Dear Editor:
Another disappointing police budget proposal - this time with a near-double digit percentage increase.
Before the current police chief was hired, past police budget percentage increases were about double that for the rest of the city; now, with the current chief, it’s about four times that for the rest of the city.
When hiring new managers, council needs to investigate a person's past record regarding their budget increases and/or their expectations around budgets.
The comment on spending to keep the essentials seems fair. However, my interpretation is about keeping essentials that are currently in place.
What seems unreasonable and not "essential" is hiring additional expensive resources such as a K9 officer (you can just rent the OPP unit the odd time one is needed) and three more resources for communications purposes (can't just one existing suffice for the city this size). Adding a few more sergeants seems reasonable as it allows current temporary sergeants to return to front lines.
One can accept a crime analyst if it will help police somehow be more pre-emptive or prioritize operations. Council should request, whenever new resources are added to payroll, that evaluations be done afterwards to quantify significant improvements - to see if there is quantifiable justification for the new hires; otherwise, these new positions should be declared redundant at future budget reviews.
Hopefully, the statement made about facing serious financial challenges ahead means the police will need to restrain their future budget increases to much more reasonable ones - and not about placing excessive financial demands on taxpayers.
Unfortunately, the majority of council will not have the courage to turn down the proposed police budget increase – they never do – and will simply just rubber stamp it. For the next city election, taxpayers need to work to replace certain councillors with ones that will have the courage to say ‘no’ sometimes to the police and be more cognizant of pressures placed on taxpayers.
Concerned taxpayers should contact the Ontario premier about scrapping legislation on police boards and have city council only make the fair and responsible decisions for all line items for all departments, including police.
The Ontario premier will start to pay attention of more people complain.
Manuel Marta Sarnia