With Veishea only two weeks away, local law enforcement agencies are making plans to enforce the alcohol-free pledge and staff events.

Jerry Stewart, assistant director of the Department of Public Safety, said DPS has been preparing for the annual celebration for months.

Most of the preparations have involved scheduling officers to cover the numerous Veishea events.

“The idea is to put people when and where activity occurs,” he said. “That requires adding a lot of personnel.”

Stewart said all DPS officers, including himself and Director Loras Jaeger, will be putting in at least 12 hours each day of Veishea weekend and possibly as many as 16 hours.

Officers will be needed to set up for the Veishea parade on Saturday afternoon, to police the Veishea Main Event concert Friday night at Hilton Coliseum, to cover the Dew the Rec event Saturday night at Lied Recreation Center and to have police presence on busy streets in Ames.

DPS also is working with student-run Veishea committees to train peer security forces and party response teams, Stewart said.

The party response teams are responsible for identifying problem parties and notifying hosts that the party is getting out of control.

“They do not report to the police,” Stewart said. “If they see a problem situation, they talk with the party hosts and say, ‘You might want to get that guy off the roof,’ because those are the kinds of things that alert neighbors and landlords.”

The peer security officers patrol busy streets, such as Welch Avenue, and initiate first contact with possible offenders.

“If they [peer security] see someone coming in somewhere with a beer, they’ll just tell them to pitch it because you can’t have it in that particular area,” Stewart said.

To assist these student-policing security squads, DPS rents extra cars, two-way radios and cellular phones. All the extra equipment, plus all the overtime paid to officers, makes Veishea a very expensive event for DPS, Stewart said.

Veishea also is a large financial burden for the city of Ames.

Ames Police Chief Dennis Ballantine said the extra man-hours and equipment Ames commits to Veishea costs taxpayers $14,000 to $15,000.

Ballantine said his department’s preparations for Veishea are similar to those DPS makes.

“We’re dealing with scheduling right now,” he said. “We’re working with the Veishea risk committee, the peer security groups and other neighborhood groups to give our input and keep things working well. We are just trying to get everyone on the same page.”

Both Ballantine and Stewart said they are approaching Veishea the same way they have for years.

“We’re not really doing anything any more different than we ever have,” Stewart said. “It looked like we had more officers out last year, but that was probably because there just wasn’t as many students.”

Ballantine said he is looking forward to the day when police presence would not have to be increased so much during Veishea.

“It would be nice if we could cut back drastically, but it will be three or four years before I could see how we could start cutting back,” he said.

Each time the department feels the event is under control, it flares back up again, Ballantine said.

Stewart said DPS hasn’t identified a cyclical pattern to Veishea disturbances like the riots in 1988 and 1992 and the Harold “Uri” Sellers murder in 1997. DPS is more concerned with trying to keep small incidents under control, he said.

“Our philosophy at DPS is to address concerns before they become problems,” he said.

Ballantine said he hoped student turnout would increase this year.

“We kind of turned the corner on the alcohol, but now the committees have got to give students a reason to stay in town,” he said. “I’m confident that will happen.”

Stewart said he felt the turnout would be contingent on the weather.

“Much of it will be weather driven,” he said. “We just hope people will behave responsibly.”