As always, cops in Coupeville will continue to nab the bad guys. The question in the central Whidbey town now is: Who’s going to prosecute those lawbreakers?

In an early indication of what might lie in store for a budget-bruised Island County, county prosector Greg Banks recently informed Coupeville Mayor Nancy Conard that his office will stop prosecuting the city’s non-traffic misdemeanors as early as Feb. 1. Banks cited the recent loss of a part-time legal secretary due to budget cuts as the primary reason for his decision.

The county prosecutes about 60 misdemeanors a year for Coupeville at an average cost of $147 per case, Banks said. While the lost secretary’s position saved the county only about $15,000 dollars, Banks said the shuffling of cases and restructuring he now needs to do in his office means he is focusing on only those duties the county prosecutor is mandated to perform.

“It’s been an issue that’s needed to be addressed in terms of how can I deal with staffing shortages,” Banks said. “Unfortunately for the town of Coupeville, that’s a discrete number of cases that I’m certainly not mandated to do.”

Conard, in turn, said Coupeville does not have the staff to prosecute its own cases. Therefore, she is hoping to reach some sort of compromise with the Island County Prosecutor’s Office.

“We have had an agreement for quite a few years now in which we provide backup support of the (county) sheriff, and the county provides us with jail space and prosecution services,” Conard said Wednesday. “It seems like it’s a fair trade.”

In the letter he sent to Conard on Dec. 18, 2001, Banks appears to disagree with this assessment of the situation.

“In 1999,” he wrote to Conard, “you and I discussed the fact that Washington State law requires that municipalities reimburse counties for the cost of misdemeanor prosecutions.”

He went on to write that the town of Coupeville “believed it compensated the county through ‘in kind’ services to other departments.”

Banks also points out in the letter that state law requires an interlocal agreement between Coupeville and the county, and that “the town pay ‘true and fair value’ for the services received.”

Conard, however, wants to maintain some semblance of that service as it has existed thus far.

“I expect that this will be resolved, but there’s a little bit of posturing to be done,” she said at Coupeville’s town council meeting on Tuesday.

Conard said she hopes Banks will continue to prosecute cases beyond the Feb. 1 deadline, an arrangement Banks said he would be amenable to, at least for a while.