Funds restored to fire and police departments in last minute budget wrangling

It was numbers versus firefighters. Guess who won?

At a special city council meeting on June 27, the Sebastopol City Council approved the city budget for 2023-24.

Last Tuesday’s session on the city budget was a marked departure from the first council meeting on the budget. At that meeting the council hewed closely to the preliminary budget as laid out by the budget committee—a group consisting of councilmembers Diana Rich and Stephen Zollman, City Manager/City Attorney Larry McLaughlin, Assistant City Manager/City Clerk Mary Gourley and Administrative Services Director Ana Kwong. 

Last week the majority of the city council—Mayor Neysa Hinton and councilmembers Jill McLewis and Sandra Maurer—voted to overthrow the budget scheme devised by the committee, which had asked for punishing cuts to the police and fire departments.

Not that they were meant to be punishing per se. The cuts, which fell on all departments, were supposed to be objective and quantitatively driven.

“We wanted to have a solid, mathematical way to approach this,” Zollman explained early in the process.

This is what they came up with:  In order to preserve the city’s mandated 14% reserve, the budget committee determined that it had to cut $1.5 million from the budget. The actual budget gap was $2.6 million, but they figured they’d take the difference from the reserves and still have the 14% reserve remaining.

Seeking a “mathematical” basis for the cuts, the committee decided to base the cuts on the percentage of spending each department represented in the overall budget. So the police department, which represents 41% of the budget would be responsible for 41% of that $1.5 million in cuts (or $685,608). The fire department, which accounts for 12% of the budget, would be responsible for 12% of the cuts (or $218,939).

All department heads in the city government were asked to submit their cuts, and everyone did, except for Fire Chief Jack Piccinini, who refused because he felt they would damage the fire department’s ability to adequately respond to emergencies.

Let the cutting begin…or not

The meeting began with the following cuts: the city council agreed to cut all $3,000 in community benefit grant funding from the city council budget. It also forswore all conference expenses for the year, saving $3,250.  From the city manager’s budget, the council also cut the cost of the recruitment firm for the city manager position down to $130,000 from $145,000, saving $15,000. It reduced the future city manager’s salary from $285,000 to $240,000 a year.

It was a different story for emergency services, however, which were scheduled to take the biggest cuts.

Sandra Maurer launched the first shot across the bow in a heartfelt paean to the firefighters and a proposal not to cut $80,000 in retention pay.

A battle ensued, with Rich and Zollman portraying the cuts as fair and necessary for the solvency of the city, and Maurer, McLewis and Hinton arguing against most of the fire department cuts. Halfway through Rich allowed that she’d consider restoring retention pay.

By the time the smoke had cleared, the council had voted three to two (Rich and Zollman dissenting) to restore the $80,000 in firefighter retention pay ($40,000 now, and likely another $40,000 at the mid-year budget review) and to hire a full-time engineer. (Piccinini revealed that the fire department couldn’t send out the engine six times in January and February, because there was no one licensed to drive it.)

“Making the fire department better makes it better for all of us in the community,” McLewis said. “The idea that we would not have enough firefighters to respond to a anyone in this community who has a fire is frightening to me and, as a councilmember, I would not be able to sleep at night.”

The council’s mood of generosity applied to the police department as well, which was also scheduled to take a slew of cuts. Instead, the council agreed (Rich and Zollman dissenting) to fund a sergeant position (likely to be a hire from within) for $264,000.

Councilmember Rich responded to these reversals this way: “I can't support this because I feel it's on the backs of our administrative staff and hinders our ability as a city council to support that administrative staff.”

Zollman, who at this point seemed visibly irked, was more direct. “As another member that spent 45 hours doing this budget, yeah, we can continue to just roll along and continue to borrow money out of our reserves but according to our analysis we're only going to be able to do that for three years,” he said.

In other words, the council has just kicked the city’s financial reckoning down the road a bit. But it also did something else: it made a stand for a cost-cutting policy based on values (public safety) as opposed to a numerical algorithm.

Just how much reserve will be left after the council restored funds to the fire and police departments is still an open question. Administrative Services Director Ana Kwong is busy incorporating the changes discussed at last Tuesday’s council meeting and tallying their financial ramifications.