$12.6M hike sought for operating budget

Ottawa police have tabled a draft budget for 2020 that sees the service prioritizing community policing and member wellness in what Chief Peter Sloly called a service with high levels of “emotional tension.”

Just eight days on the job, Sloly said the municipal police service, which for years has been rattled by dissension in the ranks and public scandal, is unlike any organization he’s seen.

“I have seen a lot of things in policing in 30 years,” he said. “I have yet to have an experience as I’ve had in the last week and a half. There’s a level of emotional tension in this organization that I’ve not experienced in any organization — private sector or public sector.

“It is affecting members individually and it’s affecting them collectively. I’m not laying the blame or pointing the finger at anybody. I own the organization right now as chief of police. Therefore, what I’m saying is on my back.”

To that end, Sloly is asking the board to approve a draft budget that includes a $4.2-million investment in the force’s wellness programming for its employees, which includes peer support, specialized health programming, resiliency training and unlimited access to psychological services.

He told Mayor Jim Watson and acting board chair Sandy Smallwood that the investment in officers now will “be the best investment you make.”

Sloly later told reporters after the draft-budget tabling Monday that “there is a great deal of excitement within the organization, anticipation for new things, better things both internally and externally.”

But, he said, hand-in-hand with that excitement is a “sense of frustration, a heightened level of emotion around the pressures that (officers are) facing internally, to do more with less in many cases, to do differently when they haven’t been given a roadmap and a set of expectations.

“So in ambiguity, there is a lot of emotion.”

The concerns of the community are largely the same, with excitement for what appears to be a new era for policing in the city but also trepidation about what that era will mean for residents of Ottawa and whether they have trust in the police.

For officers expressing their concerns,

“It may be simply a function that there’s a new chief in town and I’m making myself available to them, and it’s their first opportunity to express something that they either hadn’t had the opportunity to or this has created a special opportunity,” Sloly said.

“So I don’t want to overreact because something new is here — me — but something real is here — positive emotion, difficult emotion — and it’s coming out.”

The draft budget also includes the hiring of 30 new officers who will be deployed to community policing.

Thirteen of those new hires will go toward building two more neighbourhood resource teams.

The service currently has three teams working on a pilot basis.

Sloly said he had been briefed on the work of the existing teams, but wasn’t sure where the new teams will work.

He said the service, under his leadership, will take a more evidence-based, data-driven approach to decision making. He wants the community to have eyes on the service’s decision-making, the extent of which will likely make officers uncomfortable, he acknowledged.

“One of the hardest things to do is to stop doing things. We keep adding on as opposed to taking out. One of the toughest things I’m going to ask the command to do is to start stopping things that we just can no longer justify.” Or to realign resources to make more sense, he said.

City police currently have more than 200 projects on the go, he said. “There’s simply no way that any organization — our size, bigger or smaller — can manage 200 different things at the same time. So what are the most important things?”

The draft budget would see the police service receive a three-percent tax increase and work with a $362.1-million gross operating budget. That’s a $12.6-million increase over the 2019 budget. The average homeowner would see $18 more go to police from their annual property tax bill next year.

As usual, the bulk of the proposed budget — 82 per cent — will pay the service’s officers and civilian employees.

Red-light camera revenue is projected to give police $1.3 million in 2020 and police are asking for $2.4 million in one-time funding from the city.

Watson, who now sits on the police board and has been critical of draft police budgets in the past, called the draft “progressive” and commended its commitment to officer wellness.

The police board will hear public delegations on the draft budget at its finance and audit committee meeting on Nov. 14 and at its monthly board meeting on Nov. 25.

The police budget must be approved by city council on Dec. 11. syogaretnam@postmedia.com twitter.com/shaaminiwhy