‘Emergency’ passage stops police cuts
Move requires 6 of 7 on council to OK
Following tense police confrontations with racial-injustice protesters and rioters last summer, the Columbus City Council appeared set to make budget cuts this year to the Division of Police after scores of people testified at hearings that they wanted police spending diverted into social programs.
Five of seven city council members supported a budget amendment this year to cut $2.5 million – about 0.7% of the division's $336.8 million budget – to different uses. Yet Council President Shannon Hardin lamented Monday that he didn't have the needed votes to pass the amended budget.
That's because the ordinance was labeled an “emergency,” a maneuver often used by the city to move legislation more quickly. However, passage of an “emergency” measure requires six of the seven council members to support it, or an 86% supermajority. That's more unanimity than the two-thirds needed for the U.S. Senate to convict a U.S. president during an impeachment trial.
Despite the tougher odds, city council approves “emergency” measures more often than not. A review of city records by The Dispatch found that last year alone, council declared more than 1,400 of them, amounting to more than 68% of the 2,078 ordinances that came before it.
Most ordinances are drafted by departments under the mayor, and “council generally does not have a preference” whether the administration designates them as emergency, said Lee Cole, spokeswoman for city council.
“The drafter determines the designation,” Cole said. In the case of Mayor Andrew Ginther's budget measure, it was the mayor's office that designated the budget legislation an “emergency”.
Some city “emergency” legislation seems far from a public crisis:
h Need to sell a city-owned parcel at 539 S Everett Ave. for $3,945 to MLS Construction Services to build a new single-family home? The measure is designated an emergency “in order to reduce Land Bank maintenance costs.”
h Need to enter into a five-year deal and pay an initial $12,000 to purchase city employees COTA bus passes? It’s an emergency “to ensure continued participation in the program without interruption.”
And 2020 was no fluke: similar percentages of “emergency” measures have occurred every year since at least 2016, city records show.
There are so many routine emergencies that one might think the city charter, akin to its constitution, had used the term lightly.
But it specifically defines emergencies as actions needed “for the immediate preservation of the public peace, property, health or safety.” However, the city framers threw in a catchall: or “an emergency in the usual daily operation of a municipal department.”
“We are unaware of any judicial opinions on what constitutes an emergency,” said Faith Oltman, spokeswoman for City Attorney Zach Klein, adding that any advice it gives council is protected by attorney-client privilege.
For a Democrat-controlled body that usually overwhelmingly agrees on almost everything, needing two extra votes to pass things hasn’t been an issue – until Monday.
That’s when the council was scheduled to vote on emergency passage of the city’s more than $970-million general fund budget with an amendment that would have cut $2.5 million from the police division, delaying the new police officer recruit class scheduled to begin this summer.
“I can’t recall a time we didn’t pass (the budget as an) emergency. It’s such a big, important piece every year that broad consensus among members has always seemed like a positive thing,” said Councilwoman Elizabeth Brown, chair of the finance committee who supported the $2.5 million cut. “Obviously, this year frustrated that assumption.”
Hardin had previously announced that he would use the budget to stop all new officer hiring until a new chief was seated and an audit of past public safety hiring practices was completed.
He also announced creation of four new city funds: for COVID Response, Family Support, Economic Recovery and Small Business Support, and Reimagining Public Safety.
The first three funds would be seeded entirely with $10 million from the basic city services fund, financed by a $100.4 million-plus windfall rebate from the state Bureau of Workers Compensation between April and December.
Despite the windfall, the plan for the Reimagining Safety Fund was to provide it $7.5 million from the basic city services fund and the remaining $2.5 million from the police recruit class money.
The Division of Police, caught by surprise held a news conference tto say council was tossing out almost a year’s worth of work and that the 45 recruits selected were one of the most-diverse classes of new officers in memory.
