Residents of Isla Vista, tip your drinking caps because there is a new lieutenant in town and he’s big, bad and ready to enforce local ordinances.

Lt. Tom McKinny has been assigned to replace Lt. Russ Birchim as the head of the I.V. Foot Patrol. McKinny joins the I.V. team for the third time in his 25 years with the Santa Barbara County Sheriff’s Dept.

“I worked at the foot patrol between ’83 and ’86 as a deputy and again as a detective in 1992,” McKinny said. “I was hired to lieutenant in June of this year and now I’ve been transferred to the foot patrol, effective Monday.”

The lieutenant has worked with the detectives unit and aviation bureau, and most recently worked in personnel, hiring deputies and other Sheriff’s Dept. office positions.

Birchim said the transfer is for no specific reason other than to reorganize the department to some degree. The county’s new sheriff, Jim Anderson, said these transfers are being made primarily to mix positions up occasionally and “keep new blood flowing through the different departments.”

According to McKinny, the IVFP office is running quite efficiently and he is merely taking over where Birchim left off.

“My first duty is going to be to make the Halloween operation successful and get through it with minimal problems and keep it as safe as possible for everyone out there,” he said. “Now that I’m going back [to I.V.] not as a deputy doing the hands-on law enforcement so much, but as a lieutenant, I plan to meet with the community and get programs and the like going so that Isla Vista can be a safe and enjoyable place to live and work.”

McKinny said he looks forward to coming back to I.V. and that his previous work here has been enjoyable.