California City Council Weighs Cost of Public Safety

Redding leaders on Tuesday, fresh after hearing how fire and law enforcement officials are implementing the least costly ideas in the Blueprint for Public Safety, set their sights on April.

No date has been given, but that’s when the Redding City Council and Shasta County Board of Supervisors will weigh in on the meatier and significantly more expensive recommendation identified in the report. Topping that list are the mental health and sobering centers, alternatives to incarceration programs, nine apprentices and three firefighters to bring the Fire Department to recognized standards, and officers for the Police Department.

“The discussion in April is going to be the discussion you are calling for,” Vice Mayor Brent Weaver told his peers. “If you’re ready to go, I’m ready to go.”

The blueprint, funded by the city and county, gave the two agencies six funding tiers totaling $20 million. Tuesday’s meeting focused on programmatic tasks the report said could be accomplished with little to no spending.

But as the council heard from Sheriff Tom Bosenko, Fire Chief Gerry Gray and Police Chief Robert Paoletti, it was apparent to members that the costs will be in the millions. This includes the rollout of the new records management system by next fall, retention of four police officers who were hired in this two-year budget cycle using reserve funds, retention of nine firefighters and ongoing contributions to replace police cars reaching the end of their useful life.

Also, the council will need to consider additional costs to convert a part-time crime analyst into a full-time position, hire a homeless outreach officer, change officers’ deployment schedule and restart fire prevention and education programming.

When it’s all added up, the expenses could rise to a minimum of $5.4 million, although most of the $2.5 million needed for the computer system replacement already has been budgeted.

City Manager Kurt Starman told the council that all the recommendations have a soft cost, where resources are being redirected from someplace else.

Councilman Gary Cadd is eager for next month’s talk.

“That’s where there are going to be some hard costs. We’re going to have to start dealing with the problems we have, and I’m looking forward to that, moving forward to getting these problems solved,” he said after the meeting.

Gray and Paoletti made it a note to point to the council that many of the recommendations they are working on weren’t revelatory. Among those are mentoring programs and succession planning.

Gray said some of the ideas had already been in different levels of progress. Paoletti noted that his department already has a two-page list of its community partnerships and that he holds town-hall meetings.

As he has been saying at town-hall meetings and in the wake of the publication of the blueprint, he said much of what has hampered crime analysis is the computer system, which dates to the 1980s.

The chief told the council that the blueprint’s proactivity analysis was good for judging a shift but that he disagreed with its use to determine staffing levels.

He was supportive of keeping the current schedule with a swing shift on weekends, explaining how it fosters a team-policing environment, in which officers are working with each other every day and there is a sense of familiarity on assignments. It works well, and it also gives them consistent days off. It’s good for day care and other family and personal activities, he said.

“Basically, you have happier employees,” he said.

Also it is what the Redding Peace Officers Association prefers, he said.

Another alternative is returning to a 10-hour day schedule, which the department used to follow years ago before Paoletti became chief. Because it does not have training days built in, it may mean an added cost of $60,000.

The blueprint recommended a new shift schedule to increase the amount of time officers have for crime prevention. Currently officers who work on the day side spend their shift responding from one low-level call to the next.

That inefficiency stood out to Starman.

“The chief and I will decide how best to go upon that. I’ll rely on his professional expertise obviously. But one of the clear messages from the analysis was that our current shift schedule was not working as well as it should, and there are better alternatives,” Starman said.

Officers also are challenged when the adequate resources aren’t available in the community to best handle people who either are in a mental crisis or have a substance abuse problem, Paoletti said.

If we want to get them help, and if we don’t want them to go to a hospital bed, we have to have a sobering center and crisis stabilization center, he said. “Put officers in a helping mode rather than a confrontational mode,” he said.