But the Feb. 11 vote on Hardin’s amendment should have signaled trouble ahead: council members Mitchell Brown, a former city public safety director, and Priscilla Tyson were opposed. Hardin needed one of them to change their mind to clear the emergency threshold.
It never had to come to that. Ordinances not passed on an emergency require just four votes, as long as they are “read” at two meetings before a vote occurs, requiring at least an extra week up front.
If then approved, there is a required 30-day wait before they take effect. Council could have employed a different timeline, including taking action on a budget plan by early January.
But it was adjourned most of that month.
Hardin declined repeated requests to be interviewed for this story about why he chose to stay with the “emergency” designation for passing the budget.
But in announcing at Monday’s meeting that the $2.5 million was being reinstated to the police division and the new recruit class would go on, Hardin said he was unwilling to hold up other city spending in the budget for the extra 30 days required until late March for normal passage. wbush@gannett.com @Reporterbush
When the pandemic forced me to self-isolate at home last spring, I decided to make a list of things I had put off doing for decades. No. 1 was to clean out and organize my basement.
At that point, I had lived in my house for 32 years. Over time, it slowly filled up. My three kids grew up, moved out and left with a few things, but I remarried in 1999. That brought in new stuff.
Now, I’m not a hoarder. I didn’t have piles of junk filling the rooms with small trails snaking through the stacks. I call myself an archivist. My house has a dry but unfinished basement. By 2020, however, the basement was stuffed.
So last April, I marched down the steps to survey what I fondly called the Steve Sterrett Archive: three four-drawer filing cabinets and boxes and boxes of work-related files, letters, school and college reports, family photographs, maps, books, a stamp collection from my youth, 10 years of Consumer Reports, 24 years of utility bills, almost 50 years of tax returns and a couple of containers I hadn’t unpacked when moved into the house in 1988.
I opened a few boxes and realized I faced an existential dilemma. As a writer and editor for most of my life, I have produced and accumulated paper. Those boxes contained my life. If I threw out this paper, what mark would I have left in this world?
I glumly climbed the stairs to the kitchen. “I regret I never became famous,” I told my wife, Karen. “Why?” she asked suspiciously. “If I were famous,” I said, “some university library would clamor to obtain the Steve Sterrett Archive. I could do
I
nate my stuff and take a tax write-off, and the library staff would organize and preserve it.”
“What? Are you crazy?” Karen said, rolling her eyes. “Now get back down there and clean out that basement or, so help me, when you die, I’m simply going to throw your carcass down there with the rest of your junk and shut the door.”
She had said this before, although this time she sounded like she meant it.
I spent four weeks sorting through paper and filling 27 bags with shredded records for recycling. So as not to strain the city’s refuse collection system, over several months I rationed my disposal of dried paint cans, discarded athletic gear, old furniture, cast-off clothes, excess Christmas decorations and rarely used small kitchen appliances.
I acquired another four-drawer filing cabinet, and I spent a day assembling two sturdy shelving units to appropriately store the paper, memorabilia and other ephemera I couldn’t quite part with. As examples: my father’s 1931 edition of the Boy Scout handbook, a large piece of paper with a gold seal from Evangelical Deaconess Hospital in St. Louis announcing my birth, and a nearly complete set of my high school newspapers from 1965-66. The collection is a bit smaller, but now it’s organized. I call it the Best of the Steve Sterrett Archive.
What will happen to this archive? I haven’t figured that out, but I envision my oldest daughter — the one who is a CPA and more organized than me — proudly informing everyone at my funeral that she has found a permanent home for the archive with safe, monitored below-ground storage. My other children will be greatly relieved they won’t have to sort through and dispose of the material. Karen will be relieved, too, but a bit puzzled.
“Don’t worry,” my daughter will whisper to her. “It’s all going to the Franklin County landfill.”
Steve Sterrett, 72, lives in Columbus.
Directions: Unscramble these four Jumbles, one letter to each square, to form four words.
Next, arrange the circled letters to form the surprise answer, as suggested by the cartoon.