Silly Stimulus Games — Wilmington Edition

The NJ reported the other day on the award of $11M of Recovery money to the state for public safety projects — of which both NCCo and the City of Wilmington got $1.5M each.

In Wilmington, 17 police officers and 8 firefighters are planned to be laid off since their unions have not agreed to a one year wage freeze.  And the city says that there would be no layoffs if police and firefighters would agree to the wage freeze.

So far, I get it.  The City told all of its unions that it would keep jobs in return for a wage freeze.  Those not covered by unions are taking furlough days.  They’ve decided to partially close the budget gap by not increasing its personnel costs.  Certainly there is plenty of debate to be had about the wisdom of this approach, but they are holding the line on salary costs, and increasing property taxes, water and sewer fees and various fines.

The stimulus money awarded to the City is meant to help make sure that public safety doesn’t suffer from all of these budget problems.  This is how they’ve decided to spend the money:

Baker’s chief of staff, William S. Montgomery, said it makes sense to use the money for the Child Development Community Policing Program, which pairs police officers and social workers to help children who have been traumatized by violent crime. Money also was needed to fund the city’s surveillance camera program, operated for the city by the Downtown Visions group.

So the money that the City paid to Downtown Visions to supplement the fees paid by others to install and monitor cameras around the city was taken out of the regular operating budget and they’ve put it back in via this grant. This piece is simple — the cameras are extremely popular, the police have a view of activity at certain locations that they are delighted to have, and this is a decision that keeps this program going while funds are tight. What is not so simple is the decision to start a spanking new program — the Child Development Community Policing Program — when 1) the current regular Community Policing program is in need of expansion and bolstering and 2) you are laying off officers.

Make no mistake, I think that the Child Development Community Policing Program is an excellent initiative, one that tries to help ameliorate the effects of violence on kids.   But it seems to me that the thing that you want to preserve first is your current force — especially given the incredibly difficult time the City has in recruitment.  17 officers is about 60% of an Academy class, and getting them back once you have the funds may be tough.  The city has already postponed one Academy class with no idea if they can re-assemble this group once funds are back.  Once money is no longer tight, the City is now faced with finding funds to support the new resources required for this program AND funds to try to get back to authorized strength.  It makes much better sense to me that the city should work at keeping the officers they have, then getting to their authorized numbers, and then getting involved with more labor-intensive programs.  Their current Community Policing Program — a program I am a big fan of — needs to be made a 24/7 initiative.  Various proposals have been made to do this by various City Councilpeople to do exactly this — and there has been neighborhood push to expand this program.  We were all told that the Department needed to get to full strength before this could happen, and once they got close to full strength the idea has been blown off.

Using the Recovery Funds to give the police and firefighters wage increases when everyone else is not getting them is not what I am advocating here.  But these funds have to be used to keep the current force strength — lots of people remember (before my time) the Sills admin disasterous layoffs of police, with no new academies for 4 years.  We can’t lose the ground so many fought really hard to get to — increased authorized numbers on the force, more Academies, Community Policing and so on.  I hope that Baker and his people rethink this one and rethink it soon.