County commission to decide fate of sheriff’s department ‘tank’

Can Lenawee County afford to keep its “tank?”

A committee was assigned the mission of answering that question after a debate Wednesday among Lenawee County commissioners over maintaining an M113 armored personnel carrier.

The military vehicle often referred to as “the tank” by county commissioners has been controversial since it was acquired in 2005 through a United States Army program. Appearing in parades is the only duty the M113 has performed so far as a sheriff’s department vehicle.

“The thing is a detriment,” Ralph Tillotson, R-Adrian Twp., said Wednesday. The county just paid $3,200 to repair a concrete driveway that was broken by the heavy vehicle, he said.

The county also paid $10,000 a year in insurance on the M113. The policy was canceled in 2008 when commissioners discovered it would only pay the replacement cost of the $525,000 vehicle.

Sheriff Jack Welsh defended the armored vehicle as an important tool for the county’s emergency response team.

When it was acquired, former Sheriff Larry Richardson said it would be used in barricaded-gunman or similar situations where officers could need bulletproof transportation.

Welsh said the M113 is currently out of action due to mechanical problems. A board that governs the county’s emergency response team must be involved in deciding what to do with the vehicle, he said.

The team is made up of police officers from the sheriff’s department and the Adrian, Tecumseh and Blissfield police departments.

Welsh also disagreed the vehicle is a danger to roads and driveways. The weight distribution on the M113’s rubber tracks makes it no worse than the county maintenance department’s dump truck, he said. There is no evidence the recent damage to driveway concrete was the fault of the M113, he said.

Commission chairman Jim Van Doren, R-Tipton, assigned the criminal justice committee the job of drawing up a plan for the tank.

John Tuckerman, R-Blissfield, warned against being too quick to order the tank dropped from the sheriff’s department arsenal. There were some obligations assumed by the county when it accepted the M113 from the Army, he said.

“If we don’t keep it up and maintain it, we have to return it to the federal government, and that might not be cheap either,” Tuckerman said

The M113 was acquired through a program of the Army’s Tank Automotive Research, Development and Engineering Center, which also provided them to Washtenaw and Macomb counties in Michigan.

The only cost to the county was in converting it from steel tracks to rubber treads for use on paved roads. Briskey Brothers Construction Inc. of Tecumseh volunteered to truck the armored personnel carrier from a base in Anniston, Ala. A Manchester body shop donated a coat of black paint before sheriff’s department emblems were attached.