On Thursday, the Town Council approved funding for six more patrol officers and three marked police cruisers. They will serve parts of town west of Davis Drive.

The new beat will come at a sizeable cost: $357,616 in local tax dollars.

Council members also granted the police department about $19,000 to outfit patrol vehicles with cell phones.

The number of residents living in an area stretching north and west from Holt Road to O'Kelly Chapel Road nearly doubled to 24,768 between 2004 and 2008.

The same part of town saw a 20 percent increase in the number of incidents reported to police from 2007 to 2008.

Once hired, Cary's newest officers and equipment will serve an area roughly between N.C. 55 and High House Road, from Holt Road to Morrisville-Carpenter Road.

Town leaders predict that the creation of Cary's eleventh patrol beat, which will shrink the size of the existing west Cary beat by five percent, will also decrease response time.

The appeal for funding also comes at a time when municipalities continue to wrestle with how to make ends meet amid a sharp economic downturn.

Council members approved a budget in June that reduced Cary's overall spending plan by 25 percent when compared to the prior fiscal year.

"The issue here really is wants versus needs," councilman Jack Smith said Friday.

"One of the many reasons people come to Cary or find Cary attractive is for the promise of a safe, secure and friendly environment," he added. "... We're big on being preventive versus reactive. So as a council, I think we felt that we're not going to go on the cheap when it comes to police officers."

The town of Cary plans to fund the new positions in part with $136,737 saved on existing vacancies within the police department.

The remaining $239,689 will be drawn from year-to-date savings from debt service interest expenses due to lower-than-expected interest rates.

Town officials had hoped to stave off the added expense in the short term with federal dollars.

Earlier this year, Cary applied for a grant offered through the Community Oriented Policing Services division of the U.S. Department of Justice.

According to the agency's Web site, Cary was one of 7,300 applicants across the country that sought a share of $1 billion granted to the COPS office under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.

Of those applicants, 1,046, or about 14 percent, received a portion of the stimulus funds, which were designed to help communities nationwide to hire or retain police officers.

Police Chief Pat Bazemore said she wasn't caught off guard by the denial of Cary's application.

"There were so many people who applied for these grants," Bazemore said. "They were really targeted to either keep people from losing police officer positions or to reinstate positions lost because of the economy."

"The town of Cary is fortunate not to have these kinds of problems that some other municipalities have had," she added.

"But we still knew that adding these additional officers was going to be a need, and we felt that we should at least try to take advantage of these funds."