind with the yellow snow.

For Lyford, handling a gamut of complaints from the yellow snow to custody disputes, burglaries and the usual small-town crime is all part of his job, one that covers the neighboring communities of Milo and Brownville where he serves as police chief.

The move by the two communities to share a police chief was a relationship that evolved naturally in March 2003.

“It just seemed always to make sense – you have two towns that are connected to one another by a state route and neither town is too busy,” Lyford said during a recent interview. “Having two separate forces wasn’t a good use of our resources.”

While it makes sense, it apparently is an unusual cooperative effort.

The relationship caught the interest of Leverett, Mass., officials who invited Milo and Brownville officials to visit them in January so they could learn more about the joint operation. Leverett officials, who are considering a similar consolidation with Shutesbury, Mass., a bedroom community of Amherst, told Lyford that they had searched the Web for communities that share a police chief and found only two in the nation – the two communities he serves and another pair of communities out West.

Actually, a shared police chief is not the first venture into which Milo and Brownville have entered. The two communities were a model for regionalization and consolidation long before those became key words at the state level. They share a solid waste facility, a housing rehabilitation grant, a planned industrial park, recreational activities, and fire and police chiefs.

“To preserve the small-town, rural way of life, the only way you can do that is to work with your neighbors closely and be as cooperative in your approaches,” Milo Town Manager Jane Jones said this week. “We’re more or less inventing the wheel ourselves, and that creates its own set of stresses, but we’ve been very willing to work through those. Nothing new ever comes easily.”

Both Jones and Brownville Town Manager Sophia Wilson, who are great friends and have supportive boards of selectmen, view municipal government as a business. They try to maximize the use of resources and minimize the cost, yet continue to provide the same level of services.

“We have managed to keep local control while blending the operations more and more,” Wilson said recently.

Both town officials recognize the importance of keeping the identities of their communities, so while they share the $183,000 cost of the Police Department operation, they maintain separate quarters for the police chief and officers.

In the near future, however, Lyford and his officers will wear patches that read Milo and Brownville Police Departments, a move to eliminate confusion of people unfamiliar with the police operation.

“It’s all the same job,” said Lyford, who earns about $35,500 a year.

The progression was natural for Lyford, who had been Milo’s chief for 15 years and who offered to extend his coverage to Brownville when town officials were unable to find a candidate they wanted to fill the chief’s position.

“This job allows me to be flexible; I get up every day and enjoy coming in to work,” he said.

Lyford starts his shift at 6 a.m. and typically makes the 3-mile trip between the two communities several times a day responding to calls. He usually ends his workday at 5 p.m. but is subject to call after hours when his officers need his advice or assistance.

Lyford, who supervises two full-time officers in Milo and one full-time officer in Brownville, prepares two budgets and answers to two separate budget committees, boards of selectmen and about 3,500 people. Brownville pays 35 percent of his benefits and 18 hours of his time, and Milo pays the remainder. If required to work overtime, Lyford bills the community where the overtime occurred.

Because the towns have two distinct personalities, “he [Lyford] has to be able to keep one foot in both worlds, and that is not an easy thing to do,” Jones said.

But Lyford and his patrol officers, who can serve either town, have done just that. Each town has unique problems – Brownville is a bedroom community of Greater Bangor, while Milo is a service center for eastern Piscataquis County. The officers find themselves being referees in one community and investigators in another.

“Even those I arrest are still human and still need to be treated well,” Lyford said. “If I treat them well and have to deal with them again, I usually don’t have a problem.”

Lyford went and looked at the unique sneaker print in the snow near the Milo business. Measuring his foot against it, he said he had a pretty good idea who the owner was.

Wilson of Brownville said the quality of service has improved, and she has found that more people are calling the local police department now.

“His professionalism, his attention to detail and his dedication have shepherded us through what could have been an awkward transition phase,” she said.

The cooperative venture has resulted in saving about $39,000 for Brownville. Milo, too, would have saved money were it not for the expense of training a new officer.

“There’s no free ride for either community,” Lyford said. “It’s just working together to make it cost-efficient.”

For Jones, it all comes down to this area needing to grow its own solutions.

“We cannot afford to wait for Augusta or anyone else to solve our problems,” the town manager said. “Todd and the Police Department have been the first step towards being able to create the kind of community atmosphere we want to have into the next century.”