REDMOND – After nearly four years on the Redmond police force, officer Hannah Copeland said she still gets lost on her way to calls. She knows Redmond’s street grid – she keeps a laminated map in her car visor – but Redmond is growing so fast, it’s hard to keep up.

On Monday morning, Copeland drove her police cruiser around the city’s perimeter scouting for new roads and houses. It’s become part of her regular routine, since new development pops up in a matter of days.

”We work four days on and four days off,” said Copeland, a 27-year-old officer. ”It seems like you can come back in four days and they’ve put in five new streets.”

Just then, her car approached a vast expanse of turned earth with rows of wooden frames where soon, houses will be. ”See?” said Copeland, pointing out of the driver’s side window. ”They just started that on my last four days off.”

As the fastest growing city in Central Oregon, Redmond is undergoing a metamorphosis. Empty fields are giving way to shopping areas and houses, which necessitate new roads and bridges connecting them together. But for police, the rapid growth brings challenges.

An expanding patrol area and a growing number of calls for service means a heavier workload. And if voters decide in favor of annexation in November, officers will have to spread themselves thinner.

To complicate matters, impenetrable traffic and ongoing road construction is making the city increasingly difficult to navigate. There are 25 officers on patrol in Redmond, according to the 2003 Annual Report, but officers say they’re straining to handle the workload and still offer personal, quality service to residents.

”It’s kind of hard because our motto is that we don’t just go in and deal with problems as they happen. We try to go in and fix the problem so we don’t have to keep responding to the same call time and time again,” Copeland said. ”That stuff takes time.”

According to Redmond Police Chief Lane Roberts, even though patrol officers feel stretched, the police department is not short staffed. In line with an agreement with the city, the police department hires according to the number of calls it receives per year.

However, the plan does not provide extra officers to fill in when someone is absent.

”To an extent it’s a matter of how law enforcement works. If you have somebody who is injured or on vacation, that reduces the number of people and increases the number of calls that the officers are taking,” Roberts said.

”It doesn’t take a mathematical wizard to know that you’re transferring those calls to other officers and they’re going to work really hard,” he said.