The City of Demopolis will be the host city for a $300,000 grant from the Alabama Department of Economic and Community Affairs (ADECA) for the 17th Judicial Circuit in its quest to create a drug task force.
District attorney Greg Griggers said it is necessary to have a governing entity serve as the host city for the grant funds in order to obtain the grant.
“A month or so ago, we started seriously debating the need for a 17th Judicial Circuit Drug Task Force,” Griggers told the Demopolis city council Thursday. “We met twice with the heads of all law enforcement agencies in the Circuit. We’ve discussed it, and we all agree that there is a need for a circuit-wide drug task force, with their only job being to go out and work drugs every day throughout the Circuit.
“This is something that we haven’t had in the Circuit for about 15 years. This (restarting the program) is primarily because drugs don’t seem to be slowing down — if anything, they’ve gotten worse. There is a lot of change going on in the law enforcement administrations right now, and I felt it was important to put together a group that would tackle the drug issue circuit-wide so that I would know, as district attorney, that something is being done to police drugs consistently.”
Griggers said that his office had contacted ADECA to apply for a grant to help get the program started. ADECA requires that any grant money it provides has to go through a governmental body, such as a city council or county commission.
The city would set up a separate account to handle the grant funds to ensure that it does not get mixed in with city accounts. The funding would be handled by the 17th Circuit Drug Task Force and the city of Demopolis is not obligated to provide any additional funds with this action.
The task force will be comprised of officers and departments throughout the 17th Judicial Circuit, which includes Marengo, Greene, Sumter and Hale counties.