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Sheriff's budget cuts under fire
Speakers beg county not to cut vital programs
By SUZETTE PORTER
Article published on Sunday, June 15, 2008 |
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![[Image]](/content_images/061508_pco-01.jpg) |
| Pinellas County Sheriff Jim Coats |
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CLEARWATER – Heart wrenching was the term used to describe decisions Pinellas County Commissioners say they are being forced to make as efforts continue to prepare a balanced budget for fiscal year 2008-09.
And plenty of heart-wrenching presentations were heard during a June 12 budget recap meeting. About 40 speakers asked – even begged - the commissioners not to cut programs that some said had saved their life.
Latest figures show that the county is facing a budget shortfall of at least $57.7 million due to the impact of Amendment 1, a historical change in taxable property values and other losses in revenue, John Woodruff, county budget director, said.
Forty-five percent of the budget cuts, $25 million, are coming from departments controlled by the board of county commissioners. The remaining $30 million must be cut from budgets maintained by the constitutional officers and independents.
Of the constitutional officers, the Sheriff’s Office has the biggest budget of more than $260 million. Consequently, the biggest cuts have to come from countywide law enforcement services.
Municipal police departments are upset about Sheriff Jim Coats proposed budget cuts that would end countywide programs such as sexual predator tracking, juvenile assessment, centralized DUI breath testing and others.
Largo Police Chief Lester Aradi, who is also the chairman of the Pinellas Police Standards Council; Clearwater Police Chief Sid Klein; Gulfport Police Chief G. Curt Willocks; and Capt. Michael Haworth, administrator for the Pinellas Park Police Operations Division, all spoke about the hardships the sheriff’s budget cuts would create for their municipalities.
Aradi said it had been proven that the best and most efficient law enforcement programs for the county as a whole come from working together. Klein said the proposed budget cuts would turn back the clock 20 years.
Municipalities are required by law to track sexual predators, which the sheriff’s office has been doing for years. If the sheriff discontinues the service outside his jurisdiction, municipalities would be forced to begin programs on their own by September.
Klein said the county’s juvenile assessment center was one of the largest and busiest in the state and offered a one-stop approach.
“It’s a very, very effective program,” he said.
Problem is that it costs $601,000 to maintain a contract to keep it going, he said.
He said municipalities were willing to help fund the program but needed time to find funding sources. He said the sheriff’s proposed payment plan to charge $86 per juvenile processed through the center was too steep for most budgets.
Haworth said Pinellas Park had taken 400 juveniles to the center last year.
“At $86 each, it would have a severe impact on Pinellas Park’s budget,” he said.
Klein said $162,000 was needed to maintain DUI breath testing at the county jail. He said without the program arresting officers would be forced transport a suspect to their own stations, administer the breath test and then transport to the jail. Also, some municipalities don’t have the capability to do breath testing.
Overall, the sheriff proposes to cut 161 jobs and eliminate or reduce several programs.
Several speakers – male and female – told commissioners their stories about participating in inmate rehabilitation programs. The reoccurring theme was that the programs had “saved my life” and allowed them to rebuild their lives without repeatedly returning to jail as they had before participating in the programs.
Several residents, including wives whose husbands had been murdered and other crime victims, told commissioners that they don’t know how they would have managed without their advocates.
All the speakers stressed how important these programs, and others, were to them. Some literally begged the commissioners not to take them away.
One speaker proposed that a solution be found that would reduce program services without totally eliminating them. She suggested that budget planners take a look at programs that don’t touch people’s lives. She said perhaps cuts could come from arts programs, by eliminating a new road or foregoing pay raises.
Commission Chairman Robert Stewart said he did some quick math that showed it would cost about $6 million to fund the programs that people had requested not be eliminated from the sheriff’s budget.
Interim County Administrator Fred Marquis pointed out that the board of county commissioners could not make decisions about the sheriff’s programs.
“Mechanically I’m not sure how to restore the programs,” he said. “You can’t tell the sheriff how to spend his money.”
Two additional requests were made during the presentations. One was a request to budget $980,000 for the homeless project Pinellas Hope. The second was another appeal for the Guardian Ad Litem program.
As commissioners discussed various ways to shift money or make other changes that kept the proposed budget figures as is, talk shifted to the subject of reserves.
The debate centered on whether it was setting a precedent to go to the reserves to fund programs. Some felt as long as the 15 percent reserve could be maintained, the difference should be used to help with budget shortfalls. Others felt the reserve should remain untouched.
In the end, commissioners decided to continue the budget discussion at the June 17 meeting and to invite the sheriff to see if he had make any changes to his budget that might alleviate some of the program cuts.
“Listening to how people felt about the programs “presented in a very personal and human way makes it even more difficult to do what we have to do – present a balanced budget,” Stewart said.
Correction: Changed $260,000 million to $260 million.
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Article published on Sunday, June 15, 2008
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