Columbia budget work session, discussing budget challenges for public safety

The City of Columbia is holding a work session to discuss its proposed FY 2018 budget which city officials say faces some challenges.

The city said lower sales tax, rising health care and pension costs and transit costs are some of the challenges they’re dealing with while trying to balance the budget.

The city has highlighted four goals for the budget including balancing the general fund, avoid laying off of any full time employees, providing monetary compensation for employees and implementing City Council’s Strategic Plan goals.

The FY 2018 General Fund budget is about $83 million, just under 1 percent less than last year’s budget.

Almost half of the budget goes to Public Safety, which includes police, fire and municipal court.

The police department alone gets $22 million of the total $83 million budget. The 2018 budget would allow for the department to add four officers to the force.

Despite the large portion of the budget, Police Chief Ken Burton said it’s not enough.

One point the chief talked about was the possibility of creating a false alarm ordinance to recover some costs for answering burglar alarms. Burton said about 98 percent of those alarms are false alarms. Burton said most of the false alarms are due to user error or faulty equipment and he hopes by creating a fee for a false alarm, owners will take care of the equipment to avoid false alarms.

The budget would also allow for the replacement or upgrade of seven patrol cars. Burton said the cars are patrol officers’ offices and they need to be comfortable. He said having a nice looking, new fleet also helps with public image and give officers more pride in their work when they’re not working in cruisers with peeling paint or missing hubcaps.

The Community Outreach Unit continues to be a major priority for the department. CPD has created a fourth neighborhood for COU to work on gang deterrence while street crimes will handle gun crimes. Burton said CPD has proven COU policing techniques work but admits it is expensive.

The Columbia Fire Department is responsible for the second largest budgeted funds with just under $18 million.

Fire Chief Randy White said there are no current vacancies and the department is adequately staffed for the size of the department but he’s not sure the size of the department is adequate for the size of the city they serve. White said there are three areas where CFD’s response time is longer than four minutes.

Those areas are in the southwest part of the city (just west of Forum Blvd.), the northwest part by Cosmo Park and east of Highway 63 by Women’s and Children’s Hospital.

Fire department officials said they can staff two of them right now with existing staff, but would need 15 more people to staff a third.

They said they believe this would have a positive effect on reducing response times but ultimately, allocating the funds within the budget, which is already balanced, is council’s decision.

“I think everybody agrees that public safety and police and fire protection are two of our top priorities,” said Mayor Brian Treece.