Budget plan reflects follow-through by city
THE idea of permanently raising Oklahoma City’s sales tax by a quarter-cent was not something voters resoundingly embraced in September. Ultimately the proposal won with 52.3 percent of the vote, and we’re seeing the payoff in the city’s 2018-19 budget.
The quarter-cent tax was promoted as a tool to hire police officers and firefighters. Their ranks aren’t as robust as they need to be, affecting response times in the case of police and limiting the number of fire trucks in service.
That’s about to change. The city’s budget proposal for next fiscal year includes 81 additional police officers and 39 new firefighters. As the vice president of the local Fraternal Order of Police put it, “It’s certainly good news.”
That it is. In advance of the election, police officials noted that the current response time for the highestpriority calls is more than 8 minutes, on average, from the time a dispatcher takes a call to the time an officer arrives on the scene. Additional officers will help to bring that time down.
And as Oklahoma City continues to grow, it will need firefighters in all corners of the city able to respond to calls in a timely fashion. Shutting down trucks, as the department did for a year before recently restoring full service, is no way to do that.
In asking voters to support their plan, city council members vowed to restore funding for 69 public safety positions that had been frozen. They also said they would hire 81 more police officers, 21 more firefighters, and restore 15 firefighter positions that had been cut from a downtown engine company. The budget proposal includes three firefighters to be assigned as needed.
The police department has had 48 vacant uniform positions frozen for the past two years. The plan is to restore those and add 81 more — an overall increase of 129 authorized positions — which would get the department within about 75 positions of the 1,311 recommended in the chief’s most recent staffing study update.
The additional firefighters will allow the department to build and staff two long-delayed new stations the council approved in 2007. One is to be built in southeast Oklahoma City, the other in the southwest part of town.
Approval of the quarter-cent tax, combined with nine consecutive months of increased sales tax revenue and optimism going forward, made it possible to pencil in these new positions in the new budget.
As The Oklahoman’s Bill Crum reported this week, the city expects its general fund budget for police to grow by $15.3 million in 2018-19; this year, it was down about $600,000.
A similar decrease was seen this year for fire spending; next year, the general fund budget is expected to be up $7.3 million.
While it will be several years before all the new police and fire positions are filled, this news is encouraging. It represents a promise kept by city leaders, one that will make for a safer city down the road.