Tontitown first appointed a “conservator of the peace” 102 years ago. By the time year number 103 rolls around, the city will have a full-time municipal police department.

“Some of the old-timers do remember some sort of town marshal, similar to a deputy sheriff, sometime between the 1930s and early 1950s,” said Susan Young, an author who recently completed a history of Tontitown’s early years. “There was no squad car, no jail, just a single peacekeeping officer who also served as de facto street commissioner.”

Since then, the city has relied on the Washington County Sheriff’s Office for police protection. The county covered all the costs for decades. Then the county and city signed an agreement in 2004 that created a full-time substation in Tontitown with the city picking up the tab. All the other incorporated towns in Washington County had started police departments by the late 1970s.

The arrangement will end six months from now. The Sheriff’s Office is pulling out of Tontitown, and Mayor Tommy Granata is working to create a budget for the new police department in the city of 2,516 residents.

“The only thing we’re really missing is the personnel,” Granata said. “We already own the cars, the radio equipment, the guns and the radar units. It’s just a matter of hiring a chief and getting some officers under him.”

The department will likely start with four officers, Granata said. The sheriff’s substation started with four, but expanded to six.

“Long term, we may add more, but I think we can get by with four to start without affecting service,” Granata said.

Tontitown officers will be expected to respond 24/7, although sheriff’s deputies will still respond as backup in emergency situations as they do in other cities throughout the county, said Sheriff Tim Helder.

The switch shouldn’t mean much to the other nearby law enforcement agency, Troop L of the Arkansas State Police.

“We’ll work with whoever’s out there,” said Capt. Lance King, whose troopers are based less than a mile from Tontitown. “We used to work all the wrecks along (U.S.) 412 out there before the Sheriff’s Office took over, and our guys are through there all the time, so I don’t see much changing.”

Granata’s situation is somewhat reversed from the only other startup police department in recent Northwest Arkansas history. Bella Vista incorporated a police department in 2007, abolishing a Benton County Sheriff’s Office substation that covered the community.

“We went to bed one night as deputy sheriffs and woke up the next day as city officers,” said Kenneth Farmer, Bella Vista police chief. “We flipped everyone over in terms of manpower, but had to buy some of the cars and other equipment on our own. Most of what we had went back to the Sheriff’s Office.”

Bella Vista, population 27,027, started with 20 officers and seven civilian support staff. They’ve added another six officers since 2007.

Some of Bella Vista’s support staff were dispatchers as the substation was equipped with its own dispatch center. In Tontitown, dispatch will continue to run through the Sheriff’s Office, which already handles radio traffic for other small towns, Helder said.

Washington County’s Quorum Court approved a resolution Thursday dissolving the interlocal agreement between Tontitown and the Sheriff’s Office. That triggers a six-month fair warning period. After that, deputies will pull out of the city.

Granata hopes the transition happens sooner.

“Ideally, I’d like to see it happen at the first of the year, just to simplify the budgeting,” he said. “If we can get a chief hired and a policy manual in place quickly, I think that’s possible. It’s definitely going to happen one way or another.”