Police contracting ballot measure is wrong step

A more weighty decision now centers on the city’s police force and whether it should entertain the idea of contracting it out to either Redwood City or the Sheriff’s Office.

Both would save the city approximately $2 million but vary in the details. The Sheriff’s Office proposal would staff a San Carlos bureau with 23 full-time employees, four part-time employees and 20 percent of a sergeant’s positions. Salaries and benefits are calculated at $6,030,000.

The total price tag, including vehicles and associated costs, is $6,772,000, although it does not include overtime for special details or communications.

Redwood City offered San Carlos two options, one a base staffed up to the sergeant level and another that adds in a dedicated captain and administrative support. Officers would be assigned exclusively to San Carlos but Redwood City resources could be shifted in emergency situations. The proposals calls for 22.8 full-time employees under option one and 24.8 employees under the enhanced option. The first carries a price tag of $5,966,744 while the second is $6,409,313.

The Redwood City proposal is a two-year contract with a 5 percent annual increase, but both aspects are negotiable.

Both are slated for discussion during a June 28 meeting. In the meantime, a group of residents and the Police Officers Association began the first steps in placing a measure on the ballot that would tie the hands of the council when it comes to contracting police services. Doing so would limit the City Council’s ability to find revenue savings and would further hamstring the urgent effort to balance the city’s budget. It could also spoil the city’s ability to take advantage of the Sheriff’s Office proposal since Sheriff Greg Munks said he has held open vacant spots in his department in anticipation of the agreement and will have to fill them if the San Carlos decision is delayed.

The sentiment behind the measure is valid. It is a frightening proposition to have a significant portion of your city staff — particularly one with the sole responsibility of keeping residents safe — contracted out to another agency. But these are desperate times and the city must remain solvent. Going to voters for more taxes already failed and the only other option would be to drastically cut workers including police personnel. This alternative would have too much harm.

This is not the only reason why moving forward with this ballot measure is wrong. The timeline is extremely tight if not impossible, it will prove to a tremendous distraction for the city when keen focus is necessary and, if it passes, would run rough-shod over the city’s budget since it would require the city to rescind any decision it might make this summer regarding police contracting and force cuts to other departments to make up the imposed shortfall. And it runs against the premise of representative government. There is a simple way to remove councilmembers who make choices residents do not like — the ballot box. New councilman Andy Klein walked into the job unopposed in November. The residents who want to place this measure on the ballot knew the city was going to face tough choices and they should have stepped to the plate in November and ran for City Council instead of second-guessing the group of people elected to make those decisions.

Ballot box budgeting is no way to run a government. We’ve seen attempts at the state level fail miserably and there is no reason to bring that type of dysfunction to the city level — tough choices or not.