COUNCIL’S NEW BUDGET SLASHES POLICE AND FIRE STAFFING LEVELS
By Bill Pearl
The Long Beach City Council voted 8-0 Tuesday night—Suja Lowenthal was absent, vacationing in India—to adopt a fiscal year 2011 budget that cuts 64 sworn budgeted police positions from Long Beach Police Department officers available for citywide deployment and cuts the Long Beach Fire Department budget to the point that its management says there will be rolling brownouts at fire stations citywide.
Besides chopping 64 officers from the force, the Council also voted to cut a replenishment police academy that city management proposed to provide less than 60 days earlier and uses the replenishment cost “saved” (approx. $1.5) to maintain about a dozen police officers that city management and Mayor Bob Foster originally proposed to cut.
The actions are “Plan B” (deep cuts) that Foster and management said weren’t desired but are required unless city employee unions agree to a second year of modifications in their contracts—contracts which Foster supported despite their increased pay and pension costs during his first term of office.
Mayor Foster indicated that he has a meeting scheduled next week with the Police Officers Association board. Firefighters Association President Capt. Rich Brandt said (at the Council podium) that he’ll bring management-sought contract changes to his members.
If the groups’ members don’t approve the changes, the Council cuts will take effect; if they do approve management sought changes, the cuts can be avoided, management says. City Hall’s action effectively puts the POA and Firefighters union members in the public position of determining whether the Mayor/management/Council approved cuts take effect or not; the budget doesn’t take effect until Oct. 1.
The officer reductions will be produced mainly through attrition (meaning there’ll be few if any actual layoffs), but the result will leave Long Beach taxpayers with a police level available for citywide deployment that LBReport.com unofficially estimates as roughly 820 officers. [No Councilmember asked for final number publicly].
In addition, by not funding a replenishment police academy, Long Beach’s net police level will likely drop below 820 officers for citywide deployment by further attrition.
The Council’s action leaves Long Beach with a budgeted police level lower than when Mayor O’Neill took office in July 1994 (839.4), although the city’s population has grown by roughly 50,000 people. (To produce a 2.0 officers/thousand residents level would mean adding 100 officers now).
Over the past two years, the Council has cut roughly 140 sworn officers, using attrition obtained by canceling three successive years of replenishment police academy classes (that would normally replace exiting/retiring officers). The net result leaves Long Beach with a budgeted per-capita police level roughly equivalent to cutting the Los Angeles Police Department’s level by over 25 percent.
No member of the public spoke tonight on the police budget item when public comment was invited (twice).
In other Council budget actions, Council members voted to spend $250,000 from Long Beach’s Tidelands Fund for the Aquarium (a sum not legally required for Aquarium debt bond service), $355,000 for the Arts Council, and a publicly unlisted sum believed to be roughly $150,000 to pay the non-profit LB Museum of Arts Foundation to run the city-owned facility.
