Lean budget costs police positions
With Hermosa’s revenues falling and the state’s financial crisis continuing, the City Council approved mid-year budget adjustments that include freezing three more vacant positions for police officers, leaving the 39-member force a total of five officers short.
Sgt. Jaime Ramirez, president of the Hermosa Beach Police Officers Association, and Sgt. Kevin Averill, an association member, pleaded unsuccessfully for the council to forestall the hiring freeze for the three officer positions. They noted that two other officer positions remain frozen in a previous belt-tightening move.
After the meeting, Ramirez and Averill said the association is considering gathering signatures for a ballot measure that would require the council to staff the department at minimum “safe levels” for the community.
The council left vacant four non-police positions as well, those of the community resources director, a planning associate, a recreation supervisor and an account clerk.
All the freezes together cover half of a $1.2 million shortfall that was caused by decreases in sales tax revenues, taxes paid by hotel visitors and fees paid for building permits.
Most of the remainder of the revenue shortfall was balanced by lower-than-expected costs, when the city’s claim liabilities wound up smaller than anticipated.
Overall revenue to the city fell 4 percent below estimates made nearly a year ago, Finance Director Viki Copeland told the council.
While property tax revenues fell only slightly, sales taxes from Hermosa businesses fell 17 percent, taxes paid by hotel visitors dropped 14 percent, revenues from the city’s utility users’ tax fell 4 percent, and fees for building permits fell 47 percent.
Looking forward to the next budget year, Copeland said a budget deficit “looms at $19 billion” for the state government, which can pinch funding to cities, and she added that other revenues to the city will likely continue to drop during the next fiscal year.
“Some consensus appears to exist for positive economic news for the last half of 2010-11, however it will be difficult to count on that type of prediction for revenue estimates,” she wrote in a report to the council.
In his plea for police positions, Averill said the freezes would leave the city’s 28-officer patrol division down five officers.
“This equates to an 18 percent reduction of uniformed officers on the streets,” he said.
Averill said police patrolling would be reduced on the Pier Plaza, and throughout the rest of the town as well, as officers are sent to cover for the reduced Plaza patrol.
Averill said state corrections officials were preparing for the early release of “thousands of convicted criminals onto the streets without any parole and probation requirements,” including 800 projected for release in the larger area, as far as Compton.
The state Department of Corrections has projected the release of eight non-supervised inmates in Hermosa, 213 in Carson, 340 in Hawthorne, 45 in Redondo Beach and 249 in Torrance.
“To allow the proposed staffing reductions [in the Police Department] to take effect would certainly not be in the community’s best interest and borders on dangerously reckless,” Averill told the council. ER