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Ellen Belcher is the Dayton Daily News opinion pages editor. She writes about state government, education, the environment, higher education and all things Dayton.
Martin Gottlieb is an editorial writer and columnist for the Dayton Daily News opinion pages. He focuses on the political process itself and does such national issues as war, the economy, taxes and Social Security, as well as a hodge-podge of local and state issues.Home > Blogs > A Matter of Opinion > Archives > 2009 > October > 27
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
Editorial: How many police departments are too many?
One good thing about a recession is that it forces people to re-think a lot of what they’re doing, even if that creates a ruckus.
Take this business of the Montgomery County sheriff providing police protection for Washington, Harrison and Jefferson townships.
Montgomery County Administrator Deborah Feldman, who’s staring at a 2010 budget deficit of $12.8 million, wants a financial analysis of whether those townships are paying the full cost of the services they’re getting.
If they’re not, Sheriff Phil Plummer will be told to raise his prices.
In truth, Sheriff Plummer and Ms. Feldman already know the answer. There’s much in the sheriff’s budget that the townships aren’t charged for, including management of the property room, record-keeping, evidence technicians, contract negotiation, recruitment and more.
Ms. Feldman is not alone in questioning the sheriff’s pricing practices, even his legal obligations. Because money is tight everywhere, a push is on statewide by county commissioners to get their sheriffs to do only what’s required by law.
Though sheriffs once were mandated to patrol all areas of a county that weren’t part of a city, the law today says only that sheriffs are supposed to “keep the public peace.”
In 2003, a judge in Geauga County said county commissioners can refuse to provide money for patrols in township areas, effectively saying that townships are responsible for raising taxes to pay for that service.
In the great bulk of Ohio counties, sheriffs provide police protection to most parts of their county. It’s in the few big urban counties — where most of the land is part of a city — that police departments proliferate.
Even where sheriffs aren’t fighting crime, they still have the task of running the county jail, tracking sex offenders and providing court security, among other duties spelled out in the law.
This work, though, is not why most sheriffs went into law enforcement. More important, running a good jail is not what gets them re-elected.
If Sheriff Plummer were to raise the price he charges Washington, Harrison and Jefferson townships too much, they could buy police protection from a neighbor or start their own department.
If you’re a county commissioner, neither option would bother you; you have your hands full funding the jail, the prosecutor and the courts.
The problem, however, is that good sheriffs are perfectly poised to provide police protection on a regional basis. There are townships especially, but some struggling cities as well, that have police departments that are woefully ill-equipped to handle major crimes and even challenging day-to-day police work.
They can’t afford the training, the administrative support or the money to do the things required in a 21st century professional police department. Very few are accredited by the Commission on Accreditation for Law Enforcement Agencies, Inc., which the sheriff’s office is.
These stand-alone police departments exist nonetheless because almost every town council and board of township trustees wants its own police chief and cadre of officers.
Montgomery County’s commissioners and Ms. Feldman are right to care whether the sheriff is under-pricing his services and whether county taxpayers are subsidizing police protection for three select places.
But if Montgomery County’s officials were really being politically bold, they’d also be pushing the citizens and elected officials at least in small and struggling communities to consider whether they would be better off with the sheriff’s services.
When local governments keep saying they need more and more money, the question has to be asked: Are there ways to do things better and cheaper — so taxpayers don’t have to keep paying more?
But if elected officials — or the people who put them in office — won’t consider consolidation and collaboration, then, of course, the cost of government is going to be hard to check.
It must be said that Ohio’s sheriffs are not universally excellent — one of the big reasons that some communities won’t think about buying services from that office. But when the right person is in the job, there’s an opportunity for communities to band together and save money.
If a lot of places were dependent on the office, what do you want to bet that incompetents would have a hard time getting elected?
Law enforcement is complicated, dangerous and technical. Not every burg, village and township is going to be able to afford to have the professionals they need in this line of work, especially when tax dollars are only getting more precious.
Permalink | Comments (61) | Post your comment | Categories: Editorials, Ellen Belcher, Law Enforcement and Public Safety, Montgomery County, Ohio politics, Rural Communities, Suburban Communities
Editorial: Ohio Senate should delay next tax cut
Gov. Ted Strickland proposes filling the state’s budget gap — created when the Ohio Supreme Court rightly shot down his plan for turning racetracks into casinos — by postponing the last phase of an income tax cut. Immediately, the smart money in Columbus said even some of the governor’s fellow Democrats might not like the idea.
After all, Democrats won control of the House of Representatives by winning districts that had been drawn for Republicans. Those legislators are reluctant to support a move that critics are (absurdly) calling a tax increase.
But now the House Democrats have universally endorsed the Strickland plan. The vote came after a clever political move. Democrats added a provision to cut the salaries of legislators by 5 percent (starting with the next legislature, which is the only way it can be done). That apparently gave representatives from the more conservative districts all the political cover they thought they needed.
(Also, the more combative Democrats might argue that their Republican opponents have supported a salary increase for themselves. It’d be a preposterous charge, of course. But if failure to cut taxes can be called a tax increase, then maybe the failure to cut salaries can be called a salary increase.)
Meanwhile, Rep. Seth Morgan, R-Huber Heights, complicated life for the Democrats by proposing an amendment to impose the pay cuts, but to also go forward with the planned tax cut.
Now the Strickland proposal measure goes to the Republican Senate. There’s been talk there — as on the Republican side in the House — of using the budget crisis as an opportunity to cut spending by reorganizing the state government.
One plan would cut the number of state agencies from 24 to fewer than half that, while cutting perhaps 10,000 jobs.
But a budgetary crisis is not the time to focus on something so complicated. Republicans would do better to save the plan until consideration of the next two-year budget. There will still be big problems then. The state will be facing the loss of almost $6 billion in federal stimulus money.
The senators know what has to be done, that suspending the tax cut is the obvious short-term solution. Now it’s just a matter of rising above the contentiousness that the most partisan Republicans want to promote.
As for budget cuts, enough is enough for a while. The state has almost 5,000 fewer employees than it had in 2007, with the vast majority of those reductions being full-time, permanent jobs.
When you add those to all the job cuts that have been made and are threatened in local government, it’s hard to see more job loss as a good thing for the state. For one thing, these cuts undermine the efforts of the federal government to stimulate the economy by creating jobs.
The current $50.5 billion budget is a couple of billion dollars less than the previous two-year budget. That budget was cut three times after it was first passed, as the economy kept shrinking. The cuts hurt real people who are dependent on mental health services, on in-home senior services, state scholarships and more.
Two Republicans in the House voted with the Democrats to suspend the tax cut: Ross McGregor, of Springfield, and Rep. Matthew Dolan, of suburban Cleveland. Rep. Dolan (the son of the owner of the Cleveland Indians) has won a lot of attention for his speech.
On spending cuts, he said, “We are nothing more basically than a pass-through entity to counties. When we beat our chest and say we need to cut more state spending, all we’re saying to our counties who provide the essential services to our constituents is, ‘You find the money somewhere. You go to the taxpayers.’”
Any Ohioan who suffers a setback now — such as the loss of a state job or state help — suffers all the more because of the lack of options in this economy. So there’s not much doubt that further spending cuts would do more harm than suspension of an income tax cut which, by definition, would only benefit those who have a good enough income to pay income taxes.
Permalink | Comments (8) | Post your comment | Categories: Economy, Editorials, Martin Gottlieb, Ohio politics
