Officer Schreiber leaving Colby-Abby Police Dept.

A 17-year veteran of the Colby-Abbotsford Police Department, officer Nathan Schreiber, will be resigning from the department later this month in order to take a job as a detective with the Clark County Sheriff’s Department.

The news was announced by police chief Jason Bauer at Monday’s joint police commission meeting. Schreiber’s last day will be April 22, Bauer said.

The job opening has already been posted, with an application deadline at the end of the month. Bauer said he would like to do interviews with the top applicants at the May 10 commission meeting.

Bauer said he also plans on doing an exit interview with Schreiber and sharing the results with the commission in closed session.

Like he’s done in the past, Bauer said he will be filling in the gaps until a new officer can be hired.

_ Colby resident Mike Kreciak once again spoke to the commission about his neighbors’ dogs being loose. He quoted from the city ordinance regarding “atlarge dogs,” which are defined as those that are off their owners’ premises without a leash or other means of control. He also claimed the dogs were unlawfully damaging other people’s property, partly by urinating or defecating on their land.

“Nowhere in this ordinance does it give anyone the right to change the regulations at their own discretion,” he said.

Kreciak says he has numerous videos of the dogs violating the ordinance, and said it took a lot of complaints to get a citation issued to the owner in 2019.

“It took 18 months before a ticket was issued after so many warnings were given,” he said.

Kreciak said the dogs continue to run loose, and he asked the commission to pass a motion to remove the dogs from the city “out of the best interest of public safety.” He also said his neighbors should be issued more fines and banned from owning other dogs in the future.

Commission president Todd Schmidt said the commission could not take any action on Kreciak’s recommendation because it was not on the agenda.

“We’ll consider it, perhaps, at a future meeting,” he said.

_ Bauer updated the commission on the department’s progress with a new incident-based reporting system. During the month of March, he said the officers’ error rate on the new reports dropped to 2.6 percent, or one out of 39 reports.

Bauer said department secretary Jessica Weich, who checks over all of the reports for possible mistakes, is going to be contesting the one error that was reported because she doesn’t believe it was done incorrectly.

The department needs an error rate below 3 percent to be certified by the Wisconsin Department of Justice. Bauer said there are other hoops to jump through, so he expects to the process to take another couple months.

_ During his monthly report, Bauer said the department has been “extremely busy over the past couple weeks. This includes 11 deployments of the K-9, which resulted in six drug arrests.

_ The commission approved $24,575 in monthly expenditures.