Photo Provided Bethesda Police Chief Chris Storm, from right, and Mayor Samantha Burkhead welcome Andy Miller to the force as its newest sergeant. Also pictured is Miller’s mother, Rose. Miller is also police chief in Belmont, where Storm also works. They look forward to closer ties and more community policing.

BETHESDA — The Bethesda Police Department welcomed Andy Miller as the community’s newest sergeant in another step toward providing cooperative law enforcement efforts in Belmont, Bethesda and Goshen Township.

“He’s the chief in Belmont and he’s worked in other departments and now he’s coming to work with me part–time,” Bethesda Police Chief Chris Storm said of Miller. “He’s got years of valuable training and experience, that’s why we put him on. Plus, he knows the village. He works next door, and I work for him. … He’ll help supervise the other officers and help build the department, because we’re probably going to hire if we can one or two part–time officers. But we have to have people come in and drop off resumes.”

Storm added that the department is accepting resumes for another part–time officer.

Currently, the Bethesda department has five part–time officers including Storm, Calvin Logsdon, Kerkulah Kudel, Mark Drake and the non–commissioned chaplain, Brian Bee.

“If I need him to come out to talk to people, that’s what he does if somebody needs to talk to a chaplain. It’s pretty helpful to have a chaplain on a PD,” Storm said, adding that officers’ hourly pay is $14, with Miller making $16 as a sergeant.

“It’s kind of hard to come up with the funding, because we don’t have a lot in our budget,” he said.

Miller said he looks forward to officially working in both communities.

“I’ve worked in Belmont now for five years and I’m pretty familiar with Bethesda, so it was a no–brainer for me,” he said, adding that he and Storm frequently assist each other. “It made sense for the community to be safer, with Chief Storm working at Belmont part–time and now I’ll be the sergeant at Bethesda. It’ll be a way to help each other when it comes to investigating any kind of calls.

“There’s no mutual aid agreement right now. That’s something we’ve spoke about, but we’re at the beginning stage of that,” he continued. “The biggest thing for us working both departments is just the familiarity with the officers. People know I’m in Belmont, people know Storm’s in Bethesda, so just having us at both places will keep us in the loop of things and people able to approach us. They know who we are, they know where we work at, and that’s the biggest thing, in my opinion, when it comes to policing smaller villages.”

Miller has been in law enforcement for about six years. He has worked in Wintersville, St. Clairsville, and Bridgeport.

“I’m used to keeping busy and having a variety of experience when it comes to the bad calls, the emergency calls to the dog barking calls and everything in between,” Miller said. “The most important thing for policing in both of those villages is a very strong connection with the community. … In small villages, you really have to grow that relationship with the people.”

He said one major obstacle is funding.

“That’s definitely one of the challenges we have, giving the best service we can to our community with the budgets that we have,” he said, adding the officers will be as visible and proactive as possible, since neither community has a full–time department.

“They’re doing good things in Bethesda, and I want to be a part of that,” he said.

He said the Belmont police force consists of himself, Storm, Greg Clark, T.J Stewart, William Pelish and Timothy Skinner.